We have an account with Hawley. Our minimum order is $50, and we only buy things necessary for operating a repair shop (no retail items, nothing for people to take away unless it's installed on the bike as part of a repair; generally tools and consumables costing less than $5 apiece only). They required from us up front that we have liability insurance and a store front, and maybe a few other things that I can't recall.

We talked about buying benefits for volunteers, and we decided it create too much confusing administrative work, and volunteers have plenty of access to nice donations and other benefits anyway. And we like to send folks to the for profit shops for parts when we don't have them because that helps us maintain good relationships with the shops. Plus, our mission is about affordable repair by way tool sharing, not by way of bulk parts purchasing.

This fiscal year to date, we've spent a little more than $5000 on shop supplies, mostly on Hawley orders, and the rest split between hardware stores and emergency trips to for profit bike shops. We surpassed our supplies fundraising goals with some grant money, so we splurged a little on some tap and die sets, which have pretty much paid for themselves in salvaged bottom bracket shells and fork threads.

Hope this helps!
Rachael
Sopo Bikes//ATL

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:47 PM, Rigel Christian <rigelc@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I had an interesting discussion with someone who worked at a smaller
distributor today. I had called in order to try and cultivate a
business relationship for our local co-op, which is in desperate need
of tools and consumable parts like bearings and cables. He mentioned
that a lot more co-ops were inquiring about accounts.

He also told me the reasons why co-op/DIY shops were problematic from
his end, and it's a reasonable criticism from that perspective.
Individually, we simply dont do the volume of business necessary to be
attractive to a business interest. The time necessary to administer
and verify an account that does maybe a couple hundred dollars worth
of business a month for the higher traffic shops kind of burns your
profit margins, which are not large at that level. distributors count
on reliable, volume business to stay afloat, and take a smaller cut of
profit on the assumption that that's the type of business theyll be
doing.

I've know that some of the longer running co-ops and collectives have
relationships with distributors, but clearly many of the newer ones do
not.

I'm curious about a couple of things.

1) Does your collective have a relationship with a parts distributor?
2) Regardless of the answer to #1, roughly how much does your shop
spend on tools/consumables/things-that-one-would-get-from-a-distributor?

It seems to me that in the first few years of a
co-op/nonprofit/collective situation, lots or most of these
organizations leverage either existing ties to, or the goodwill of
LBSes.

My suspicion is that in some edge cases, where the bike or DIY culture
isnt all that strong, this can be a fairly significant issue for a
fledgling operation, in terms of both finances and social capital.

The idea that i'm trying to push here is that of a sort of buyers
club. Disregarding for the moment the perfectly valid criticisms of
the legal structure of 501(c)3s, if there was a nonprofit that could
act as a go-between for a parts distributor and a number of regional
shops, that would serve the needs of both the for-profit distributors
AND the co-op shops. distributors wouldnt have to deal with as much
volatility from taking on co-ops as charity cases, and co-ops banding
together could drive the price of a lot of the most necessary
consumables and parts down even further than their current distributor
relationships can offer. in the ideal case, of course.

I would appreciate any input people have. I dont know if this has been
suggested before (I suspect it has), but i didnt see anything in my
archive of the last year or so. If I'm totally off base in my
assumptions I'd like to know that too, where i went wrong, and what
the real deal is.

cheers.
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