No Sissy Bars For This Designer

With his long hair and lifelong obsession with motorcycles, Richard Seymour could be mistaken for a member of the Hell's Angels. Indeed, when the managing director of one of Germany's oldest motorcycle makers first laid eyes on the hefty 41-year-old, who was waiting outside his office, he slammed the door shut. "I thought he was a thug," explains the executive, Petr-Karel Korous. But Seymour, a partner in the top British design firm of Seymour Powell, doesn't mind his outlaw image. In fact, he seems to relish it. "I'm sort of the Antichrist of design," he jokes.

Still, Seymour's firm may turn out to be the German motorcycle company's savior. With the collapse of its Soviet-bloc markets, the former East German manufacturer, Motorrad-und Zweiradwerk (MuZ), took the unusual step of asking a design house to help relaunch the company. The strategy: To use a jazzy new motorcycle design as collateral for new financing while adding new panache to a stodgy communist image. In just 51/2 months, the team produced the Skorpion, a hot new bike that has captured the industry's imagination.