Mini-Memoir: A Simple Winter, and a New Year’s Update
All is well here. Nothing unusual or good or bad to report. Mostly staying home awaiting the vaccine. Aerostich open and generally solvent. We are making good incremental progress on past debts and correcting past mistakes. Yesterday our bank let...
Problems with (Motorcycle) Magazines, Digital Forums, Search Algorithms and Webzines
Here’s an excerpt from an emotional essay about the recent ending of some good special interest outdoor magazines. Not the print motorcycle titles we all knew and have recently lost, but almost the exact same scenario: “...And what’s left is...
Cameos
(Wish You Were Here) By Guest Blogger Rand Rasmussen It is perfectly okay to not love the prairie. But anyone who thinks there is nothing to see there, simply does not know how (or where) to look. This is a...
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
This is such a common back-to-school English-class homework assignment it became a cliché. So here is my little pandemic-summer story. This past weekend I replaced the ignition sensor in my 1994 Honda XR650L and now it runs again. I’ve ridden...
Maybe the Nerdiest YouTube Video Ever, And a Few Other Items
Item the first: Thanks to COVID I recently enjoyed about the nerdiest YouTube video ever -- an 18-minute presentation about why Timex wrist watches are considered neither valuable nor collectable by watch experts. You would think such arcana would be boring,...
A Girl and Her Aerostich
By Guest Blogger Margie Siegal It's blazingly hot on the road. I pull into a rest stop, enter the ladies room, strip down to my sport bra and rinse my cotton T shirt out in the sink. The other women...
A Kinesthetic Affinity
Note: This is an excerpt from a longer email I’d written to a very old friend last October. When he recently replied at similar length it caused me to re-read what I’d written and realize you might enjoy reading it,...
My First Mistake
As far as this company goes it literally was mis-spelling the name "Aerostich" when making the master artwork for the first printing of letterhead stationery and business cards, and when opening the business's checking account and applying for the Minnesota...
Balancing Act
My first bicycle was a 20” Huffy. Deep candy red with white pinstripes on its triangle-shaped fenders. I remember it so perfectly because this was the bike I first learned how to balance without training wheels. I can take you...
Motorcycle Awareness Month
Year after year this is co-promoted by both the AMA and the Motorcycle Industry Council, and almost nobody cares. The AMA is the American Motorcyclist Association and is the largest membership motorcycle rider political group (PAC) in the country. Sort...
Tell A Friend...
If you own, wear and enjoy your Aerostich gear, please tell your friends about it. Our ability to continue as a solvent, successful business depends on your positive recommendations, stories and referrals. We all came back to work during this...
We're Ready
For motorcycle accessory businesses like ours the good sales quarters are Q2 and Q4 and the slow quarters are Q’s 1 and 3. Most annual profit is made during Q4. This entire year will be an economic write-off, but hopefully...
Follow-Up To "A Sorta Sensible Trade-Off"
An earlier Mr. Subjective blog post led to a long-ish email exchange between two old friends: Tom, a continuing blogger in ‘Geezer with a Grudge’, and Mr. Subjective. The ‘Sorta Sensible Trade Off’ essay was about the trade-offs between today’s safety-enhancing...
Riding Is Cool
“Younger rider’s reactions to my suit (Roadcrafter Classic, R-3) are not entirely positive.” - Any number of experienced motorcycle journalists. That’s an understatement. I’ve thought a lot about why this is. First, youth-in-general looks very hard at the micro-granular details...
A Sorta Sensible Trade-Off
Most riders today agree about the desirable complications of modern motorcycle safety features like ABS and Traction Control. I do, too, though at times still slightly struggle with some these high-tech enhancements. Electronic fuel injection is great and so are...
My Car Life
...Or, A Completely Stupid Situation (As appended to an email reply to ‘Gabe F’, January 4, 2020.) PS - I still have a car. Two in fact. I just don’t want to drive either in the winter. Here’s my car...
The Winter Report
So far this has been a fairly mild winter, temp-wise, but we've had an above-average amount of snow. Which is fine. I'm quite happy riding my now three-year-old electric bicycle on its studded tires as primary transportation (made up a...
Remembering Neil Peart
A Good One... A customer wrote today and suggested we re-name the Transit suit after Neil Peart.  He was a great fan of the Transit suit and generously let us use photos of him riding wearing his Transit.  We have...
Artisanal Stuff
It has always been fashionable to possess and enjoy handmade things. In motorcycling this usually means waxed cotton or leather bags and old-school traditional rider’s gear. It’s all good. Most of our products are crafted by hand. Some are made in two...
It's the Little Things
Snow clean up at Aerostich after a blizzard came through last weekend, dropping over 20 inches of snow in Duluth. It's been a wild week. A couple of nights ago I discovered a slowly deflating rear tire on my electric ‘winter...
Winter Time
Yesterday for the first time this fall it got down to twenty degrees, well below historical averages here on this date. I rode to work from a heated garage aboard a recently re-animated -- but still seriously old -- 1994...