The turn of the century and the start of the automotive era saw a wave of consolidations in the bicycle business, out of which Schwinn emerged weakened – but even more ambitious. Various takeover made Schwinn one on the big players, and retailing through mass merchants allowed the Chicago-based company to achieve big sales. In 1928, the in-house brand for motorcycles that had been acquired in 1912 and 1917, Excelsior-Henderson, even ranked 3rd in the national motorcycle industry.
But in terms of U.S. employment, “it’s really a shadow of what it used to be.” From California, the bikes fan out to mass merchants such as Wal-Mart. Once there, cashiers making less than $10 an hour ring up the latest Sting Ray at prices much cheaper than the original. Pacific sells more than a quarter of all bikes purchased in the United States, with just about 350 U.S. employees. The Schwinn Bicycle Co. went bankrupt in 1993 and sold off the brand. But at its peak two decades earlier, the Schwinn family oversaw a labor force of 2,000, the majority of whom never made it past high school.
Though weighing slightly less, the mid-priced Schwinn Superior or Sports Tourer was almost indistinguishable from Schwinn’s other heavy, mass-produced models, such as the Varsity and Continental. While competitive in the 1960s, by 1972 these bicycles were much heavier and less huffy mountain bike responsive in comparison to the new sport and racing bicycles arriving from England, France, Italy, and increasingly, Japan. The company also joined with other United States bicycle manufacturers in a campaign to raise import tariffs across the board on all imported bicycles.
Fillet-brazed frames are also more costly to produce than lugged frames because they are made by hand and require hand finishing. Many other types of bicycle frames, including lugged, can be made on automated machines. In 2004, Pacific Cycle was in turn acquired by Dorel Industries. Once America’s preeminent bicycle manufacturer, the Schwinn brand, as with many other bicycle manufacturers, affixed itself to fabrication in China and Taiwan, fueling most of its corporate parent’s growth. In 2010, Dorel launched a major advertising campaign to revive and contemporize the Schwinn brand by associating it with consumer childhood memories of the company, including a reintroduction of the Schwinn Sting-Ray.
Schwinn’s new competitors such as Specialized and Fisher MountainBikes were soon selling hundreds of thousands of mountain bikes at competitive prices to eager customers, setting sales records in a market niche that soon grew to enormous proportions. By the mid-1970s, competition from lightweight and feature-rich imported bikes was making strong inroads in the budget-priced and beginners’ market. While Schwinn’s popular lines were far more durable than the budget bikes, mongoose bmx bike they were also far heavier and more expensive, and parents were realizing that most of the budget bikes would outlast most kids’ interest in bicycling. Inspired, he designed a mass-production bike for the youth market known as Project J-38. The result, a wheelie bike, was introduced to the public as the Schwinn Sting-Ray in June 1963. The boom in bicycle sales was short-lived, saturating the market years before motor vehicles were common on American streets.
Customers could replace components as they wore out, but Schwinn’s frames had to live up to the their well-advertised lifetime warranty. Fillet-brazed bicycle frames are strong and have a neat and clean appearance, but they are uncommon because of the additional craftsmanship required. Lugged bicycle frames, for example, are now manufactured by automated machines. Custom framebuilders still provide fillet-brazed construction, and tandem framesets were often fillet-brazed when lugs to fit their frame angles were not available. Schwinn’s fillet-brazed CrMo models were beautiful and sweet handling, but in the 1970’s bicycle-boom they lost ground to more popular lugged-frame construction, and never recovered.
The company took advantage of the continued demand for mountain bikes, redesigning its product line with Schwinn-designed chrome-molybdenum alloy steel frames. Supplied by manufacturers in Asia, the new arrangement enabled Schwinn to reduce costs and stay competitive with Asian bicycle companies. In Taiwan, Schwinn was able to conclude a new production agreement with Giant Bicycles, transferring Schwinn’s frame design and manufacturing expertise to Giant in the process.