Ride Time, Ride Place
Southern California quietly has turned into a hub of bicycle manufacturing, and yet the area has never hosted a major consumer bike show.
Promoter Peter Heumann plans to highlight that first fact and change the second this weekend with the Southern California Bicycle Expo, which runs Friday through Sunday at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
“This is the biggest market in the country for bicycling,” both in the quantity of bike-buying consumers and the number of companies making bicycles, components and accessories, Heumann said. “The industry realizes that here’s another way to promote itself and get its product in front of the public eye.”
The expo will allow consumers to see current product lines from large and small bicycle makers and accessory manufacturers, talk to dealers and test ride all kinds of bikes. Orders can be placed at the show, but bikes must be retrieved from dealers’ shops, Heumann said.
“I’m not trying to start a swap meet here. I’m trying to support the industry of cycling,” said Heumann, a former mortgage banker.
The show also will feature competitions for best bicycling police officer, best corporate team and even a children’s “bike rodeo.”
Consumer shows are common for other sports and products. The car, ski and golf industries are among those that have gotten good mileage from such events, the best of which are part showcase for the latest equipment, part sales event and part entertainment extravaganza.
But the bicycle industry, which is composed of a few big names and a lot of smaller companies, has resisted such public displays of commerce, preferring trade exhibitions like the gigantic Interbike show, scheduled for Anaheim this September.
Stagnating sales of quality bicycles has pushed the industry to experiment with consumer shows, said Geoff Drake, editor of Bicycling magazine, one of the sponsors of the Southern California Bicycling Expo.
About 12.5 million bicycles were sold last year, of which about 3.2 million were specialty bikes sold by independent dealers, according to the Bicycle Product Suppliers Assn., a Philadelphia-based trade group. That’s down about 5% from the year before.
The bike show “is an effort to get the technology to the people,” Drake said. “The idea is to whet the appetite of consumers and get them into the stores.”
Encouraged by the success of other promoters’ consumer bike shows in Chicago, Toronto, Seattle and Portland, Ore., Heumann set out to create one in Southern California--and promptly crashed into a brick wall of industry resistance.
Heumann admits his lack of a track record was part of the problem, compounded by the small size and limited resources of many manufacturers, who simply didn’t want to commit to another show.
But support began building in January, and Heumann, who has invested more than $200,000 in the show, now has several major manufacturers signed up as well as sponsorships from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Bicycling magazine, Mountain Bike magazine and Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM.
The Southern California Bicycle Expo is much smaller than the Interbike Anaheim International Bicycle Expo. At last year’s Interbike show at the Anaheim Convention Center, some 900 exhibitors--generally manufacturers and distributors--did millions of dollars worth of business with about 21,000 attendees, generally bicycle dealers, from 50 countries.
The Southern California Bicycle Expo features a little more than 100 exhibitors--primarily manufacturers and bike shops--and Heumann has been advised to expect no more than 10,000 attendees, although he’s hoping to top 20,000.
The expo will feature some well-known out-of-towners, including Schwinn Cycling of Boulder, Colo.; Huffy of Miamisburg, Ohio; Cannondale of Georgetown, Conn.; and Raleigh USA Bicycle Co. of Kent, Wash.
Although many of the biggest names in cycling are based elsewhere, Southern California is home to dozens of mid-size and smaller makers of specialty bicycles and their components and accessories. It’s almost a cottage industry--if you could fit a machine shop in a cottage.
“I would guess about three-fourths of the bicycle manufacturers are in the Southern California area,” Drake said.
One of the largest and best-known is GT Bicycles of Santa Ana, which makes more than 100 models of racing and mountain bikes and is one of the few publicly traded bicycle manufacturers. Also based locally is Shimano American Corp. of Irvine, the U.S. arm of a Japanese company that dominates the market for bicycle drive trains and other parts.
There’s Diamondback Bicycles in Camarillo, a mid-size maker of mountain bikes and other bicycles, and a cluster of smaller manufacturers, including Parkpre Bicycles of Moorpark, KHS Bicycles of Carson, Giant Bicycles of Rancho Dominguez and Ventana Mountain Bikes of Rancho Cordova.
Then there are the super-specialized producers of tandems (Santana Cycles of La Verne), recumbents (S&B; Recumbents of Compton), three-wheelers (Tricruiser All Terrain Trikes of Signal Hill) and scooters (California Chariot of Del Mar and Rollerbyke of Long Beach). Flourishing alongside the manufacturers are makers of such products as frames, forks, seats, handlebars, pedals, lights, helmets, clothing, eye wear, water bottles and even tire patches.
Southern California is “definitely a hotbed of design, development and distribution . . . all of [the companies] pitching in to support the local economy,” said Peter Sweeney, vice president of sales and marketing for KHS Bicycles. “You’ve got a year-round season to test and try bikes here.”
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Pedal Pushers
About 75% of specialty bike manufacturers are believed to be based in Southern California. Total U.S. bike sales have been flat for the last few years, but bike use is at an all-time high, with about 100 million U.S. residents owning bikes.
TOTAL U.S. BIKE SALES*
(Please see newspaper for full chart information)
1996: 12.5 (Millions of units)
* Includes bicycle wheel sizes 20-inch and over. Statistics for 1996 is an estimate.
MARKET SHARE
* California is home to about 1,000 of the nation’s 6,800 specialty bike dealers.
* Mass-merchandisers sell about 75% of bicycles nationwide.
* Mountain bikes account for 63% of the specialty bike market, children’s bikes 20% and hybrids 10%. Traditional road bikes are only 1% of the market.
* Imports constitute about 44% of the total U.S. bike market. Of that, 53% are from Taiwan and 43% are from China.
Sources: Bicycle Institute of America, Bicycle Manufacturers Assn., Bicycle Product Suppliers Assn.; Bike Shop List; Bicycle Dealers Assn.
Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM / Los Angeles Times
