We started with J&B a couple of years ago and they we're very accommodating. We now have accounts with QBP and BTI as well.
Rich Community Cycles Boulder
Patrick VDT wrote:
Try the small ones first and work your way up the food chain to cheaper prices. Try the newest distributor for your area and get your foot in the door with a larger order. Most if not all the ordering can be done online and once past the first order they don't care. Our first order was around $1000 and we do about three orders a year that avg 1500 each. I will say that the first distributor we went after said no do to our credit history, i changed it to my personal one (made it look like i owned the shop) and had no problems setting it up.
Most if not all will require Business license insurance some require a photo of your shop or sales area (get creative)
We started with XYZ then went to Hawley, then JBI and now Quality Each time we move up we get better terms, shipping and service
If you still have problems im sure the bigger shops on this list can help you out.
Patrick STLbikeworks
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:47 PM, Rigel Christian <rigelc@gmail.com mailto:rigelc@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, I had an interesting discussion with someone who worked at a smaller 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. _______________________________________________ Thethinktank mailing list Thethinktank@bikecollectives.org <mailto:Thethinktank@bikecollectives.org> To unsubscribe, send a blank email to TheThinkTank-leave@bikecollectives.org <mailto:TheThinkTank-leave@bikecollectives.org> To manage your subscription, plase visit: http://lists.bikecollectives.org/listinfo.cgi/thethinktank-bikecollectives.org-- Sopo Bicycle Cooperative 404-425-9989 www.sopobikes.org http://www.sopobikes.org
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