On the last chapter, I spoke about the final steps to launch the brand, especially with the Bike Exif partnership and being that there was nothing like it at the time (RSD was the most comparable, but not quite the same, RSD is rocker Americana, Pagnol is classic-modern Euro), we came out with a bang!

Today brands like Dainese 36060, Oscar by Alpinestars, Rev'it, and Spidi plus a whole other smaller range of Euro brands to even Revzilla's own "Pagnol like brand" have followed, but we are on to a new direction (Stay tuned!)

Coming from the fashion world as I mentioned in chapter 1, I also mentioned how when I started Pagnol I did not want to use the typical fashion formula of the time, "celebrities"! To me, very few of them had any say on "what is good design and validating a product", so who would? the people, art and design disciplines we admired, real creatives! Architects, Photographers, Industrial designers, illustrators-graphic designers and of course, the new wave custom motorcycle builders-designers! OUR heroes.

Through a friend, I met Alex Earle, designer at Audi and Ducati who had just finished his amazing design using the Ducati Monster as a base. He was not well known in the scene at the time, but to me, I already knew the level of talent, that was all I cared about and was thrilled to start with him! Besides, neither were we known! So it was very cool to come up together.

After him, we added from an Architect to the creative director of the ad agency BBDO, cool photographers to Cam Elkins from Stories of Bike.

They were all so thrilled for the idea, nobody had ever asked them for such a thing! but the best for this series was yet to come, starting with a hero of mine, Mr. Walt Siegl.

I met Walt at one of the Moto GP rounds in Austin. I was at the time also working with Bike Exif as his USA marketing and salesperson. I introduced my self to Walt, we hit it off and hang out during the event, in the end, I asked him if he would like to be a part of our Pagnol creatives riders, how well his bikes fit our vision and he was delighted to do it!

It took a bit of time to get it done, but taking the bull by the horns, or shall we say, the moto by the handlebars :), I had our NYC creative rider and now friend David Goldman visit Walt and did the shoot! I did not have to twist his arm to do this.

The result was outstanding and from here not only was it a no-brainer for other builders we admired to join, but they started coming to us and even better, we naturally became good friends and did cool collaborations in the launch of their project such as Bill Webb's Huge Moto simple yet amazing Honda CBR 1000RR to PRAEM's BMW and so on, becoming "Pagnol's culture"

Be sure to check out most or all of the rest of our Pagnol creative riders under our "culture" page!

So of course, the story continues and who knows if at least one of my kids or some partnership will take over in many years to come, but for now, with challenges of a startup and all, the goal is not to "make cool moto gear", the goal will continue to be "making motorcycle protective gear cool" so you guys have no excuse to wear it!

Thank you for reading our story of how we got started and then some, we are no Dainese or Astars! but we wanted to try to inspire some of you to do your thing as we were inspired by other people and brands.

Paulo Rosas

Pagnol

The Pagnol story - Chapter 4, meeting your heroes