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Skully on Friday finally acknowledged what has already been known in the motorcycling community: the company was going out of business. The news comes after a last-minute effort by the remaining management to secure a new round of funding.

With $15 million down the drain, work still to do before the Skully AR-1 would be ready to ship, and a growing group of disgruntled early adopters, Skully’s resurrection was not to be.

Instead in a letter to backers and customers, Skully announced that it would be filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy procedure for companies that are going out of business. This news, of course, directly impacts the thousands of motorcyclists who were expecting to receive a Skully AR-1 helmet.

It was just two weeks ago that we told you about Skully’s investors ousting brothers Marcus Weller and Mitch Weller from the San Francisco startup, and today TechCrunch reports that the motorcycle helmet company will be rather swiftly closing its doors.

A&R readers may remember that Skully’s latest delay to market stemmed from the Skully AR-1 helmet not being ready for mass production, despite the nearly $15 million raised through seed money and a Series A funding round, which was led by Intel Capital.

As such, the closure surely stems from Skully’s investors choosing to shut down the company’s operations, rather than rebuild Skully’s tarnished reputation and retool its product for mass production.

According to TechCrunch, operations at Skully have already ceased, and the website is expected to go offline later today, though as of this writing Skully’s website remains, and its social marketing team is still on Facebook cooling the heels of angry customers.

If one were to grade the marketing efforts in the motorcycle industry, you’d be hard pressed to hand out a grade better than a B- to one of the major OEMs. While some companies have produced some brand value, carved out a defensible niche for themselves, or caught on to this whole internet fad thing, none of the OEMs really do a bang-up job of hitting all the standard marketing best practices.

If we had to single out one company that needs a letter sent home to mom, it has to be Aprilia, as the Italian company constantly proves itself to be the pants-on-head retarded (sorry Sarah Palin) window-licking moron (sorry again Sarah Palin) paste-eating buffoon (we’re not sorry for that one) of motorcycling media. Report card: F with a “does not play well with others” note attached.