The shade they will never sit under: A Quick Pit Stop with Mark from Mimi and Moto
Who is Mark Augustyn? He’s one half of the team behind Mimi and Moto, the children's books bridging the gap between riders and their kids. Breaking down stereotypes about motorcyclists and building the pathway for the next generation to get into the sport. This October it will be ten years since the first book sold!
Welcome back to Pit Stop, the corner of American Moto Co. where we pull over to explore the craft, the culture, and the creators who keep the raw, unfiltered soul of motorcycling alive. Today we're catching up with Mark of Mimi and Moto, who I met at Vintage Motorcycle Days. A man who has thought harder than anyone I know about where the next generation of riders comes from.
Mark has a question he asks people, and it is not why do you ride.
"That's a subjective thing. The better question is specifically what got you into riding motorcycles."
He says the overwhelming majority of riders will tell him about a childhood experience or memory that happened before they were ten or twelve. Mark is so confident about it, he built the business around that idea.
The seed for Mark was planted in elementary school in Connecticut. A couple of friends rode dirt bikes. Mark did not have one, but Mark was reading Dirt Rider magazine and having dreams like any little boy did. When he finally had the chance to jump on his friend's YZ80 he rode it right into a pile of dirt, broke the front fender, and he is fairly certain he made his friend's dad angry.
He wanted a mini bike, but between his parents and the guitar showing up in his life, he never got one.
Then in 2003 he lost his fiancee to cancer.
He was a musician at the time and could not find it in himself to play or even listen to music. Instead he was given the restless physical feeling grief does to a body. Somewhere in the pile of books he was reading he found the line that ignited it all, “go do something you have always wanted to do”.
He got his motorcycle license in 2004 and rode. A lot.
"Motorcycling gave me a place to put that energy."
So when Mark tells you the thing that gets a person onto two wheels usually happens before they turn twelve, he is not theorizing. He is describing a seed that sat in the ground for a quarter century and came up during the worst year of his life.
Now he plants those seeds for a living.
It all started in a bathroom, during potty training. Mark's job was keeping their daughter Meah seated long enough for the process to work. Mark and his wife Nancy are both AMA members, which means two copies of the AMA magazine arrive every month, so he started handing Meah the spare and asking her to find the motorcycle. She would point at them.
Those bathroom meetings sent them looking for a motorcycle book for a toddler. Nobody was making the thing they wanted. So they decided to make one.
The first book is eleven sentences long. He will tell you they labored over every letter of it. It sold for the first time on October 4, 2016, which makes this October the ten year mark.
With a Walmart pop up tent, a six foot table, one blue book, and a couple of plastic holders with a sheet of paper explaining what they were doing, they would set up at track days and any other moto event that would have them.
"It was just like starting a band. You're creative, you make stuff, go meet people, you hope they like it, and then make something else. It builds on itself. By the time you find out about a band, they've been ‘banding’ for ten years."
Ten years of that got Nancy and Mark past twenty seven thousand books sold, over twenty eight if you count the ones they have given away. No distribution. All of it themselves. At the eighty sixth Sturgis, Mimi and Moto was the only vendor anywhere there selling nothing but kids' stuff.
After nine years behind their table, Mark has now asked his question a few thousand times, and the answer keeps coming back the same. Somebody's uncle. A neighbor. A race their dad took them to when they were seven. A childhood experience or memory.
Which is why Mark will correct you if you say ‘motorcycle industry’. He says motorcycling is a sport and the industry is there to support it.
"I’m a golfer too and you never, ever hear any golfer at any level talk about the ‘golfing industry’. They talk about growing the game, giving back to the sport."
His argument is that language shapes perception. ‘Industry’ conjures units and margins and factories. ‘Sport’ conjures families, ecosystems and somebody handing something down to a kid. He points out, with some irony, that according to the Motorcycle Industry Council, the average age of U.S. motorcycle riders has roughly doubled, from somewhere around twenty five in 1980 to about fifty by 2020.
He is careful to say this is not a condemnation of the motorcycle industry but the facts and data don’t lie, and he has no patience for the usual excuses about screen time and risk aversion. His answer to all of that is “so what, those are the obstacles, and that is the job in front of us”. And he thinks the ‘motorcycle industry’ has the math backwards.
"The most important part of a motorcycle is a human ass. With no ass, I don't care how good the motorcycle is, it's not gonna move. If you focus on the asses, and focus on them when they are young, then the unit problem starts to take care of itself."
That is also why he is so plugged into what Ryan McFarland is doing at Strider. Bicycles are the gateway to motorcycles, and if a kid cannot ride a bicycle, you cannot even start the conversation. The numbers on kids riding bicycles are every bit as bad.
The next ten years will be focused on the two areas he thinks will scale Mimi and Moto. He wants Mimi and Moto animated, and he wants the books translated, German first because Nancy is, then Spanish.
There is a cost to all of this. Mark mentioned his ride time was almost zero at this point, but a price worth paying for growing the sport and giving back. The man who was saved by getting on a motorcycle now spends most of his year at a folding table making sure somebody else's kid gets the idea early enough for it to take.
On the back of their laminated story sheet there is a Greek proverb:
“A society grows great when old people plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit under.” Mark is planting those motorcycle seeds.
You can check out Mimi and Moto at Mimiandmoto.com
