Honda has opened up a new type of motorcycle shop in Japan. Rather than the cold feel of a typical dealership and service center, the adorably named Cub House has an upscale yet nostalgic feel. The location in Toda City, Saitama Prefecture is a pilot store, but if it’s successful more of them may pop up around Japan.
Walk into Cub House and you might even mistake it for a café or an apparel shop. That’s intentional. Honda wanted the store to feel inviting and warm, a place where customers might just want to browse or hang out with like-minded enthusiasts without the pressure to buy something. A typical motorcycle showroom might feel intimidating for a beginner, so one of the goals for Cub House was to appear welcoming to even non-riders.
“Traditional motorcycle dealerships were places people visited with a clear purpose, such as purchasing a bike, test riding, or getting it serviced,” said Kosuke Kuroda, a product designer for Honda’s Motorcycle Power Products division. “However, Cub House is designed so that anyone can casually drop in without any particular purpose or reason and experience the charm of motorcycles in a relaxed atmosphere.”
The concept actually comes from Honda Thailand, which operates in an environment where bikes are much more a part of everyday life. The Saitama location is Japan’s first. Honda’s bikes are seen as more of a luxury item in Thailand, but in Japan they’re more of an entry-level product, especially the 125cc models like the Super Cub, Monkey, and Dax.
To create the friendly environment, Honda filled it with clever design features that make customers want to come back. Modification parts are hung on the walls like works of art. Motorcycles are displayed at eye-level so customers don’t have to get on the floor to examine them up close. The service bays have a window so customers can see their bikes being repaired or modified.
Design details from Honda motorcycles abound. The barstools have seats from the Honda Monkey. The lighting in the ceiling emanates from motorcycle tires. Even the packaging for anything sold at Cub House comes not in brown cardboard, but in stylish black and white boxes that, when stacked, look like a checkered flag. Perhaps most cleverly of all, in the Cub House logo the word “Cub” is stylized to resemble a motorcycle.
Honda Japan’s Sakika Suzuki, who oversaw the Cub House launch, explained, “In an age where you can get anything through online shopping, I wanted to recreate the ideal experience of going to a physical store, seeing, touching, and checking things out before making a purchase.”
To coincide with the store’s opening, Honda has also launched a series of exclusive customization parts called the Cub House ’70 Collection. The Monkey 125 ’70 has a retro seat to make the bike look more compact and a decal stripe kit that’s available in various colors. The Dax 125 ’70 Style features a big vintage Honda logo, up-fender, and a retro-style seat and muffler. The CT125 ’70 Style pays homage to the 1970s CT90 with its gray and red two-tone, has been modded with vintage finish wheels and chrome front carrier and side boxes.
So far Cub House’s launch seems like a success. “On opening day, dozens of motorcycles were lined up in the parking lot, but not a single one was the same,” Suzuki recalled. “People who had never met before were looking at each other’s bikes and naturally striking up conversations saying, ‘That’s cool!’ And at the end, they were proudly straddling their bikes and heading home — it was a heartwarming scene.” We could see a Cub House being successful in a hip urban area like New York or Seattle. Hopefully one will eventually make its way to the US.
Images courtesy of Honda.
I do not like to diss, and I really like this kind of shop, but I do not think it will ever work outside of a primarily walkable city. If you wander around everyday on foot or on a bike and you stumble upon this motorcycle dealership cosplaying as a clothing and coffee shop, you might be interested, and eventually curious to drop in, have a coffee, look at and touch the bike, meet other people and make you want to work hard to afford a nicety like these Hondas.
If you wander around by car, it just is another shop along the boulevard while you just want to get where you are going, and I do not see this concept actually working. I seen it in a library (super nice, but was slowly losing money), some garages (the coffee shops ended up unstaffed because of no clients, and taking space with lights out) and one car dealership, though I guess someone could go make you a coffee, everyone I saw when I was last carshopping was drinking a quick cup of joe made out of the keurig-or-similar close to the entrance… Only the harley-davidson near to me still has something like that, but it is a full-fledged restaurant, and harley-davidson is mostly a clothing brand anyway!