Electric Bike Action - October 2014

“The pushback from the bike industry was tremendous. When we went to bike dealers, they said, ‘We already tried that; it doesn’t work, get out.’ It had to be one of two reasons: they didn’t believe in the bikes, or they had dealt with the bikes and they were too much of a nightmare because of all the junk coming in from China. We went to Interbike in 2008 just to have a look, and it felt like the word ‘e-bike’ was a dirty word. We returned the following year with three Chinese-made e-bikes and we were like outcasts in a little booth. Everyone was knocking us, and there wasn’t anyone that believed in us. By then we understood that most hardcore bike riders wouldn’t buy our bikes. It had to be somebody else. Now we see riders going into a bike shop to buy an electric bike, but four years ago we didn’t see that.”

GOING OUTSIDE
THE CIRCLE

Ongoing quality issues with the bikes they imported convinced the pair that they needed to assemble the bikes in the U.S. to get the quality they deemed necessary to grow the business. With no personal vision tied up in the design of the bikes, Robert and Daniel wanted feedback on what types of e-bikes to build, so they built some prototypes and took their show on the road. “We wanted a big audience, and there was no bike event that will give you a million people at one time. We found those million people at the L.A. Auto Show. We spent long hours over 11 days surveying people about our designs. We were still the outcasts, since everything there was about cars. We were the ;rst electric bikes to display at the show, and we got so much good feedback. Now there are lots of e-bike brands there. We started to hit other shows—boat shows, software shows, computer shows or any sort of show. At one home show, a radio station was looking for the most innovative booth, and they chose ours.

Everywhere we went people said they had not seen e-bikes before, and they thought they were cool, and many said they would buy one. So we asked, ‘Okay, if you would buy it, what are you looking for?’ Before we built the bikes, we spent nearly two years doing research. We didn’t want to build what we wanted. We wanted to build what the public wanted. Everything you see on our bikes, like the folding frame, the throttle, being assembled in the U.S. and even the pricing, was based on that feedback. Our Mariner model is a direct result of the boat shows. The portability