Thank you for your articulate and analytical posts. I have a small business, ‘The Bike Orphanage’ selling used bikes in Australia. We donate $500 each month to a registered charity (The Starlight Foundation) helping children going through cancer treatments. In Australia the donation is tax deductible but moreover, a lot of our customers give us their old bikes for our charity support. We also receive a lot of community support for doing this. It’s on our signage and social media posts. This practice may be useful for other small businesses although I understand each geographical location has different economic conditions. Goodwill can come in many forms.
That's a great practice! For us, we have a local charity we've worked with focused on assisting homeless children in the area, the scope of their charity is large but it does include rehabbing bikes as transportation
Nice video - as always! Interesting about the kids-bikes. But nowdays there are also very low ends Trek, Giants and Specialized - hardly to differ from those cheap bikes you mention. Do you take every bike only by name - or do you say yes/no also by how they look like?
Brand name is our first filter, then we look at age and condition. Each bike we take in will go through and initial mechanical inspection which takes about 3 minutes and then we offer a trade in value. We probably end up taking in roughly three out of every 10 bikes that are offered to us, there's plenty of them out there! Just less so with kids bikes
30-45 min assembly is crazy fast. Especially low end bikes are such garbage from factory. Bent rims, rotors and derailleur hangers, tyres not seated, front derailleurs misaligned, no grease in headsets etc.
The cheaper the new bike, the greater the skill required to get it to function. Some will never function properly, or stay adjusted. Low quality chains are impossible to overcome, and must be changed. These low grade bikes unfortunately are too often demanded by customers with unrealistic expectations.
Have sold hundred of used bikes. Anything exotic is a nightmare, Had a lot of success with durable bikes, they don't have to shift prefect or have a buttery fork, they just have to work, be presented clean and be reliable. So many people just want to pump up the tires and go for a spin randomly with the Kids.... that's their choice, not ours.
Another reason you don't want to be selling rehabbed kids bikes from department stores is because they are often unsafe also.....i know YOU know this but viewers might not ......when the customer states that their kid will outgrow the bike so they dont want to buy anything to nice... you have to stress the safety issue with them and point out to their nice beautiful car and explain to them that you don't want your kid in some old unsafe turd with brakes that don't even work or brake levers that break when they try to really squeeze them to keep them from getting hit by a car
Wish I lived near you…….thank you for expert advice .
Very comprehensive and well worded, thanks again for the uploads
Thanks for watching!
Thank you for your articulate and analytical posts. I have a small business, ‘The Bike Orphanage’ selling used bikes in Australia. We donate $500 each month to a registered charity (The Starlight Foundation) helping children going through cancer treatments. In Australia the donation is tax deductible but moreover, a lot of our customers give us their old bikes for our charity support. We also receive a lot of community support for doing this. It’s on our signage and social media posts. This practice may be useful for other small businesses although I understand each geographical location has different economic conditions. Goodwill can come in many forms.
That's a great practice! For us, we have a local charity we've worked with focused on assisting homeless children in the area, the scope of their charity is large but it does include rehabbing bikes as transportation
👍video. Can you tell us your thinking ref your membership scheme, and the economics of offering this
This will be coming out in a video in the next few weeks!
Nice video - as always! Interesting about the kids-bikes. But nowdays there are also very low ends Trek, Giants and Specialized - hardly to differ from those cheap bikes you mention. Do you take every bike only by name - or do you say yes/no also by how they look like?
Brand name is our first filter, then we look at age and condition. Each bike we take in will go through and initial mechanical inspection which takes about 3 minutes and then we offer a trade in value. We probably end up taking in roughly three out of every 10 bikes that are offered to us, there's plenty of them out there! Just less so with kids bikes
30-45 min assembly is crazy fast. Especially low end bikes are such garbage from factory. Bent rims, rotors and derailleur hangers, tyres not seated, front derailleurs misaligned, no grease in headsets etc.
The cheaper the new bike, the greater the skill required to get it to function. Some will never function properly, or stay adjusted. Low quality chains are impossible to overcome, and must be changed. These low grade bikes unfortunately are too often demanded by customers with unrealistic expectations.
Have sold hundred of used bikes. Anything exotic is a nightmare, Had a lot of success with durable bikes, they don't have to shift prefect or have a buttery fork, they just have to work, be presented clean and be reliable. So many people just want to pump up the tires and go for a spin randomly with the Kids.... that's their choice, not ours.
Another reason you don't want to be selling rehabbed kids bikes from department stores is because they are often unsafe also.....i know YOU know this but viewers might not ......when the customer states that their kid will outgrow the bike so they dont want to buy anything to nice... you have to stress the safety issue with them and point out to their nice beautiful car and explain to them that you don't want your kid in some old unsafe turd with brakes that don't even work or brake levers that break when they try to really squeeze them to keep them from getting hit by a car
For the love of Archimedes fix your damn clock behind you … that seconds hand ugh OCD is working overtime
🤣 one of these days