The Innovation Day Podcast
Innovation is defined simply as; the generation, and realization, of new ideas. In reality, innovation is far from simple. In this podcast host Neil Follett speaks with the founders, creatives and creators who are leading, living, and (usually) loving innovation. Brought to you by Studio 245, the Innovation Day Podcast showcases diverse points of view, personal stories and creative solutions in the world of business, culture and the arts. It is a podcast about imagination, risk, courage, leadership, and the reward of seeing your idea come to life.
The Innovation Day Podcast
Ben Taylor, Co-Founder and CEO of Beachman, on the Power of Design, and the Passion Behind the Brand.
When he was just 18, Ben Taylor started the Beachman Life account on Instagram, and at the time it was a brand in search of a product. Fast forward to 2025 and that product is now an eBike (and soon to be motorcycle) like you’ve never seen before. On this episode Ben shares the Beachman story, from those very first bikes to the immanent launch of their electric motorcycle.
Ben, thanks for joining us on what is not a holiday but a Monday.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, just had a nice long weekend, so happy to chat.
Speaker 1:Beachman is a manufacturer of both e-bikes and motorcycles, and it may just that I'm not completely up to speed. Is the motorcycle part?
Speaker 2:new, pretty new. There's a few reasons for that, but yeah, to start off, we began just making an e-bike.
Speaker 1:And when did the motorcycle part happen? Because I was deep into some Reddits and I think at some point you had mentioned that the work to be licensed to produce motorcycles is significantly different than the work to be licensed to produce e-bikes, and so it sounds like that works complete. But what was that journey like?
Speaker 2:It's been an interesting journey for sure. One of the reasons that we went with an e-bike in the beginning is because this company really did start as just two guys in a garage, and so when we were initially working on it, the very first two bikes that we produced were motorcycles. So Steve took a 1979 Kawasaki KZ200 and a 1982 Honda CB200 and converted them into electric cafe racers, and so those bikes were motorcycles, you know, they retained the van and the ownership and everything of their original gas existence. But then, when we went in to start trying to produce them in numbers, we decided well, if we put some pedals on these things, they're e-bikes.
Speaker 2:And the entire purpose of our brand was to create an entry-level bike, reviving the kind of moped 50cc Honda Cub awesome existence that was in the 1970s and 80s and that whole category kind of died off. But we saw the opportunity to revive it using the e-bike platform. And the other reason, of course, was the barrier to entry as a manufacturer to make an e-bike with little to no regulation, versus Canada's automotive regulations, which include motorcycles and happen to be, as far as we know, the strictest in the world, even more than Europe. And so now, opening up motorcycles as a new category. It's a process that's taken us three years. We've spent over $250,000 on this process and we're just trying to certify a moped, just a little city bike, so you can imagine it's even more intense if you're doing something that goes on the highway.
Speaker 1:Just so people who maybe haven't seen the product have a picture in their mind, the Beachman bike is a highly differentiated, I think, e-bike compared to what anybody who's listening to this might imagine it looking like. And you mentioned a cafe racer. So maybe just describe the product for people so they can kind of get it in their mind, and then we're going to go back, like to the early days, to the beginning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Beachmans are definitely unique. There's really nothing out there like them and it is absolutely a cafe racer, as you just mentioned. So what that means is, you know, the easiest thing is, if you look up cafe racer style and there are these really cool vintage bikes that they came to exist in the 1950s and 60s post-war United Kingdom, specifically in London, where all these soldiers came back from the World War II and they had this huge surplus of those really cool classic green military motorcycles that everyone knows from World War II and basically they just kind of gave them all to the soldiers.
Speaker 2:And so there were all these young guys. They were hot off the war, they had all these cool motorbikes and of course they would start racing them around the soldiers. And so there were all these young guys. They were hot off the war, you know, they had all these cool motorbikes and they of course they would. They would start racing them around the city. And what a cafe racer is is basically this culture that developed in London, where guys would, they'd race between the various cafes in London and kind of a circle they do the entire city, circumnavigated, and at every cafe you would stop and grab a napkin with the monogram of the bar on it to prove that you had visited all the different cafes, and the guy who came back first won a bunch of respect and maybe they would race for pink slips. And so when everyone has the exact same motorcycle, the way that you make it go faster is by, obviously, tuning up the engine, but when the engines are all identical, the easiest way is by stripping parts off and making the bike lighter.
