TAIPEI, Taiwan (BRAIN)—Joshua Hon’s new folding bike brand Tern launched Saturday in Taipei where the company is headquartered.
The brand, which Hon developed with his mother Florence Shen and a team of former Dahon employees, debuted at a party held at a former paper mill in Taipei City. Guests included 20 international editors from endemic magazines and another 200 of Taiwan’s industry leaders.
Tern’s full product line includes 21, 20-inch, 24-inch and 26-inch bikes under the names Verge, Link, Eclipse, Castro and Joe. Hon has also taken BioLogic Accessories to his new company. Bikes begin shipping in September and should be in retail stores by November.
Tern’s executive team, most of whom have an ownership stake in the company, came primarily from Dahon including Matthew Davis, director of sales and marketing; Marc Liu director of manufacturing; Joakim Uimonen, senior manager of product design; Sean Smith, art director; and Steve Boyd, Dahon North Americ’s former chief operation officer who’s now managing distribution of Tern in the U.S. Many of Tern’s 65 sales, marketing and product development employees also came over from Dahon’s global offices in Taiwan.
Joshua Hon is the majority owner and vice president of Tern and Shen is general manager.
Hon has spent the last two decades at the helm of Dahon, the folding bike brand co-founded by his father, Dr. David Hon. About a year ago, he made the difficult decision to develop a competing brand.
“There are things we wanted to do with product, organizationally with philanthropy, being able to take the brand a lot further, and the issues we had within Dahon weren’t allowing us to do those things,” Hon said in an interview with BRAIN. “Rather that getting mired in negativity, we decided, ‘Hey, let’s take the hard road.’ We have an amazing team in place. We hope by taking the hard road at the beginning, it will be an easier, smoother road at the back end.”
Hon, along with Shen, still owns Dahon Global, but no longer has a hand in operation of the Dahon bike brand. Dr. David Hon continues to manage Dahon China and Dahon North America.
Dahon is moving forward with a new management team in place, and will introduce its new line this summer. For more information on Dahon’s plans, click on the link above.
—Nicole Formosa
nformosa@bicycleretailer.com
Photo: Tern Verge Duo
