The Story
For all
builders
We have been chasing the same feeling since a blue toy chopper showed up on top of a birthday cake. Everything since has been an attempt to get back to it.
We grew up around motorcycles in the eighties and nineties, watching our uncles work and deciding somewhere in there that we would dress like that too. First bike at sixteen, hauled around town by a grandfather who did not ask a lot of questions. By 2002 we were building for real out in Los Angeles, cutting and stretching fenders instead of buying parts off a shelf.
Back then a run meant twenty bikes rolling out together and every stop was a taco stand. Not a bar. A taco stand on the side of the road at midnight, bikes parked all around it, everybody eating. You cannot get that feeling anywhere else, and we quit trying to explain it to people who have never had it.
You are there with your buddies and you are in freedom. That is what this whole thing is. Fred Tavarez
The years off
Then it stopped
for a while
Cancer took the bike away before anything else did. Chemo hollows your bones out, and after that cold air on a ride meant real pain, so we would get a few miles down the road and have to turn around and park it. That went on for years.
A doctor eventually said try vitamin D. The calcium came back. We got on the bike again.
So we built a garage behind the house in the Central Valley and started buying bikes and making little choppers out of them, one at a time. When a friend came around going through a divorce and needed somewhere to put their head, they did not get handed a beer. They got handed a wrench and told to work on their own bike, because you take care of something you built yourself.
The name
That is not how
you spell it
We know. It was never supposed to be. Chopperos is not correct Spanish, it is spelled the way it sounds on the street, so that somebody who grew up speaking it and somebody who has never spoken a word of it read it the exact same way.
That was the entire point. No color line on it. Hispanic, white, whoever, the same way it worked when everybody rolled out of Los Angeles together because they all liked the same bikes. One name everybody can wear.
I want everybody to wear it. No color line. When I put that hat on I feel free. On where the name came from
People see it and ask if it is a club. It is not a club. It is apparel, it is for all builders, and if you just love choppers then it is yours too.
What we stand on
Built, not bought
Every mark is ours
We draw the letters and the artwork by hand first. Then it gets vectored and colored and printed. Nothing here got pulled off a font menu at midnight.
Sizes to 4X
We got tired of brands stopping at 2X and pretending nobody noticed. Every tee runs S through 4X, and the big sizes get restocked the same as everything else.
Old school only
Knuckleheads, panheads, shovels, evos. Fifties through nineties. If it came out of a showroom last spring with a fairing on it, that is a different brand.
Why the hats look like that
Half the builders
came from skating
That is not a marketing angle, it is just what happened. Most of the builders we know were skaters first, and a lot of them still are. You will see a bike roll up to the beach with a board racked on the side of it.
So we make the hats to sit in both worlds. Vintage up front, skater everywhere else. Golfer panels with the holes so your head breathes when it is a hundred and five in the valley. Short brims that go backwards under a helmet without fighting you.
See the hatsWhere it goes
Real recognizes real
One builder sees another builder wearing it and they already know. That one did not buy their bike finished. They put hands on it. That is the whole handshake, and it fits on a hat.
Still in the garage in the Central Valley, still drawing. God gets the credit for the ideas.