“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
PRODECOTECH
CEO Robert Provost and Daniel Del Aquila are the
business minds behind Prodecotech. James Aversa
(right) handles the tech and production side.
When the company couldn’t find a relable source for wheels, it started building them
from scratch with 12-gauge spokes.