Bicycle Industry and Market
ID: 727283
Wisconsin, USA
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Expert started in the bicycle business as an employee of a bike shop in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1957. He was hired as a writer by Arnold, Schwinn & Company in 1966 to develop a sales and management school for Schwinn franchised dealers. He worked for Schwinn for 24-years as a writer, sales promotion manager, director of product safety & governmental affairs, vice president of product safety & governmental affairs, vice president marketing, vice president bicycle marketing, vice president and assistant to the president and vice president purchasing.
He left Schwinn in April 1990 and moved to Lyndon Station, Wisconsin where his family had owned and operated a campground since 1980. In 1991 he estabished Expert & Associates, a consultancy focusing on the bicycle industry and market. He served as president of Giant Bicycle, Inc. in the mid-1990's, followed by his appointment as president of Browning Component Company. He returned to full time consulting in the late 1990's and focused on the specialty bicycle retail, or bike shop channel of trade. From 1997 through 2004 his consulting business manages the National Bicycle Dealers Association (NBDA) Retail Data Capture Program, a retail tracking program covering retail sales of new bicycles by bike shops.
Expert & Associates is affiliated with Z-Cam International, a product design trading company located in Taichung, Taiwan, the center of the Taiwanese bicycle industry and gateway to the Chinese bicycle industry.
In 2004 he co-founed The Gluskin Expert Group, a market and marketing research consultancy focusing on the outdoor and bicycle industries.
He contracted with the Scotts Sports Group (SSG), the company that purchased Schwinn Bicycle Compay out of bankruptcy in 1994 to set-up new sourcing for the Schwinn Airdyne and other fitness equipment with Merida Industrial Co. in Taiwan. SSG and Schwinn lost Giant Manufacturing Co. as their supplier of Airdyne and other fitness equipment as the result of the bankruptcy and needed a new source set-up in six-months to meet demand for the coming fitness season. Merida was the number two bicycle manufacturer in Taiwan behind Giant, but had never manufactured fitness equipment before. He formed a team of former Schwinn engineers and SSG / Schwinn certified our first test production run of Airdyne' at Merida six months and one day after the project started - earning the maximum performance bonus, less one day. He contracted with Graber Products (now Saris Cycling Group) to perform due-diligence relative the purucase of PowerTap, and hub based watts measurment system for road racers and triathletes. After the successful purchase of PowerTap he became the contract product manager for the eventual successful re-launch of PowerTap for the 2001 and early 2002 season. PowerTap in now a major contributor to the Saris Cycling Group business.He contracted with a client who had designed and built one working prototype of a new bicycle product, but needed three-fully functional and "like-production" prototypes for a major trade show and testing with-in a three month time frame. He researched and found two prototype houses that helped work throught the final designs and delivered the fully functional "like-production" prototypes on time for the client.He contracted with Yamaha to act as a marketing and market research resource for Yamaha's California R&D facility in the developement of pedal-assist (PAS) electric bicycles. This assignment included working for Yamaha's U.S. general counsel in applying for an advisory opinion from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that the Yamaha PAS equipped electric bicycles should not be regulated under the NHTSA, but instead under the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) as a "bicycle." The NHTSA agreed, and PAS equipped electric bicycles are regulated under the CPSC bicycle safety regulation.