Speaker 2:So cafe racers have this really cool, stripped down, very simple aesthetic that doesn't really exist elsewhere in the motorcycle world and usually it's a thing that you do to your motorcycle. You buy an old, vintage bike and then you spend like a year, you know, converting it into your dream cafe racer. And that's what Steve did for years before we met. He built these Honda cafe racers and our idea was let's just make a bike that that comes stock looking like this and this really cool simple look and it instantly gives that vintage impression and, uh, it's definitely a head turner. The most common feedback we get from our customers is as soon as they buy the bike and they're riding around town every day people are stopping them at red lights and asking them like whoa, what is that? What year is that? Is that actually electric? Because, yeah, it's a bit of cognitive dissonance almost seeing such a beautiful vintage bike with a completely electric drivetrain.
Speaker 1:You mentioned you know, steve doing this before you guys met. How did you guys meet? What was the context for for you guys first connecting?
Speaker 2:Steve and I met in 2019. However, beachman life and it was, you know, cool like Porsches and surfing and riding motorcycles, like 1960s, steve McQueen kind of stuff, and I always knew it would be a brand one day. It was kind of just a brand without a product and I had an idea to do a bike and I actually initially had done like some watches and other kind of little projects where I designed some products under the brand name, but I wasn't really happy with anything that I brought to the finish line. But the bike was always the North star.
Speaker 2:And so I moved from Vancouver, where I had the idea, to Toronto and a mutual friend of ours, a guy named Tom he. He was a barista at the end of my street and he basically just texted me one day and said hey, dude, your neighbor builds motorcycles in his garage. His wife's always coming in and getting coffee. Here's his email. Send him a message and, uh, see, if you know, maybe there's something to this beachman idea that you keep telling everyone about. And so I sent steve an email. I actually found the email the other day. It was pretty cool to see all these years later where I'm like hey, steve, you don't know me. I'm your neighbor but I've got this, this weird idea for a little moped cafe racer. You want to grab a coffee? So we met at that coffee shop and I had a whole slide deck prepared and presented to him my vision for Beachman, and I think we didn't even get through the whole deck. Maybe five minutes in Steve just goes like all right, I'll build one. That sounds cool to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the sense, that sort of slide too. He was like okay, dude, like I, yeah, exactly I also. I also need to point out the delightful full circleness that you guys built a cafe racer and you got connected by a barista.
Speaker 2:Yes, like I don't think anyone's pointed that out before. Yeah, that's very true, yeah.
Speaker 1:There's something quite magical about that. And then you had your first meeting in a cafe. So, thinking about this Instagram page, I've seen it, there's actually. That's how I reached out to you originally. That's sort of like a nostalgia, analog, fantastic, sort of old kind of vintage. Like you say cars, people, boats, life, vacation, vibe how old were you? If you don't want me asking like when you started that and when you were thinking about okay, this is maybe the mood board for the product that I'm going to build, were you an industrial designer, like, what was your background to have? You start to imagine at that age, like one day I'm going to go build a thing, what was sort of how old were you and what kind of harder soft skills did you have that would lead you to building something?
Speaker 2:I was relatively young. I was 18 when I started and so I'm 28 now. So I'm 10 years into working on Beachman. And you know it's that classic thing of like people seeing you know an overnight success and they don't realize it's you're a decade in. You know, it took me a decade to be an overnight success to a vocational school called Vancouver Film School. So it was similar like going to electrician school, for instance. It was a year. It was a lot of intense work. It was like 40 to 60 hours a week of school and kind of simulating the film industry. And I went through that program, came out of it with a really good education in film but also a certainty that I was not going to work in the film industry. It just was not the lifestyle that for me. So a lot of my friends went on. They had great careers in film. Uh, still see all of them and all these years later it's it's those, you know, peers of mine from film school that that do all the beachman commercials. You know I'll bring them in and shoot everything with my old buddies. So yeah, yeah, but yeah, I was.
Speaker 2:I was in film school when I had the idea and a lot of it, I will say, came from my my mom and dad. They have a real penchant for mid-century, modern, you know, furniture and architecture and, um, they, they moved into this, uh, this new place in 2013. It was a 1960s mid-century house near Toronto on Lake Simcoe and they decorated the whole place mid-century, and so that was kind of like my home experience was just being immersed and I was actually at that house when I made the Instagram account and they really kind of got me up to my ears in mid-century and going like, okay, what else is out there? And started kind of going out on the internet and seeing you know what else design-wise existed in this bygone era, and I just fell in love with the old bikes and old Porsches and stuff like that. And basically a few months after that I was back in Vancouver and I don't know how I got introduced to it, but I found Alibaba and I found a watch factory that would make a watch for me, you know, and so I started ordering samples and the initial watch was actually a wood watch and it was inspired by this old wooden Nixon that my dad gave me for my 17th birthday.
