It depends on the money. It all depends on the money.

Brandus Extinctus

Several years ago I was involved in a project to bring an extinct bike company back to life.

In the interest of everyone involved, I’m going to leave out the names of any individual that was involved with the project and I’ll only speak in general terms if a second person was involved.

Back when 29” ers were still new one of the first 29” ers I saw was a cruiser-inspired titanium bike hanging up in a tradeshow booth. I must say when I first saw it, my heart went pitter-pat.

A couple of years later I was writing an article for a magazine with two of the co-founders of the bike company.  The guys were cool, we had some lunch together and we talked about the bikes and our conversation became the basis of the first draft of an article I submitted to my editor.

Shortly thereafter I spoke with my editor and I was asked to do some follow-through questions. I contacted the partners and after asking some follow-through questions it became evident the guys had folded their company and had no plans to go back into production.

As far as I was concerned that was the end of the story.

Or so I thought.

Months after killing the story I got an email from one of the partners asking where the story was and I said I killed the story.  Needless to say they were upset and they said they were depending on the story to drum up support for the company so they could go back into production but they added they wanted to meet and talk things over.

We met.

One meeting became many.

Many meetings became an offer to partner up to relaunch the company.

I was loaned a bike so I could become familiar with the product and I was asked for my feedback in ways I thought it could be improved.

For the record, the bike rode great, it climbed well, and for a rigid big-wheeled bike, it handled chopped up trails well too but the bike industry had gone through some major changes since the bike’s original design.

After working on the project for several of months I became frustrated by my “partner’s” inability to honour the dates we set up for meetings, and their unwillingness to commit to simple things as drafting a mission statement.
At some point, I came to the sad conclusion that the relaunch wasn’t going to happen.

In light of current events, I’m somewhat relieved.

The amount of money needed to do a big launch with bikes we could get in the hands of even a small number of stores would have been enormous.

While our business plan would have included both brick and mortar sales it’s possible we would be sitting on a lot of inventory right now and I’m sure that we would have had to file for bankruptcy at some point.

If an opportunity like this rolled around again would I jump on it?

It depends on the money.

It all depends on the money.