Their timing couldn’t have been better, given the spike in U.S. “We went for the throat of the industry when we first came out at our price point.” “The team at Lectric accomplished this through a novel approach to design, marketing, distribution and customer support, which has earned it thousands of highly satisfied, loyal customers.” “Lectric has become one of the largest and fastest-growing e-bike brands in the United States in just two short years,” Bertram Capital partner Ryan Craig said at the time of the VC’s funding announcement. Revenue will hit $85 million this year and Conlow says that figure is likely to double in 2022. Earlier this year he company surpassed cumulative sales of 100,000 e-bikes in October 2021. Lectric went from selling just one or two bikes a month in 2019 to $2 million worth of XPs a month a year later with the modified design.
At that point, he knew I’d already screwed up his retirement so he gave us the extra $10,000.”Īnd that’s when everything changed. “I asked my dad, ‘how would you like to lose $10,000 more. But that meant borrowing more from Levi’s father. They gathered as much feedback as they could to learn what it was people didn’t like about the first bike, its styling, features and materials, and quickly followed up with a modified design, Lectric’s XP bike. Things weren’t going well but the cofounders raced to figure out where they’d gone wrong. “We lost his money and potentially screwed up his retirement.” “It was an absolute disaster,” Levi Conlow recalls. Initially, it looked like a bad bet when the first batch of bikes the company produced came out and didn’t sell. “We knew we could do it for a much more affordable price, especially by going direct to the consumer but also by keeping the (cost of goods) and margin as low as we could possibly go.”īrent Conlow, Levi’s father and co-owner of Letric eBikes, fronted the pair $40,000 of seed funding to get things off the ground, dipping into his retirement savings. “We came into this space because my old man wanted an electric bike and at that time the average price of an electric bike was around $3,000,” Conlow tells Forbes. CEO Conlow, who previously sold electric skateboards while in college, was in charge of drumming up sales and Chief Innovation Officer Deziel would focus on designing and engineering Lectric’s first model. The two 25-year-olds, originally from Lakeville, Minnesota, started their company in Phoenix intending to sell durable, high-quality e-bikes directly to consumers for less than $1000-a much lower price point than competing models from industry heavyweights such as Trek, Giant and Yamaha and a host of fellow startups.