Make sure you use your machine properly and maintain it regularly. The best thing for you to do is to go directly to the manufacturer’s website. A tool is set up to find a bike as easily as possible, in a store near you or, if the service is available, directly in your mailbox (if there is enough kent bike space of course). Overall, the prices correspond to the very low end of the market. Following Walmart’s commitment to revalue American production, in 2014 Kent Bicycles decided to pivot part of its production to South Carolina. “The bicycle business is high volume with a small profit margin.
Kent’s history spans a century in the bicycle industry, including over fifty-seven years since the 1958 founding of Kent on Kent Street in Parsippany, N.J. We survived because my father was bookkeeper and shipping clerk,” Kamlin says. Kamler, for example, had the kind of government assist getting started that suppliers in other states envy. “I had expressed to the people in the South Carolina Commerce Department that we couldn’t find a building with natural gas,” he recalls.
“The prices there were just so low it made no economic sense to continue, so in 1991 we stopped production, sold off the equipment, shut the doors,” Kamler recalls. “We were never, ever going to manufacture again in the U.S. That was 23 years ago, our very final decision.”And then kent bike along came… Walmart. What Kamler is doing in bicycle manufacturing exactly parallels what transplant automotive producers engineered in the 70s and 80s. Kent Bicycles made headlines with its plans to produce 500,000 bikes annually in its new South Carolina factory in Manning.
“When I go into a Walmart store, I’ll see many many bicycles; they’ll have 100 different models. I’ll see maybe 25 at Target. Walmart loves bicycles—to them it’s apple pie and the Fourth of July.” “When I joined the business in 1972, there were eight American bicycle manufacturers and about 40 bicycle importers. All eight American companies that were manufacturing either went bankrupt or just gave up and closed,” Kamler recalls. kent bikes “Of the forty importers at that time, only Kent and Raleigh still remain, and both of those companies are financially sound.” However, we also have noticed that the build quality of these bikes is not as high as more expensive models, and they may require more frequent maintenance and repairs. Additionally, some of our test riders found the seat and pedals on Kent BMX bikes to be uncomfortable or poorly designed.
Kamler knew they needed to be reasonably close to a major port, because initially, all parts had to be imported, but Kamler also wanted to be able to export. Kamler recalls that he never intended to go into the family bicycle business with his Dad, as it promised conflict. “In college I majored in marketing and advertising,” he said. “And I really didn’t have the best relationship with my father—it was strained, so I knew it was going to be a struggle. I wanted to do market research, but Dad begged me to try it for two years. Early in my first week, Dad asked me write a business letter.
‘Didn’t they teach you how to write a business letter at American University? Kamler has come to realize that one of his challenges is to invent a new process, starting with the assembly of imported parts, and then moving into areas where U.S. manufacturers have lost or forgotten the recipe, as with aluminum rim assembly. Localizing a supplier network that will guarantee the manufacturing and delivery performance that Kent requires will be an ongoing challenge. But as many candidates for re-shoring discover, you can’t go home again, at least not to the exact point and time when everything stopped. The machines are gone—tooling moved offshore along with manufacturing intelligence.