The Apprentice ebike

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Sirallen of The Apprentice challenged his victims to come up with an electric bike. The prototypes were created in about 45 mins. The winner sold £1.5 million to Halfords.
Were these bikes straight out of the catalogue? I'm sure I saw a poster of the orange bike on the wall as they were designing it.
Is the bike business really that easy. Go to Raleigh. Pick a bike out of the catalogue. Add some decals for branding, sell bucket loads to Halfords or Evans then retire to Majorca?
Does anyone here work in this biz?
 

biggs682

Touch it up and ride it
Location
Northamptonshire
They made it look easy
And yes it almost seems you can go to Raleigh and take on e of there design and they will build abd badge as many as you want .
Did you notice though they never mentioned the cost of each bike
 
Location
Loch side.
To "deisgn" a bike is easy. You choose a frame style from a Taiwanese frame catalogue, "design" the paint job and order a couple. You then assemble it from non-designed parts (i.e purchased over the counter) and voila, you have a bike.

The difficult part is convincing a retailer to buy yours rather than those from any one of the other 16000 Joe Soap brands out there.

Start with Alibaba. Drawing board not needed.
 
OP
OP
M

MichaelW2

Guru
Do Raleigh supply direct to shops? Do you have to dirty your hands handling or storing any product ? Did they even create a company structure to carry out the activity and pay any taxes and duties?
 

gbb

Legendary Member
Location
Peterborough
It was interesting only because it concerned bikes. The basic principles of business make the programme interesting, shame the participants often very quickly forget those basic principles. It was an exercise in creating a mock product, presenting it and selling it, costings didnt even really figure in the profitability of the product. Even the potential buyers were mock in their participation, I couldn't see Halfords buying an untested, unknown product and competing with well established brands, even if they were cheap ones.
A lot of nonsense really...and I dong mind watching the programme :wacko:
 

AndyRM

XOXO
Location
North Shields
They made it look easy
And yes it almost seems you can go to Raleigh and take on e of there design and they will build abd badge as many as you want .
Did you notice though they never mentioned the cost of each bike

I thought that too about the cost. Normally the manufacturing price is taken into account. Both were clearly cheap, though I reckon the actual margin of victory probably wasn't that high for Sophisticated Sarah's bike, but that wouldn't make good TV.
 

Globalti

Legendary Member
In the world of manufacturing a small number of mega-factories makes any product you want, to your spec. I visited a TV factory in Jaszberenyi, Hungary, where they manufacture Phillips, Samsung, Panasonic and a couple of others. When I asked the Production Manager which was the best he replied that they're all made with the same components and only the casings are different.

I also worked in a bike factory in Darlaston in 1979 where they made bikes for Edwardes, Brown Bros, Vindec and several others, all garbage. At that time they even made a utility bike for China, would you believe. It weighed a ton.
 
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