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There was a time when a Harley wasn’t just a motorcycle. It was part of the texture of American life. The bark of a V-twin at a set of traffic lights. The chrome and leather in a diner parking lot. The Bar & Shield logo stitched onto a jacket in a film you grew up with. For more than a century, since William Harley and Arthur Davidson built their first machine in a Milwaukee shed in 1903, the brand was simply there—recognizable everywhere, quietly embedded in an American idea of freedom.
And then, almost imperceptibly, it stopped being central.
The dealerships didn’t disappear. The logo barely changed. The company didn’t collapse. It just receded—edged out by a generation that doesn’t ride, a used-bike market awash with cheap machines and a cultural moment that no longer treats a $25,000 cruiser as the shortest route to authenticity.
In February, Harley-Davidson reported full-year 2025 revenue of $4.47 billion, a 14 percent decline from 2024, following an 11 percent decline the previous year. Its core motorcycle division, HDMC, posted an operating loss of $29 million, a reversal from $278 million in operating income the year before. Global retail sales fell 12 percent; shipments dropped 16 percent. The company’s market capitalization, which peaked above $19 billion in 2006, sits at roughly $2.7 billion today.
The deeper question isn’t whether Harley-Davidson can grow. It is whether it can survive the next decade without becoming a museum piece. Newsweek contacted Harley-Davidson for comment.
Few product brands have reached that level of cultural penetration. “Among other things, generations of movies and TV shows have effectively served as infomercials for the Harley myth,” said Robert Thompson, trustee professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School and director of its Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “And not just ancient classics like Easy Rider and Pulp Fiction—like Trojan hogs, Harleys managed to sneak into a staggering number of zeitgeist franchises: Rocky, Indiana Jones, Terminator, RoboCop, the Marvel Universe and lots more, many of which diverge from the ‘older,’ ‘outlaw’ stereotype. The images and vibes in, say, Sons of Anarchy, however, are what many of the uninitiated think of when they think of Harley.”
Seth Barnett, a behavioral economist who studies generational consumer behavior and rides a Harley himself, said cultural saturation is not the same as commercial durability. “The biggest thing is they’ve got to maintain a cultural identity, and they’ve built a cultural identity intentionally and unintentionally,” he told Newsweek.
Barnett does not think the current model is sustainable. “They can’t maintain where they are right now from the dealership model all the way up to their corporate structure,” he said. “They can’t maintain because they’re continuing to resist the younger generations, particularly because they don’t fit that identity model of the people that they’ve been selling to really successfully over the past couple of decades.”
The company, in his reading, has found a floor rather than a future. “Right now…Harley-Davidson stock is almost at a five-year low, but they’ve kind of found this equilibrium that they can try to maintain through the coming five to 10 years,” he said. “But in order to actually succeed and to grow and to develop, they’ve got to understand how to meet the challenges of the younger generation.”
The Demographic Cliff
The arithmetic is unforgiving. The median age of a Harley-Davidson buyer reached 52 in 2024, up from the mid-40s in the early 2000s. The traditional core—affluent men over 50 who value heavyweight cruisers and long-distance touring—is aging out of riding altogether. Meanwhile, its grip on young riders has collapsed, with Japanese brands like Honda and Yamaha dominating the entry-level and youth motorcycle market.
Women now account for roughly one in five U.S. motorcycle owners, up from 8 percent in 1998, and are the fastest-growing ownership group in the industry, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council. Yet Harley has struggled to capture them: female riders skew toward scooters and lightweight machines that Japanese brands have long dominated. Harley’s aggressively masculine imagery, honed over decades, has become a liability in a market that is diversifying rapidly.
“Other brands can only dream of the global recognition that Harley-Davidson has achieved, but a beloved cultural identity comes with a hitch,” Thompson said. “As that identity ages, it may not appeal to emerging generations. Harley culture gets parodied as often as it gets celebrated. Adapting the culture for new cohorts, though, runs the risk of compromising one of the most powerful brands of the last century.” Barnett said the industry’s habitual defense—that broadening the brand risks the base—is the wrong way round. “The biggest thing is, and so many people are dealing with this, they say, well, we don’t want to alienate our existing clientele. And they do have a really strong client base,” he said. “But that’s an aging group. They’re losing market share from that group. And no, you don’t want to alienate them, but you also want to try to figure out a way to embrace the new generation coming in and attracting those customers.”
