Breaking Into a Culture

509 Street. Category launch, 2022.
Global Marketing Director, Teton Outfitters

The Setup

509 spent twenty years earning trust in snow and dirt. Riders in those worlds knew exactly what the brand was for. Street motorcyclists had never heard of us. We were a small brand out of Spokane walking into a category owned for decades by companies with a hundred times our budget, and we were doing it without a dealer floor.

The Challenge

Street is a culture before it's a category. It has its own history, its own gatekeepers, and a long memory for outsiders who show up selling.

Three decisions carried it.

Launch direct, add dealers later. November 2022 went live exclusively at ride509.com/street. No retail meant every unit of demand had to be built digitally. Harder, but it meant we owned the entire story while the brand had nothing to stand on. Dealers came in by mid 2023, once there was proof to sell them on.

Borrow credibility from someone who already had it. The 509 x White's Perry Boot put us next to one of the last American bootmakers still building on their own last. Street riders who had never heard of 509 knew White's. That isn't a product decision. It's a permission decision.

Let the riders vet us. #509StreetCrew brought riders in to test the gear and feed back on it. In a culture that can smell an outsider, the fastest way in is to stop talking and let the people who already belong there do it for you.

What I Owned

  • The category launch, end-to-end, through a category manager who ran the project day-to-day.

  • Hiring the team and setting the direction they built against.

  • Launch strategy and positioning for a category we had never sold into and an audience with no relationship to the brand.

  • Approval on go-to-market, channel sequencing, and the partner decisions that bought us permission.

  • Accountability for the outcome across digital, ecommerce, demand generation, partner marketing, community, and PR.

How it Landed

  • Played a key role in 39% year-over-year growth.

  • Accelerated 7% year-over-year e-commerce growth.

  • Built influencer programs into new target markets, driving 28% growth.

Street became a permanent category alongside snow and dirt, with its own dedicated product line manager. By 2024, the line produced the Mach V Commander, the industry's first fully integrated communication helmet, developed in partnership with Cardo.

In the press:

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All product and lifestyle photography appears courtesy of the respective photographers and Teton Outfitters, LLC.