Crash Helmet

[scubascuba3]

1 hour ago, Kerryd said:

Hard to bar fine the staff from a helmet shop ! (More profit in booze too.)

I think the market for decent/hi-end helmets here would be pretty small. Most motorcycles here are scooters and the owners either get a free "100 baht" helmet with purchase or buy the cheapest version they can find in the big chain store like Tesco/Big C.

Though the big bike market is getting bigger. I think a lot of the "Adventure Bike" crowd would be more into quality helmets, especially the newer tech ones with built in Bluetooth and other features.
And from what I've seen among my (Thai) friends, few of them are wearing "quality" helmets. I saw a couple "couples" wearing bluetooth helmets but most guys/girls are wearing ordinary, low cost rigs. 

Probably though the best option would be to finagle deals with existing shops (Route 66, Hot Rod, etc) to set up booths/shelves in their shops (for a cut of the profits of course). Supplement that with sales booths at the various bike weeks.

Custom helmet paint jobs though. Have a helmet shop that also offers custom paint jobs ? (There's a guy just north of Bangkok that does airbrush paint jobs. He sells skid lids for 1,200 baht at Burapa and other bike events. They look great and he does custom work as well.)

Remember the old adage about Pattaya (and Thailand in general) - If you want to make a small fortune here, start with a big one !
(That way, by the time you realize you aren't going to make money, you may still get away without losing everything.)

To have a decent helmet shop here, you'd have to have the money to set it up, advertise, hire staff and then patiently wait, maybe for months, before you get enough business just to pay the bills.

(Set up storefronts on Lazada and other platforms and ship helmets around the country.) You might be able to make a go of it, but it would be hard to make it worthwhile just selling helmets.

People put money in bars which are just a cash pit, very little thought goes into it, no thought of the competition from the other 1,000 bars and they wonder where it all went wrong. Maybe looking for a gap in the market might pay dividends

[Kerryd]

5 minutes ago, scubascuba3 said:

People put money in bars which are just a cash pit, very little thought goes into it, no thought of the competition from the other 1,000 bars and they wonder where it all went wrong. Maybe looking for a gap in the market might pay dividends

Well, bars probably tend to be easier to run. No real skill involved and you don't need a lot of "knowledge", especially over here (especially as your staff would be doing all the work anyways). Plus I'm guessing there's way more people that know how to drink than ride a motorcycle !

Not to mention that you could probably stock a bar quite nicely for less than the price of a couple of "hi end" motorcycle helmets that might sit on the shelf for months (or longer).
There does tend to be a plethora of bars here though. 

I recall back in the days when "high season" and "low season" were very different. You'd walk down Soi 7 in high season, even on a week night, and the bars along the soi would be overflowing. People were setting up "mini" bars in alleys and open spaces to take advantage of the overflow.
That is what lead to so many other bars opening in other places, and why we went from a dozen a-go-gos to 6 dozen in a few short years.

But the same area in low season ? The only bars still running were the ones right on the soi, usually with live music. All those little overflow bars were gone (as in, no just closed, but completely gone). The beer bar complexes on Walking Street (like Simons) were like that too. In high season it was hard to find a seat even in the bars at the back. In low season, the couple bars on the edge of Walking street had customers, a couple more further in might be open (with a bunch of sad, lonely staff sitting there) and the ones in the back were just plain closed.

No doubt there are business opportunities here that don't involve bars, but bars are so easy to set up and run. 

A helmet shop wouldn't require a lot of skill or knowledge either I supposed, but to make a decent one, with a wide selection of types, styles and sizes, would take a hefty layout to get up and running.
(Not to mention the cost of getting those high end, quality helmets into the country too !)

Like I said, if you had to money to set it up and not worry if it took a few months to start paying for itself, you might make a go of it. But if someone was hoping to be rolling in the dough hours after first opening for business, they would probably be out of business within weeks.

In other threads I mentioned about the "golden days" when people were making money hand over fist and everyone I knew was buying Harleys. Bar owners, restaurant owners, hotel owners, go-go bar owners/managers. One MC my friends were in had about 30 people, mostly Thais and they were all business owners.

That is when something like a decent helmet shop would have been a viable business. Especially if you got in good with the various shops that were selling/servicing big bikes back then.

Nowadays though, I think you'd either need a killer location or have to offer something more than just helmets in order to be successful. And be prepared to sell a hundred "cheapie" helmets for every "quality" one.