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Vanilla Bicycles Follow-up
By spokesman | March 7, 2010
Last week, at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Richmond, I had the opportunity to speak with Sacha White of Vanilla Bicycles. I had written about Vanilla Bicycles last April after reading an article in Forbes magazine about the company.
I asked Sacha about the Forbes article and the response to it. He was happy with the article. In particular, he was pleased with how the article portrayed his business. It used a different definition of success than the typical measures (revenues, profit, growth) used in most Forbes articles. Not that Vanilla isn’t successful, but Forbes usually focuses on much larger businesses. The article recognized that Vanilla is a business and not just an artistic endeavour, but growth at all costs or growth by sacrificing quality is not an option. Sacha wants to be successful building beautiful bikes for a limited number of customers. And on the subject of beautiful bicycles, as I looked at the bicycles that Sacha had at the show, I commented that some of the commuter bikes were my favorites. They had classic styling but modern features. I live about 1 mile from both a train station and a new Whole Foods so I am in the market for a commuter/errand bicycle. One of those commuters would be the perfect for me except they are far to nice to leave locked up. I think that I am going to stick with a Craigslist beater bike.
Here is a link to a video of Sacha discussing a bicycle that he built for his daughter. It won the Bicycle Of The Day Award on the last day of the Handmade Bicycle Show in Richmond.
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Topics: Bicycles |
May 13th, 2010 at 2:51 am
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