Editor's note: For a feature in Bicycle Retailer & Industry News, Retail Editor Ray Keener spoke with 14 leaders on the supplier side of the industry. Ray spoke with leaders of major bike brands, component suppliers, e-bike startups, accessory makers and more. We will be running sections of that article online this month.
BOULDER, Colo. (BRAIN) — It’s been a hectic and unprecedented several months for our industry and many others. Fortunately for our companies and retailers, hectic has meant managing demand rather than fighting for survival.
Now that the season is waning, inventories are catching up (in some cases) and suppliers are catching their collective breaths, we reached out to a cross-section of suppliers and service providers to get their take on the future.
Adele Nasr, Chief Marketing Officer, Aventon Bikes
Our Aventon brand was founded on fixies. In the past couple years we’ve been successfully transitioning to e-bikes. We’re not trying to be the cheapest but the best value in the range of $1,000-$2,000 retail price points. The future of e-bikes is like cell phones, rapidly evolving and we’re just getting started.
We’re bullish on 2021. Our retailers are working hard to hang on to new customers and turn them into active cyclists after the pandemic. While many manufacturers are having a hard time keeping up, we have our own factory so we’re happy to have quite a lot of bikes in stock. Getting parts, motors and batteries is the hard part. Our CEO is visiting our parts supplier factories in China, with the goal of securing 100% of the orders.
We have independent ownership and we’re able to fund growth of new models and expand product offerings into next spring and summer. We’re pretty married to our China factory location, with a recent investment in a new building. We’re not changing geographic locations, and we are ramping up for additional product lines.
We have three to five models scheduled to launch in the next 12 to 18 months. We’re not doing model years. Shops are correctly concerned about SKU count, so there’s no reason to change when we can get two or three seasons out of a new model. The e-bike consumer is so different. They just want a comfortable, fun ride.