Speaker 2:He gave me these two watches that were his back in the 70s. He bought them originally One was a Nixon and one was a Fossil. They weren't super luxurious or anything, they're just some cool watches. But they were both kind of rectangular and had wood paneling on them which I had never seen anything like that, and it really spoke to me. It was the first time I ever saw a watch that I liked and I remember that set me down this path of like okay, what else is out there that I've never seen? Because I was born too late for this era of design and I ended up getting this idea of like I'm going to try to bring this back. I'll make some cool wood watches found this factory that was willing to work with me and started, you know, prototyping and basically from the age of like 18 to 20, I spent every spare dollar I had sending it and wire transfers to some factory in China, like getting I think there was like five generations of prototypes.
Speaker 2:I must have spent like 10, 20 000 on it and, um, I got them to a place where I really was happy with them and they started breaking because they were made of wood and yeah, like there was like it was at this crossroads where it was like, okay, I can make some concessions, I can do a wood-steel hybrid thing, or I can just shelf this very expensive project that I'm working on with very little return and focus on my career and keep the Beachman page going. So I kind of opted to do that, because the watches were beautiful and I had a few stores in the city that were interested in. I probably could have made some decent money selling them, but I wanted to protect the brand and I never wanted that Instagram post of someone being like look at this watch, it broke you know, it's the Beachman name is Sully, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So, um, yeah, I just kind of kept the idea alive in my head and I got a moped when I lived in Vancouver and that was what kind of opened my eyes to the bike thing and started the idea off watch experiment.
Speaker 1:I imagine you're actually building up some muscle memory around working with suppliers in China understanding prototyping. There's maybe not a complete straight line from a watch that didn't hit the market to a bike that you've been selling for a few years now, but there's got to be some foundational pieces in there. Was there one or two lessons that you took from your watch experience that felt like sort of very key to starting up the bikes?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah, I mean Alibaba, just as a concept, is unbelievable, right, like people usually associate it with, like AliExpress or like Timu, you know, like the cheap goods and stuff, but really what it is is it's just like a repository or like a Facebook for all the factories in China. And the things that I learned the most was that a oh my God, the amount of expertise that I have access to just through my computer was unbelievable. You know, like that process of building a watch was iterative and it was collaborative, because I'm talking to someone who works every day at this watch factory. They know exactly what they're doing and they would make suggestions and they helped me work through this process. And so I learned to definitely like trust the expertise of the people that I was working with in China. And then the other thing I learned was that anything's possible. You know like if you can dream something up and find the right people with the right skills, it's not an intimidating process to get something made. And so Steve had, I think, done similar stuff as well, not so much custom things, but he'd ordered things, just order parts and build the bikes from scratch in Toronto. But the other issue we ran into this is one you learn quickly is getting a sample made is easy, but meeting the minimum order quantities for an actual mass production run of a new good is not so simple. And so when we started setting out to make the bike, so we met in 2019.
Speaker 2:In 2020, steve finished the first prototype and it was beautiful. I still ride it every day. We call that bike zero and it's pretty much remained the same. It has a few upgrades since then. But we had the bike in hand. We knew the platform, we knew the dna, and so we went to try to buy parts uh, overseas, bring them in and build them. But you know, when we're only have enough money for like 30 bikes because we didn't have investors. It was all financed on steve's mortgage, his line of credit, so proper entrepreneur leap of faith. But we essentially came to realize that there's no way anyone is going to sell us 30 brake rotors or 30 front forks. It's just the quantities were too small.
Speaker 1:Well, and multiplied by every single part on the bike.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:If you find somebody to sell you 30 of half the parts, you still have to find someone to sell you 30 units of all the other parts, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it was too much for us to have that as our initial undertaking. So eventually we found a factory that agreed to build the whole bike for us and we bought 30. And we bought 30 without even even making a prototype, which scared the heck out of me. But steve, you know, being the brilliant engineer that he is, he could just look at the just a list of parts on the paper and see into the matrix and be like this is a good bike, you know. And uh, I trusted him and the bikes came and they were great, and so the first two or three production runs they were fully built over there to our design.
Speaker 1:And how are you? How are you selling them at that point? So you've got 30, do you have 30 orders and you know that, like you're set for your 30, or do you have no?
Speaker 2:So let's go back of it then. So basically I'm like okay, let's get a prototype. And then Steve starts talking to me and he is like one of the formative moments in our, our relationship as business partners, is he calls me and he goes. So I'm just thinking about this prototype thing. What if we get like, let's say, we get five and they're not that great, we could still sell them on Marketplace and make our money back because we're paying the factory price. Yeah, I guess. So, yeah, that makes sense. Five, we could do that.
