UniChris

The costs and profit may not actually work out that different. One of the reasons those department store floor bikes are often mis-assembled (classically the fork backwards, etc) is that they ship to the store in a box and then are put together in the back room by someone payed a few dollars per bike.

By shipping them as pallets of components instead, you save some costs in kitting and packaging, and you make it easier to deal with individual bad componets rather than dumpstering the whole thing. Then, you don't actually build them in the back room of the store, but partner with a community organization to build them, while providing practical training and honorable employment to teens or disadvantaged adults struggling to find work. You could hang a builder bio card about how someone is turning their life around from the handelbar when its done - social virtue is a real product selling point. Essentially you combine the store's experience in getting things manufactured and shipped over, with the community organization's experience in getting assembly and adjustment right, propagating skills, and generate good press and feelings. The idea is to get away from the current problem, which is the stores importing and mis-assembling crap, and then the coops having to work with that as their starting point since there's no feed of sound budget components to work with.



This would be an alternate sales and assembly channel fed by the same supply chain. The key is that it doesn't have to work on product economics, because mostly you're selling an experience (or using community grants to provide one to disadvantaged kids). One of the additional upsides is that you not only get sound assembly, and knowledgeable owners who've had the experience of learning a skill, unlike with the machine built wheel of the buy-it-assembled option, you also get robust, stress-relieved, hand-built wheels that aren't going to have the break-in problems of machine built ones. Building good wheels isn't hard, all it really needs is enough supervision to overcome the frustration at the points where adjustments start to interact, and to validate that the final tension is reasonable - the actual supervision almost isn't even needed, as much as the confidence that it would be there when one gets stuck, but a a teacher demoing and then walking around provides both.

I know someone who has a beautiful wooden rowboat in their garage; it hasn't been used much (if ever) but it was a father/son project decades ago where they went to a place and built it in an "experience" class. Now imagine doing that with something more usable like a bike - and maybe it comes with an option to donate if someone doesn't need one, or outgrows it.