F. Goodrich bicycles, sold in tire stores, Schwinn eliminated the practice of producing private label bicycles in 1950, insisting that the Schwinn brand and guarantee appear on all products. 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. The company’s next answer to requests for a Schwinn mountain bike was the King Sting and the Sidewinder, inexpensive BMX-derived bicycles fabricated from existing electro-forged frame designs, and using off-the-shelf BMX parts. This proved to be a major miscalculation, as several new United States startup companies began producing high-quality frames designed from the ground up, and sourced from new, modern plants in Japan and Taiwan using new mass-production technologies such as TIG welding.
Still, the company ranks easily in the top
10 and possibly in the top five among bike builders in the United States. Roughly 100 U.S.-based builders, companies like Waterford, Serotta, Lynskey
Performance Designs and Independent Fabrication, manufacture about 12,000 bikes
a year domestically. That represents a miniscule fraction of the estimated 13
million adult bicycles sold in the country each year. The limited run of Paramounts and the
foundation of the Waterford and Gunnar models connect the company to its
lineage as an offspring of the once-dominant Schwinn line. At one time, Schwinn
employed 2,000 people in its Chicago factory.
Schwinn’s new company coincided with a sudden bicycle craze in America. Chicago became the center of the American bicycle industry, with thirty factories turning out thousands of bikes every day. Bicycle output in the United schwinn electric bike States grew to over a million units per year by the turn of the 20th century. “Shinola only wants to bring to market
high-quality products so we feel really lucky to be able to make the frames
here,” Yaeger says.
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The one commonality is
an exacting attention to detail and precision measured by the thousandth of an
inch. A former Division 1 runner, Dan grew up riding fixies and mountain bikes and now reviews everything from performance running shoes to road and cross bikes, to the latest tech for runners and cyclists at Bicycling and Runner’s World. While the limited Paramount production
represents a reflection of the Schwinn and Waterford history, the launch of
Shinola represents a significant opportunity for its future. Financed by Tom
Kartsosis, the founder of Fossil watches, the company opened in Detroit two years
ago, making high-end watches and bicycles and focusing on the American-made
appeal. It opened a trendy shop in Detroit and a fancy boutique in New York
City to sell its watches and the luxury bikes, the lugged, silver brazed
Runwell and the tig welded Bixby, at $2,950 and $1,950 respectively.