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How Cissbury began ...
Our Beginnings ...
By Mark
September 20th, 2009
Cissbury was founded by Mark Withey in September 1989, in Findon Village, West Sussex in the UK. Mark has remained as Director, steering the company through the inevitable challenges that have faced businesses during the past twenty years. Here, Mark tells us about those early, heady days of Cissbury:
Opening brands were mainly from Lloyd Lifestyle (… thanks for your help George), and included Akito, Jumbo, GMAC, Alpinestar, Reusch and helmets from Shoei and FM. Cissbury has always tried to pioneer new brands and I became involved purely from a love of bikes and the clothing that went with them – if I wouldn’t wear it then I didn't want to sell it.
To get the name into the market place we began trading at race events both national and club. We had a gruelling calendar of events taking us all over the country and even to Ireland. We became good friends with many of the racers of the era and some of the ‘old fellas’ are still racing now (… Hello Dave Heal!). Their experience and pain passed into our own experience and our racing leather collection grew and grew. We were the first to measure for Brian at BKS (now retired with a Frank Thomas chq for the brand name if he has any sense), plus measured for Mike at MW London (R.I.P. Mike) as off the peg suits were rarely up to the job.
By the mid-90’s we had become distributors for Spyke Leathers in Italy and RS Taichi of Japan – such was our rep. for race gear – and as the sports bike market took off our suit sales followed. We were approached by many other manufacturers to get space in-store and were one of the first dealers in the UK with Alpinestar race suits. Others did not get in … even then Dainese had an opinion of themselves far above the reality of the product!
Other Cissbury stores over the years have included Oxford which became a victim of a misguided business partnership with a local resident (Hi Pete) who even hijacked the store at one time to extort money out of me! We had a great store in Brighton Marina, but too close to Findon to make money. Toyed with a store in Putney with a great guy called Alex, who subsequently raced a bit , fell heavily and lost his memory (Hi Alex, if you do remember me, you were a gent). Then Newcastle-under-Lyme was our last satellite store, the economy caught up with this one, much to Dennis at D.H. Autos’s delight no doubt (Hi Dennis).
Next blog will be a low down on our wholesale rise and fall, a few more friends and enemies to mention and a general rant on what’s good, bad, new and interesting in the motorcycle world.
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