"Innovation in pursuit of a better riding experience" might sound like the mantra of every helmet maker. The reality is, it's not.
Because if making you feel safer and more comfortable in a better-fitting helmet for hours and hours at a time, day after day, was the goal of every company, why is Arai alone responsible for such comfort and fit advances as different interior shapes to fit different head shapes, removable/replaceable Cheekpads and Comfort liners to give you a more custom fit, and our latest, the Emergency Cheekpad Release System to aid injured riders?
In Arai's world, innovations don't come from a marketing department.
They come from a decades-long history of caring about one thing: riders.
Arai's single-minded obsession with the comfort and safety of riders comes from our roots.
Arai alone is a family-owned helmet company started over 60 years ago by an artisan: a custom hat maker who rode motorcycles back in the 1930s. (Talk about a match made in heaven.) And the company Hirotaké Arai founded is still his family's company three generations later. Still singularly committed to that same goal.
So when you hold an Arai helmet in your hands, wear it and feel its unparalleled comfort, you know not only where it came from, but who it came from. And why. Compare this against the cold reality of an industry of big, impersonal publicly-held helmet corporations whose primary mission, by definition, is stockholder profit, not excellence at any cost.
Consider: If your family's name was on a helmet, would you be content with it being the same as everybody else's? Us neither.
Every Arai helmet is virtually 100% handmade. But the obsession goes even deeper than that.
Every Arai helmet must go through three separate quality-control departments: one after the shell is made; one after painting and graphic completion; and one after assembly. This attention to detail isn't performed on every hundredth helmet, or every tenth one, but every single Arai helmet. (This kind of thing could give a profit-driven, cheaper-price helmet maker a heart attack.)
And it still goes even deeper than that: The community of Arai workers who build your helmet are so involved it's as if their family name was on the front. Their level of pride, care, and understanding of what they do - and the rider they're doing it for - is so visible you can see it in their eyes, in their concentration. They actually sign the inside of the helmet they work on. It's part of the Arai "culture," honed over those three generations. It's part of who they are, too. The Arai worker. Arai alone.
Do you think you're worth this degree of attention? Do you really think it's something you can get with just any brand?
Arai alone was the first helmet company to have the confidence in its product to offer a full 5-Year Limited Warranty 15 years ago! Only recently have a couple others extended their warranties past one year. If a manufacturer doesn't trust its helmets for more than one year, why should you? |
