DK Interviews HogWorkz Co-Founders

A little while ago, the founders of HogWorkz, Justin and Kyle, stopped by the Dennis Kirk headquarters. We sat down with them to learn more about their company. Justin and Kyle discuss the genesis of HogWorkz and where they see themselves in the marketplace. They also talk about where they see the company going in the future. You can catch the full interview in the video below.

Transcript Below:

Kyle: What’s going on guys, I’m Kyle.

Justin: And I’m Justin. We’re co-founders of HogWorkz and we’re here with the Dennis Kirk team.

Kyle: HogWorkz is a motorcycle brand based in the Detroit, Michigan area. We do a lot of things, most notably LED lighting, stretch saddle bags, fenders, turn signals, and most recently OEM color match bodywork.

Justin: We started HogWorkz for a passion of entrepreneurialism. My business partner here, Kyle, has been starting a company since he was at a very young age and him and I grew up together as close friends.

Kyle: We basically met through our moms. Our moms are best friends still till this day. We met that way. I mean he’s a week younger than me. I mean it’s more of a Brotherhood than anything, you know, first and foremost.

Justin: So, one day I called him and told him I quit my job and we’re going to start a company together and that’s essentially what was the catalyst to start this company.

Kyle: You know, our dads are both avid Harley guys and we kind of grew up in that. So, we wanted to create a company that kind of appealed to the broad range of those Harley guys that wanted to do their work themselves.

We really started by finding pain points in the industry that that weren’t being met. So, the first thing I noticed was a lot of these aftermarket companies were doing like lower vented fairings. So, they were selling these kits, but they weren’t including the hardware. So, we were like, okay, well that’s an easy product to do- clamps and bolts and screws. And that was our first product, I think. And that was, I mean, way in the beginning. I mean that was like the first thing, I think, we actually put online.

Justin: The HogWorkz brand, actually the name’s kind of interesting. It actually leans a little bit on a company called Skunk Works. It’s a part of a defense contractor and one of their features or one of their influences is that they cut through a lot of red tape and get the job done when the government needs it, especially during wartime. We really like that kind of attitude of, just you know, cutting through the fat and figuring out how to do it best. And the hardware speaks to it.

Later on, we moved into LED lighting. There was a very strong need of LED lighting on motorcycles. That’s absolutely what really trailblazed our brand for us is selling LED lighting.

Kyle: The OEM color match stuff is kind of a newer product line for us. Probably about two years old now, two and a half years old. But we saw a demand for it. We were already doing Vivid black and some of, and denim black, as well as unpainted parts. But we were constantly getting calls like, “hey do you guys offer this color, you know, I laid my bike down. I only need a left side saddle bag” or “I want to replace both my bags” or “I want to go to stretch bags. Do you offer them in my color.” You know. So that was a question we constantly were getting and we have a great team of people there in our paint room. Jasmine is our head painter. She’s amazing. She’s been with us pretty much since day one when we started doing the paint stuff.

Justin: Yeah, we plan to grow our skus but we want to do it in a way that’s sane. We want to grow in a way that we make parts that are valuable to our customers, we’re able to sell a lot of, of course, but we’re also not overdoing it and trying to get into places where we’re not going to succeed. We expect to keep growing that way. We also want to focus on the customer experience. So, when a customer calls us, if we have parts for the rest of their bike, we want to engage in those conversations early on and help them build the bike the way they want to instead of just selling them one part at a time. So, I think there’s a lot of opportunity at just using what we have right now, building upon it with extra skus in the same manner without overdoing it and then helping your customers get all the parts they need instead of just one.

Kyle: Make sure you check out everything HogWorkz has to offer on Denniskirk.com, especially our OEM color match products.