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future of bankrupt Electric motorbike startup Cake is still unsure, but most of its US inventory is going to a guy in Florida.
Michael Joyce, who runs a retail shop called Imoto in St. Petersburg, tells TechCrunch that he purchased all the Cake Mecca and Osa motorbikes that were shipped across the state as well as accessories and spare parts. Joyce says he did not purchase any of the remaining Kek Kalk electric motorcycles, as they have been recalled due to the risk of battery fire and steering column problems.
Joyce says he hopes the purchase will help keep the Swedish brand alive. “The last thing I want as a dealer is for the consumer to be left alone and not trust the brand,” he told TechCrunch in a recent interview. Joyce isn’t doing this entirely alone either. He’s working with a new Detroit-based startup called Bloom, which will warehouse all the inventory and help ship the motorbikes across the country — a sign of how this corner of the electric vehicle industry is shaping up to be. Used to be.
Cake filed for bankruptcy in early February after spending more than a year trying to raise a Series C funding round. Founder and CEO Stephen Ytterborn told TechCrunch that the startup also Tried to court cars like Harley-Davidson And traditional automakers after venture capital options ran out, though to no avail.
Joyce says Cake’s bankruptcy came as a shock, and also presented risks, as it is the only brand he currently sells in Emoto. Buying the inventory gives them a runway of “six to 12” months, which will give them time to complete negotiations with other companies to sell electric motorbikes.
Joyce is confident that he can sell the cake inventory after spending most of the last year on a good sales and marketing strategy. He started out as a direct dealer partner and says he faced a “tough time” selling Cake’s expensive products early last year. But Joyce says he eventually agreed to start carrying the company’s products on consignment, which helped fill the Emoto retail space and gave potential customers a chance to interact more with Cake’s bikes, leading to Monthly sales increased by double digits.
“It makes a big difference to have the bikes fully assembled with accessories in front of them,” he says. “To be able to point to it and say, ‘This could be yours,’ – that was something rewarding.”
His biggest immediate concern was what to do with the goods he had purchased. Joyce says he had been visiting warehouses in Florida over the past few weeks trying to figure out how to fulfill orders for motorbikes when they had the conversation. bloomThe company, launched last year by the founders of e-bike brands Propel and Vela, is based in the Detroit Mobility Innovation District known as Michigan Central.
Bloom basically aims to take some of the toughest work out of the hands of startups in the field, which includes offering contract manufacturing, distribution, service, and other logistics. It’s an idea that co-founder Chris Nolte thinks will have even more resonance as companies like Cake or VanMoof continue to struggle to do it all themselves.
“With these brands, there was a big push to vertically integrate as some of the larger automotive players have done,” Nolte said in an interview with TechCrunch last month. “But the reality is that no one really has the proper scale on their own, and the market is too volatile to do that adequately.”
Joyce and Bloom are not immediately ready to handle new sales – inventory is currently being moved from Los Angeles to Bloom’s warehouse in Detroit. Once it all arrives, it will serve as one of the first tests of this new hybrid business model. Joyce hopes Emoto will have enough success to build a brand that will become a one-stop-showroom for electric motorbikes, similar to some of the largest powersports dealers in the country.
In the short term, if Cake is able to restructure and find a way to move forward, Joyce says he wants to remain a partner in that new version of the company.
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