Three CEOs, One Circle
The company’s response has been a bewildering sequence of strategic pivots, each reversing the one before it. In 2018, then-CEO Matt Levatich launched the “More Roads to Harley-Davidson” plan, an ambitious attempt to expand the brand through adventure bikes, like the Pan America 1250, streetfighters, smaller-displacement models and the flagship electric LiveWire.
Levatich was ousted in 2020. His replacement, Jochen Zeitz, streamlined the product line by dozens of models, exited underperforming markets, killed the air-cooled Sportster—long considered the gateway machine for first-time Harley owners—and refocused the company on high-margin touring motorcycles for wealthy riders. On paper, Zeitz’s “Hardwire” strategy improved margins. In practice, it accelerated the demographic contraction.
No element of the Zeitz era proved more unsuccessful than LiveWire. Although conceived under Levatich as part of the “More Roads” expansion, Zeitz spun the electric-motorcycle business into a standalone company through a SPAC merger in 2022, making LiveWire a central pillar of Harley’s growth strategy. Harley projected sales of 101,000 electric motorcycles by 2026. In Q2 2025, LiveWire sold 55. For the full year, it managed 653 units worldwide, and its motorcycle division generated just $6.1 million in revenue against $73.8 million in operating losses. Hardcore Harley riders showed little interest in a silent machine; environmentally conscious younger buyers found cheaper alternatives. In March 2026, Harley confirmed a complete brand separation from LiveWire and refocused on what it does best—big-displacement V-twin cruisers, touring behemoths and the lifestyle ecosystem that made it one of the most recognizable brands on the planet.
Zeitz retired in October 2025. He was replaced by Artie Starrs, the former CEO of Topgolf and, before that, the global head of Pizza Hut. Starrs had no motorcycle-industry experience but a track record of scaling consumer brands and managing franchise networks. Barnett said the choice matters more than it would in almost any other consumer category. “It’s a unique group. It’s a unique brand. It’s a unique type of market,” he said. “If you’re coming in as a CEO that has never had experience in the automotive industry and you’re going into Ford or GM or something like that, that’s a little bit different. Everybody has a car… Harley’s a kind of different player in that.”
Barnett is careful in his assessment of Starrs. “It really comes down to…do you understand the customer? Do you understand what they want, what they’re trying to achieve? And I don’t know that he does,” Barnett said. “There’s a couple of videos of him online where he’s at dealers or…he’s gone to a couple of the big motorcycle shows and is being interviewed. And the comments kind of tear him apart because he doesn’t look and sound like the typical rider, doesn’t really understand the reason people do what they’re doing and the reason people ride.”
In May, Starrs unveiled his own strategy, “Back to the Bricks,” named after Harley’s historic Juneau Avenue headquarters in Milwaukee, which is internally nicknamed “the Bricks.” It was, in almost every respect, a repudiation of the Zeitz era. Its centerpiece: more affordable motorcycles. The Sprint, an entry-level 440cc bike priced at around $6,000, is expected later this year. The air-cooled Sportster 883, Harley’s most requested model, will return in 2027 at around $10,000. The company plans 20 new models and trims over the next three years, along with an expanded “blank canvas” customization program aimed at new riders. The financial targets are ambitious: more than $350 million in HDMC profit by 2027 and at least $150 million in cost reductions. Dealer profitability, Starrs promised, would double in 2026 and double again by 2029.
Barnett gives the direction a qualified endorsement. “That kind of back to basics, that brick and mortar idea—I think that’s a great step. It’s not the end-all-be-all step, but it’s a great step,” he said, “especially because every single dealer is having different conversations.”
Investors, at least, appear willing to give Harley-Davidson another chance. Its shares are up about 24 percent this year as markets bet that the latest reinvention might succeed where previous ones failed. Even so, at roughly $2.6 billion, the company is worth barely one-seventh of its 2006 peak.
The Culture Trap
If demographic decline, strategic whiplash and an electric-vehicle fiasco were not enough, Harley-Davidson has also stumbled into one of America’s most politically charged corporate minefields. In August 2024, after conservative activist Robby Starbuck targeted its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Harley publicly rolled back several DEI initiatives, ended diversity-focused supplier spending and withdrew from external social surveys.
