The Paramount continued as a limited production model, built in small numbers in a small apportioned area of the old Chicago assembly factory. The new frame and component technology incorporated in the Paramount largely failed to reach Schwinn’s mass-market bicycle lines. W. Schwinn, grandson Frank Valentine Schwinn took over management of the company.
From the 1920’s until 1938 Arnold, Schwinn & Co. became primarily a producer of heavy-duty juvenile bicycles. The story of these unique bicycles is a meaningful branch of Schwinn’s history. They are worth recalling as a unique Schwinn production strategy and a sidebar in the evolution of the bicycle industry. Founded in 1974 in a Southern California garage, Mongoose has always been an aggressive brand with products that push the limits of what a rider can do.
More and more cyclists, especially younger buyers, began to insist on stronger steel alloys , responsive frame geometry, aluminum components, advanced derailleur shifting, and multiple gears. When they failed to find what they wanted at Schwinn, they went elsewhere. While the Paramount still sold in limited numbers to this market, the model’s customer base began to age, changing from primarily bike racers to older, wealthier riders looking for the ultimate bicycle.
Alternatively, if you are looking for a used Schwinn bike, there are plenty of vintage and used Schwinn bikes that may delight you. Since workers built the company’s first bike in 1895, you can even find antique Schwinn bicycles on eBay. The company considered relocating to a single facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but financing the project would have required outside investors, perhaps even foreign ones. Schwinn’s board of directors rejected the new plant in 1978.
Perhaps Schwinn can rearrange the legal terminology of its other distributional arrangements to avoid “the ancient rule against restraints on alienation” which the Court adopts. Perhaps other manufacturers who use sales as a means of distribution in a franchise or analogous marketing system can do likewise. If they can, the Court has created considerable business for legal draftsmen. If they cannot, vertical integration and the elimination of small independent huffy mountain bike competitors are likely to follow. Meanwhile, the Court has, sua sponte, created a bluntly indiscriminate and destructive weapon which can be used to dismantle a vast variety of distributional systems — competitive and anticompetitive, reasonable and unreasonable. Schwinn fielded a mountain bike racing team in the United States where their team rider Ned Overend won two consecutive NORBA Mountain Biking National Championships for the team in 1986 and 1987.
During a strike atSchwinn’sChicago manufacturing plant,Giantmanaged to fill the void and pump out an additional 80,000 bicycles in a mere 5 months. Matt Fox welds a custom bike at Waterford Precision Cycles in Wisconsin.Richard Schwinn, left, part of the last generation to run the company that bears his name, now runs a small custom bike factory in rural Wisconsin. By 1950, Schwinns accounted for one of every four bikes sold in the United States.
By 1979, even the Paramount had been passed, technologically speaking, by a new generation of American as well as foreign custom bicycle manufacturers. A growing number of US teens and young adults were purchasing imported European sport racing or sport touring bicycles, many fitted with multiple derailleur-shifted gears. Schwinn decided to meet the challenge by developing two lines of sport or road ‘racer’ bicycles. One was already in the catalog — the limited production Paramount series. As always, the Paramount spared no expense; the bicycles were given high-quality lightweight lugged steel frames using double-butted tubes of Reynolds 531 and fitted with quality European components including Campagnolo derailleurs, hubs, and gears.
The Paramount series had limited production numbers, making vintage examples quite rare today. The 1960 Varsity was introduced as an 8-speed bike, but in mid-1961 was upgraded to 10 schwinn bicycles speeds. Other road bikes were introduced by Schwinn in the early and mid 1960s, such as the Superior, Sierra, and Super Continental, but these were only produced for a few years.
The Greenville plant was not a success, as it was remote from both the corporate headquarters as well as the West coast ports where the material components arrived from Taiwan and Japan. Additionally, Asian manufacturers could still produce and assemble high-quality bicycles at a far lower per-unit cost than Schwinn at its plant in Mississippi, which had to import parts, then assemble them using higher-priced United States labor. The Greenville manufacturing facility, which had lost money each year of its operation, finally closed in 1991, laying off 250 workers in the process.