With the Hollywood stars endorsing Schwinn products combined with
its reputation for quality, their bicycles began flying out of stores. Schwinn increased sales to 400,000 bikes by
the late 1940s and by 1950 had a 25% market share of bicycles sold in the USA. The seeds for how to market Schwinn products were spread during
the 1930s. Frank W. Schwinn was eager to reduce the company’s reliance on large
retailers and had begun investing resources in developing direct relationships
with small bicycle dealers across the nation. The consequence of this shift was
that Schwinn had a pipeline of information about consumer preferences from those
on the front line of bicycle sales. By the end of the 1940s, Schwinn had reduced
its relations with large retailers and focused on its relationships with bike
shops.
Only 3 percent of family businesses are still alive and
kicking by the fourth generation (Zellweger, Nason, and Nordvist 2012). Edward
Schwinn, Jr. was a fourth-generation president of a family business. The 1982 film ET (ExtraTerrestrial) illustrates the intensity
of the BMX craze.
The Wright Brothers started ignoring
their bike shop in favor of flying machines. Henry Ford rode a bicycle to a
factory where he manufactured his first motorcar that looked like two bicycles joined
together. He and others like him working on the first cars would sound the
death knell for the 1890s adult bicycle boom. By 1990, other United States bicycle companies with reputations for excellence in design such as Trek, Specialized, and Cannondale had cut further into Schwinn’s market. Unable to produce bicycles in the United States at a competitive cost, by the end of 1991 Schwinn was sourcing its bicycles from overseas manufacturers.
And while guides and charts are helpful as a starting point, there’s nothing more useful than watching your kid actually test out a bike. The Sting-Ray[28] sales boom of the 1960s accelerated in 1970, with United States bicycle sales doubling over a period of two years. We bring a proven, unparalleled education program that includes expert coaching schwinn tricycle techniques and top tier class design. They also manufactured their own rims in the Chicago factory, the “Schwinn Tubular Rim”. These rims, like the Chicago frames, were among the sturdiest ever built. The parts that say “Schwinn” were made by Schwinn in their enormous Chicago factory (which I had the pleasure of touring in the early ’70’s).
Bicycle output in the United States grew to over a million units per year by the turn of the 20th century. Having managed two bicycle factories and worked in a number of bicycle shops, Schwinn’s experience came during one of the biggest evolutionary periods in bicycle technology. He saw first hand the development of the drive train using a chain and equal sized wheels. He saw the “high-wheel” (penny farthing) go the way of the horse and buggy, and he watched as pneumatic tires took the place of solid rubber on steel rims, offering a much softer ride. Schwinn also recognized the opportunity of converting the 60 pound high wheel with wheels from 48 to 60 inches in diameter to a 25 pound “safety bicycle” with wheels of equal size. With historic roots in outdoor cycling, Schwinn®’s focus has always been on authenticity and quality.
With catalogs featuring places like Disneyland and 20th Century Fox,
marketing continued to be a Schwinn strong point. However, management had begun
to ignore the need to retool its factory. Sales were still at all-time schwinn mountain bike highs, but with the
market share declining, Swhinn’s dominance in the bicycle industry was on the
wane. The Varsities and Continentals did prove to be popular among
teenagers who were fairly rough on their bicycles.
Determined to once again reshape the bicycle industry as he had in
the early 1930s, Frank W Schwinn hired one of the USA’s best-known bicycle race
mechanics name Emil Wastyn. With this collaboration in place, he learned that the
manufacturing process had to be radically realigned to produce bicycles for
adults. Under the supervision of Frank and his new lightweight bicycle engineers,
Schwinn began to produce light chrome-moly lugged frames along with finely
machine bicycle components that such as sprockets, hubs, cranks, and headsets. Frank W. Schwinn was not satisfied that he had changed the
children’s bicycle market. After another trip to Europe in 1935, he was delighted to see adults
riding bicycles. He was especially enamored with the sturdy internal 3-speed roadsters
he had seen gliding over the streets of England.
This was not much different
than the earlier autocycle, but they added some fancy styling features that made
it popular among consumers. The Black Phantom was advertised as having all the
popular options, such as a spring fork, chrome fenders, horn button on tank,
built-in fender light, and white wall tires. The model became quite popular
during the 1950s and today they are a collector’s item. Founded in 1974 in a Southern California garage, Mongoose has always been an aggressive brand with products that push the limits of what a rider can do. From the biggest hits on the mountain or in the park to the urban jungle, Mongoose is an authentic brand that produces durable products built for real riders. If I recall, it was what Schwinn called a “cantilever” frame, where the seat stays pass by the seat cluster and continue on in a graceful curve to join the bottom of the head tube.
In exchange for ensuring the presence of the Schwinn name, distributors retained the right to distribute Schwinn bikes to any hardware store, toy store, or bicycle shop that ordered them. W. Schwinn tasked a new team to plan future business strategy, consisting of marketing supervisor Ray Burch, general manager Bill Stoeffhaas, and design supervisor Al Fritz. By the end of the 1960s, the beginnings of an adult bicycle
boom had begun. With the 1950s kids now entering early adulthood and the environmental
movement in full swing, road bikes were starting to become very popular. Schwinn
had been making lightweight bicycles for decades without much sales success. Given
this experience, they should have been well positioned to develop new
lightweight models for adults.
Mountain bikes were originally based on Schwinn balloon-tired cruiser bicycles fitted with derailleur gears and called “Klunkers”. A few participants began designing and building small numbers of mountain bikes with frames made out of modern butted chrome-molybdenum alloy steel. Using the standard electro-forged cantilever frame, and fitted with five-speed derailleur gears and knobby tires, the Klunker 5 was never heavily marketed, and was not even listed in the Schwinn product catalog.