Vanhawks, maker of Valour, the world’s first smart carbon fiber bicycle, has
resurrected itself with a new marketing plan after coming close to
shuttering earlier this year.
The Montreal-born company, which was a sensation on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in 2014 before falling into financial difficulties,
says its plan includes a hybrid sales model with both online and
in-store sales. It’s a change in direction from its online-only sales
model that promised to disrupt the bike industry. The now Toronto-based
Vanhawks also says it has lined up promising partnerships in the bike
industry to help influence sales of its product, which is a $1,500 USD
bike that can be connected to smartphones via bluetooth and track rider
statistics, such as route and speed, in real-time.
“My whole effort for the last few months has been around
partnerships, as opposed to throwing money at solving problems,” Sohaib
Zahid, cofounder and CEO of Vanhawks, said in an interview on Tuesday.
“I have solved it by forming partnerships with people I think will help
and believe will put us back on track.”
He won’t yet name the partners, or the dealers readying to sell the
bikes in the U.S. and Canada, but said Vanhawks is “gearing up for
2017.”
Vanhawks was founded with a mission to shakeup the bike industry,
including the product and how they’re sold. Like many other new consumer
company startups, they launched with the idea of online sales only.
Since then, Zahid says they realized the bike industry may not be in
need of massive disruption after all.
“Along the way we realized, there are a lot of good things the
industry does. You can’t just throw away the whole book they wrote over
the last 60, 70 or 80 years. There’s some great chapters in there that
you can always use,” says Zahid. “It’s going back to basics.”
That includes the in-store experience where you build trust with the person or place selling you a bike.
“It’s a very different industry than buying shampoo or soap from [a
drug store]. It takes trust,” he says. “Some players do this really
well.”
The rise, fall and restart of Vanhawks was discussed by investors from Relentless Pursuit Partners at the VanFUNDING 2016 conference in Vancouver on Tuesday, put on by the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada.
Cofounder Simon Whitfield, the former Olympian, and investor Brenda
Irwin outlined how they were attracted to Vanhawks, which fit their
model of investing in health and fitness technology firms, and some of
the mistakes and lessons learned along the way, in particular around
crowdfunding.
Irwin, a former life science venture capitalist for Business
Development Bank of Canada, says she always enjoyed the “luxury” of
investing in private companies, which aren’t required to publicly
disclose all of their ups and downs.
“What hit me with Vanhawks was [while it’s a private company] you
have public stakeholders that are very active on social media,” Irwin
told the audience at the VanFUNDING 2016 conference. “When the company
hit a wall, you are exposed as if you were a public company. That was
new feeling for me to deal with, let alone the company.”
But Irwin says she and Whitfield recently got their Valour bikes and love the product, and the new company direction.
“We are cautiously optimistic about where Vanhawks is gong to end up,” Irwin says.
She then read a quote to the audience from Zahid, who lives in
Toronto and was not in attendance. It said: “Ups and downs are part of
starting a new business, especially one that challenges the status quo,
but when you have passion to change something … you aren’t going to back
out when you get knocked down and rest assured, you will get knocked
down, over and over again. And isn’t getting back up what winning is all
about.”
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