Three Little Letters
Just keep riding, just keep riding…
I was up in the air when our second Kickstarter campaign failed. We knew it wouldn’t be successfully funded since week two, but this made it official. With $60,000 raised and 68 backers, we came up well short of our goal.
As the plane landed, I only had one thing in mind. Getting home and giving my little ones a great big hug. I missed them so much after a week in Las Vegas. Interbike is a chance for us to meet up with old #bikeindustryfriends and make some new ones. My kids asked how the conference went, and if I was disappointed about the Kyoto. I smiled and told them it was NBD.
Here’s what these three little letters mean to us.
No Big Deal
I learned this phrase, or way of thinking, when I was a pre-med volunteer in college. I’ll never forget the sign hanging in the doctor’s lounge, a reminder to everyone seeking a little respite from the chaos of the emergency room.
“Unless it’s fatal, it’s no big deal.”
It may seem like gallows humor, but this mindset allows us to get through a lot of bad times, and puts into perspective what’s truly important in life. The Kyoto was really important for us to build, but we’re a small company that can’t spend the resources to bring every product we develop to market. This was a calculated risk, the investment in research and development is just a fraction of what we would have to spend to bring the Kyoto to production. While it is a big disappointment for us to see the project end here, this failure isn’t fatal to the company. We will continue on, and work on new projects that will have a better chance of success in the marketplace. Customers decide what we make, just as they will decide which companies win in the ebike race. It will be a long road, and this is just Mile One.
Never Been Done
Another meaning of NBD comes from the skateboarding world. The early innovators of the sport were the ones out their busting their butts, and investing blood, sweat and tears to push the boundaries of what could be done. They worked hard to come up with tricks that had Never Been Done. We think Karmic is destined to do the same for the bike industry.
This year’s Interbike was a bit of a letdown, both in terms of participation — with big brands pulling out of the show — and product, with a lot of derivative imitations, or variants of the same old boring bikes. Then there is the straight up copycat ebikes.
We ran into our friends from Coast Cycles, who’s award-winning Ruckus from the Taipei Show was copied as a “new ebike” offering just a few months later. That sort of blatant thief of IP is deplorable, and should be called out. These contemptible companies shouldn’t be rewarded by buyers. They don’t do the work to come up with new ideas, they plagiarize other people’s work and claim it as their own. They took a $800 bike, added a $400 motor and charge $3000 for their ebike. Except it’s not theirs.
Our next project will be yet another new take on what an ebike should be. It is our responsibility to move the industry forward, and we fully expect the copycats will follow. That’s okay, because over time, they’ll lose as they keep trying to play catch up. They have to copy because they can’t be the original. We set the pace, we set the direction, and we will always be first with new technology in products that have never been done before.
New Bike Day
The last acronym for NBD is my personal favorite. New Bike Day! While we’re bummed that the Kyoto won’t be available to the public, we do still have some Koben and Koben S in stock, ready to ship across the country. We’re giving a special discount to Kyoto Backers, something we’ve never done before. The design of the two models were very different, but they both share the Karmic Bikes DNA, and both provide the Karmic Experience you can’t get anywhere else.
One of our great meetings at Interbike was seeing our friends John and Julie, who are manufacturing our Karmic Kids bikes. We should be getting them in a month, with plenty of time to make our list of kids who will be getting new bikes this holiday season. It’s our favorite part of the Karmic story, and you should see these kids faces when they have their New Bike Day. We hope to bring that joy to many more people in the years to come.
Cheers,
Hong
