The largest electric bicycle company in the US, Lectric eBikes, has just hit a pair of dizzying milestones. The much-vaunted e-bike maker just hit its 1-billionth dollar in sales on its e-commerce platform and sold its 750,000th electric bicycle. And perhaps even more stunning, it landed those two feats on the same day.
It’s rare that we get an inside look at sales figures from electric bicycle companies. Nearly all are privately owned and keep their cards held close to the vest for fear of giving their competitors any strategic advantage or insight.
But when you’re already at the top of the mountain, you can apparently breathe a bit easier, as evidenced by Lectric – or rather its bold, young, shoot-from-the-hip co-founder and CEO Levi Conlow – sharing the news on his social media.
Today, Lectric is a titan of the industry. But a mere seven years ago, it was an apartment living room startup from a few college friends with an idea and the will to make it work.
Lectric eBikes’ rise to fame was the result of a fascinating set of converging factors. Its founders, Levi Conlow and Robby Deziel, originally bootstrapped the company, eschewing traditional venture capital funding.
The company began by prioritizing making e-bikes more affordable, launching its first major success on the back of the $899 Lectric XP in 2019.
That affordability stuck, and as the company grew market share, it could afford to fatten up its initially thin margins not by raising prices, but by using its increasing size to negotiate hard with its suppliers to reduce costs.
That positive feedback loop helped Lectric skyrocket to over 100,000 e-bike sales in just two years, further helped by the launch of diverse new models, an extreme focus on local, helpful customer support, and a general “Why not? Let’s just do it…” attitude that rarely gets past the boardroom in much of corporate America.
Now Lectric leads the pack by a sizeable margin, and the sales figures released by Conlow don’t even tell the whole story. The $1 billion in revenue figure comes purely from Shopify, which is Lectric’s main sales channel as a famously direct-to-consumer company, but doesn’t include sales from additional channels that Lectric has opened, such as Best Buy and other stores.
In fact, instead of resting on its laurels or getting fat at the throne, Lectric has continued to double down – and triple down – by opening three new e-bike brands this year.
The company bought the defunct Juiced Bikes e-bike brand and breathed new life into it with a pair of Scrambler e-bike models, then opened Juiced Powersports to build higher power e-motos, and finally landed the hat trick with the launch of Monarc, a more upmarket e-bike brand with higher-end components for riders who can afford to spend a bit more for high-quality parts.
The three new brands may have very different focuses, but all have followed Lectric’s lead by offering what are, objectively speaking, much higher value propositions with better performing or higher quality components for prices that undercut their competition.
And there’s nothing more Lectric than that.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.