ELECTRA BIKES

Electra Bikes is a Carlsbad, California-based bicycle brand/company, founded in 1993 by Benno Baenziger and Jeano Erforth. The company offers a wide range of modern Electra bicycles and helped bring the cruiser bike back into more popular use.At the time, there were very few cruisers, the classic “fun” bike, on the market. “Back in 1993, there were no cruisers available,” Erforth told the Carlsbad Local News, “You could buy a $99 Huffy at Wal-Mart, or you could try to find an old one and restore it, which is very expensive,” Baenziger decided there was a market niche for a stylish, affordable cruiser bicycle for twentysomethings and began working on designs that combined old school looks with contemporary technology. About this time, Baenziger met Erforth, a fellow German transplant who was selling pieces of the Berlin Wall. Erforth said he could sell the kind of bikes Baenziger was designing, so the two pooled $30,000 in personal savings and founded Electra Bicycles. The two remain the firm’s sole shareholders. The new Electra cruisers were manufactured by a Taiwanese contractor and the two partners began trying to sell them to bike shops. At first, "Dealers laughed at us," says Baenziger. "But people realized they didn't need a mountain bike to go to the grocery store." However, when bike shops tried stocking the Electra Cruiser Bikes, they began to sell, and word-of-mouth convinced more dealers to sign on. In fact, the fledging company’s cruiser sales were so strong that larger firms were spurred to start offering their own cruiser models. Today, Electra Townie are available in bike shops throughout Europe, the USA, and Japan. Electra Bicycles advertising in the early days focused on the company’s combination of classic looks with more modern features, such as aluminum frames and multiple speeds, with the tagline “Modern cruisers, with modern components, for modern people.Visit Electrabike.com