Products like bike helmets and safety gear are must-haves for each and every member of your family, as they protect your body from potential injury. Kohl’s also offers other padding to keep you safe from scrapes and other impact injuries.
So it is better to capture that history before it is too far gone. Jay Pridmore and junior author Jim Hurd have done just that in their book, Schwinn Bicycles, a 1996 publication of Motorbooks International, republished in paperback in 2001. If you like Stingrays and Krates (I don’t…don’t get me started!), check out the bicyclehistory.com page abotu them. After the bike-boom of the early 1970’s, Paramount was in a poor state of affairs in regards to competition and advancing technologies. In 1979, Edward R. Schwinn Jr. was made president of the company and promptly closed down all of the Paramount operations until they could be brought up to date.
With the Hollywood stars endorsing Schwinn products combined with
its reputation for quality, their bicycles began flying out of stores. Schwinn increased sales to 400,000 bikes by
the late 1940s and by 1950 had a 25% market share of bicycles sold in the USA. The seeds for how to market Schwinn products were spread during
the 1930s. Frank W. Schwinn was eager to reduce the company’s reliance on large
retailers and had begun investing resources in developing direct relationships
with small bicycle dealers across the nation. The consequence of this shift was
that Schwinn had a pipeline of information about consumer preferences from those
on the front line of bicycle sales. By the end of the 1940s, Schwinn had reduced
its relations with large retailers and focused on its relationships with bike
shops.
The Wright Brothers started ignoring
their bike shop in favor of flying machines. Henry Ford rode a bicycle to a
factory where he manufactured his first motorcar that looked like two bicycles joined
together. He and others like him working on the first cars would sound the
death knell for the 1890s adult bicycle boom. By schwinn tricycle 1990, other United States bicycle companies with reputations for excellence in design such as Trek, Specialized, and Cannondale had cut further into Schwinn’s market. Unable to produce bicycles in the United States at a competitive cost, by the end of 1991 Schwinn was sourcing its bicycles from overseas manufacturers.
Schwinn
eventually decided to produce its high-quality bicycles in the Greenville factory
and low-quality bikes in Asia. This was a reasonable strategy and similar to
one being followed schwinn mountain bike Trek. The Schwinn
family bicycle company was very strong for two generations. The third generation Schwinn manager Frank W.
Schwinn did not have the drive of his father.
Determined to once again reshape the bicycle industry as he had in
the early 1930s, Frank W Schwinn hired one of the USA’s best-known bicycle race
mechanics name Emil Wastyn. With this collaboration in place, he learned that the
manufacturing process had to be radically realigned to produce bicycles for
adults. Under the supervision of Frank and his new lightweight bicycle engineers,
Schwinn began to produce light chrome-moly lugged frames along with finely
machine bicycle components that such as sprockets, hubs, cranks, and headsets. Frank W. Schwinn was not satisfied that he had changed the
children’s bicycle market. After another trip to Europe in 1935, he was delighted to see adults
riding bicycles. He was especially enamored with the sturdy internal 3-speed roadsters
he had seen gliding over the streets of England.
The 1930s was a period in which Frank W. Schwinn established himself as a creative force in both his company and the bicycle industry. The decade started with an emphasis on motorcycles and ended with Schwinn firmly established as the highest quality bicycle maker for both adults and children. The innovations of the 1930s, such as the balloon-tired children’s bikes, front suspension, front drum-style brakes, and the Paramount Racer set the direction for Schwinn to next several decades. The publication in 1895 coincides with the same year Schwinn was founded by Adolph Arnold and Ignaz Schwinn. This publication with the name Famous Schwinn Built-Bicycles very likely was marketing the original bicycles sold by the new bicycle company founded by the two founders. The brochure contains four interesting safety bicycles, including two for racing and two for everyday use.