The controversy has not subsided. In June 2026, Starbuck renewed his boycott, this time targeting Starrs and newly appointed Chief Brand Officer Marcus Fischer over their prior involvement with diversity-related work. Conservative influencers urged riders to switch to Indian Motorcycle; MMA fighter Sean Strickland told nearly a million followers he’d “officially made the switch.”
Harley defended its CEO, saying Starrs has spent his first eight months “listening directly to our riders, dealers, employees, and unions” and insisting its “only agenda is getting back to basics: building great motorcycles.”
Harley is not the only heritage brand that has discovered the limits of reinvention. In May, Ferrari unveiled the Luce, its first all-electric model—a 1,035-horsepower, five-seat EV developed with former Apple designer Jony Ive. The reaction was brutal. Former Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo warned that it “risks destroying the myth,” while investors wiped almost 8 percent from the company’s market value in a single day. The message was familiar: customers who buy lifestyle brands often care less about specifications than identity.
The parallels are striking. Both brands derive power not from specifications but from sensory identity—the scream of a V12, the rumble of a V-twin—and both have discovered that removing the defining experience leaves a product that feels, to the faithful, like a betrayal. Any gesture toward cultural modernization alienates the traditionalist base that generates most of the revenue, while failure to modernize ensures the base continues to shrink.
The Legacy Play
In April, weeks before unveiling “Back to the Bricks,” Starrs launched the “RIDE” platform—a comprehensive brand reset designed to reconnect Harley-Davidson with its heritage while signaling openness to a broader audience. Its centerpiece was the return of the traditional Bar & Shield logo, replacing a simplified version introduced during the Zeitz era. A national multimedia campaign featuring real Harley riders, set to Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” aired across broadcast and streaming platforms.
For Barnett, the heritage lever is the most underused the company has. “Here’s what it’s about. Here’s where things came from, and the simplicity and the tenacity of the brand itself is embodied in this entity,” he said. “That right there, that will sell a younger generation—not coming in and trying to say, ‘Oh, you want to be just like your dad, or you want to be just like your granddad.’”
He does not want to be sold nostalgia. He wants to be sold inheritance. “I want to be part of that legacy,” Barnett said. “That motorcycle right there, one of these parked in my garage, says that I’m part of that legacy. I don’t need to go to Sturgis [Motorcycle Rally, the 86-year-old annual motorcycle event in South Dakota]. I don’t need to be sold that way. I need to be sold in a way that says, ‘Hey, you’re part of something that’s bigger than you. You’re part of something that’s gone across generations and that should continue to exist, even if you don’t want to be embraced in the same type of way as our core base.’”
Nowhere is Harley’s difference from the rest of the motorcycle industry more visible than in its dealer network. Barnett said the physical stores—not the marketing budget—may be the company’s most valuable channel. “If I look at other motorcycle dealers, the only reason you show up to the dealership is to purchase the bike, sell the bike or to service the bike. Harley in most cases is totally different than that,” he said.
“People come there just because. They come there to meet up with their friends. They come there to hang out. Some of the Harley dealers have a bar in it, or some of them have a little coffee place, whatever it may be. People are coming there because it’s a gathering point.”
The strategic mistake, in Barnett’s view, is treating that foot traffic as a sales funnel. “You have to get away from the idea that everybody that walks in your door needs to be separated from their money to buy a new bike,” he said.
External pressures compound the challenge. President Donald Trump’s tariffs cost Harley-Davidson $67 million in 2025, with another $75 million to $90 million expected this year. Indian Motorcycle has gained share in the heavyweight segment. Yet retail sales in North America rose 5 percent in Q4 2025 and 14 percent in Q1 2026, while global dealer inventory fell 22 percent—a sign demand is improving and shipments are back in balance.
Harley-Davidson has been here before. In the early 1980s, the company was on the brink of collapse, but a management buyout in 1981, led by 13 executives, saved the company. They restored quality, rebuilt the dealer network, and then launched the Harley Owners Group, turning Harley-Davidson into the cultural juggernaut it became in the 1990s and 2000s. That turnaround took a decade. It required patience, focus and an almost fanatical commitment to the brand’s core identity.
Whether the current leadership possesses the same conviction is the central uncertainty. The company must decide whether it is willing to become something different in order to remain something at all.
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