Every Arai helmet is virtually 100% handmade. Each craftsman signs the helmet shell along the way. And every helmet is hand inspected at least three times during construction. Not every hundredth helmet, or every tenth one — every single helmet.
We are the only helmet company we know of with a single quality standard that is the same for every model we make. Arai comfort, fit, finish, quality and safety are not compromised to fit a cheaper pre-determined retail price, to please shareholders, or to squeeze under the barest minimum of safety standards. Instead, we build ARAI helmets. We build them by hand to our standard, towards the ideal of what "could" happen instead of simply to what's "likely" to happen. As a result of this effort a typical Arai helmet easily meets the world's major motorcycle-helmet safety standards - with little or no modification.
We build Arai helmets to maximize the comfort and protection of you, the rider. Our company was founded by a motorcyclist almost six decades ago, and so we have approached the care of riders with a singular obsession for quality and innovation since the beginning.
Simply said, Arai's primary goal is not to be the world's biggest helmet company, but the world's best. That is more important to us than chasing sales volume.
Ranked Number One in customer satisfaction in all eight J.D. Power And Associates Motorcycle Helmet Satisfaction Studies. An unprecedented achievement, Arai helmets earned this distinction in every J.D. Power Study to date - in voting done by thousands of riders themselves.
Arai's quality reaches the world's highest level of motorsports competition. In 2006/07 alone, Arai is the helmet of choice for both the MotoGP World Motorcycle champion, Nicky Hayden, and the Formula 1 World Auto-racing champion, Fernando Alonso. And it wasn't a fluke: all four U.S. MotoGP riders choose Arai along with more than half the drivers on the F1 grid. Sebastien Bourdais won another Champ Car championship in 2006 in a series that practically ³guaranteed² an Arai championship: all of the top-five championship drivers wear Arai. In NASCAR®, there's Jeff Gordon, Jeff Burton, Mark Martin, Greg Biffle, and Jamie McMurray. On two wheels, please check our racing page on the site here to see how completely Arai dominated professional motorcycle racing in the U.S., starting with Davi Millsaps' AMA Supercross Lites East championship, Kenny Coolbeth's AMA GNC National Dirt Track Championship and Jake Johnson's AMA National Dirt Track Single's crown. All in all, not bad for such a small helmet company, is it? But maybe not so surprising when you know everything that goes into the design and creation of a single Arai helmet. Including yours.
The first helmet company to offer a full 5-Year Limited Warranty - 14 years ago! Only recently have a couple others extended their warranties past one year. (How many cheaper helmets can you go through in the lifespan of a 5-year warranted Arai?)
An Arai doesn't feel good for just an hour or two. It's made to feel good all day - and to keep feeling good for years, long after cheap helmets have become loose and shabby. You can't always see the reasons why, but they're there: lower weight from proprietary aerospace fiberglass, superb scratch-resistant faceshield, lower center of gravity for better balance and less strain, softer single-piece multiple-density liners (whose technology has still not been able to be copied in almost 20 years), ventilation systems that work in the real world, not just in drawings. There are no "minor" parts of an Arai helmet. Even the parts you will never see are subjected to the same attention, simply because we can see them. The result is profound: you feel good. You want to keep riding - and that's why we build our helmets the way we do.
No one can predict the angle, severity, speed, or conditions of a crash. That's why, in our relentless efforts to upgrade and improve the protection of Arai helmets to the best of our ability, we build them to our standard, towards the ideal of what "could" happen instead of simply what's "likely" to happen. As a result of this effort a typical Arai helmet easily meets the world's major motorcycle-helmet safety standards - with little or no modification. Yet, even with this level of attention, Arai liners and interiors are regularly singled out by magazine editors as the ultimate in comfort.
Arai's philosophy blends a conservative sense of tradition, a Zen-like awareness of the natural interrelation of things, and a hunger to know what works, what doesn't, what stays, what goes. And what's next.
