Custom Built Show. The day I had to fly in a judge from Australia.
In 2018 I founded Custom Built Show, Latin America’s first custom motorcycle festival. It started because I modify my own motorcycles and, working with workshops in Bogotá, I realized those builders weren’t being paid like artists. They were treated like mechanics. To me they were making art on two wheels, and no one was paying them as such.
For the show to be taken seriously I discovered something uncomfortable: I couldn’t have local judges. The shops weren’t going to feel respected if the jury came from here. So I went abroad and got Marlon Slack, writer at Pipeburn, the most important custom motorcycle publication in the world. I don’t think the builders ever fully believed me until the day I told them I was on my way to their workshop with “the gringo” from Australia. That’s the day I earned their respect. And that’s the day the show truly began.
Two years later, in the middle of the pandemic, we ran the festival with five judges, one per continent. The point wasn’t the prizes: it was that the builders had finally started to understand how good they were.
I had to fly in an Australian judge for a guild to believe in itself. That single line captures, better than any other, LATAM’s problem with its own worth.