Speaker 2:And then he calls me back like a week later and he's like all right, so we're just getting ready to do this order. We're talking about that marketplace thing. You think if we get 15 and they're not great, we can still flip them and you know, at least recoup our costs. And I'm like, oh man, 15 that's a lot. But like I guess, like there's six million people here. Like you know, e-bikes were starting to become popular. I guess you know we could probably do that. And then I'm like cool, 15, let's do it. I guess he calls me back the next day.
Speaker 2:He's like so they said that uh 30 fit in a shipping crate. And listen, we see we it's half as much money on shipping if we double the order. And I'm like oh my god, but you know we hadn't even seen it yet, so I wasn't collecting orders. But we get 30. They come. We have the shipping crate delivered to a storage mart in Etobicoke.
Speaker 1:Right, because I was going to be my next question, like do you have somewhere to put 30 bikes that you've yet to sell?
Speaker 2:Yeah, storage mart, man Just got a big storage unit and we unloaded it by hand. It didn't have a forklift or anything, so that was an escapade getting that shipping crate unloaded, because it was packed to the ceiling with like five millimeters of spare room.
Speaker 1:And the bikes, I think are like 200 pounds or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, In the shipping crate like well over 300 pounds, because they came in these steel crates. But yeah, so we unload them, we crack open one of the bikes, turn it on, ride around the parking lot and it was great. It was exactly what we were hoping and that was kind of an aha moment. We all got some burgers and then I took a bunch of photos of the bikes and I put them up on Facebook Marketplace and I woke up. I think that was like a Monday evening. Monday evening I put them up. So the weekend prior we we took three of the bikes out and we did a photo shoot down by the Humber River and then I put them up on Monday. I wake up on Tuesday morning to like two or three hundred people messaging me on marketplace if they can buy the bike and I was like whoa.
Speaker 1:So you're not even selling them on your own website yet, like you don't have the, this is legit. Here's the pictures from my photo shoot, and that alone has got you almost 10xing the number of bikes that you have sitting in your store.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, to say we had a website would be giving way too much credit. We just had a single Facebook post to giving way too much credit. You know, we just had, fair enough, a single facebook post and I posted on my instagram story and yeah, like, because we didn't know, you know.
Speaker 2:and then when I put it up and I got all that interest. It's not like we sold all those bikes overnight. I mean, you know how facebook is like so many of those like hi is this available? Kind of messages, but yeah, just to see that much interest was awesome, and so we basically what we did is I made a little website, I made an instagram and we started doing these saturday test ride days, where I would go to cherry beach on saturday and it would be a time you'd have you come and meet us at 2 pm and get like somewhere between like three and 20 people depends on like how nice the weekend was and some days, though, you know, 20, 25 people will be out there and we just have everyone sign a little waiver and then they'd ride the bike up and down, um, that road that goes down to the cabana pool bar, you know, and they'd, uh, rip around in the sun and if they enjoyed it, they would e-transfer us, and then that night Steve would build their bike to their spec in his garage and then the next day I would deliver it on Sunday to your house on the back of my car, and that was the business.
Speaker 2:It was a weekend warrior thing and we still had full-time jobs for the first. We had full-time jobs for the first year of operating the business, so it was just after work and on weekends.
Speaker 1:I have to reflect on the auspicious date that you mentioned of 2020. This is not amazing timing for supply chains and getting people out in person. Like how did the pandemic affect the business? What was going on there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so thankfully, the real thick of it during 2020 was when Steve was still finishing the prototype and doing all his sourcing with factories overseas in China, trying to find someone who will make the bike for us, and also he did about two years of once. We found the factory going back and forth like an iterative design process, but there was a limit to what they would allow him to do before. They were like you got to order some bikes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So the ones we got in the beginning were close to what we wanted, but they were still a shade away, because we took like an existing platform based on this 125 CC old Honda style platform and changed part by part by part with off the shelf parts and kind of moved it toward that vision. Because that's what a cafe racer is right you just use existing parts and swap things out on your bike to get that look. So throughout 2020, we're doing that. Steve places the order in the fall of 2020. And the first 30 show up in the spring of 2021.
Speaker 2:So 2021 was like you know, things were opening up again and also at that point in time, lockdown was still enforced on like restaurants and stuff. So really the only thing people could do was like go out, and 2021 and 2022 are the biggest years in history for bicycle sales. So in 21, what happened was we, we sold those first 30 bikes and after I had sold like 10 of them, my dad sat me down and he was like you have a business, you need to keep this going. Order a hundred bikes right now. And it was like are you serious? He's like, yes, you need to do this.
Speaker 1:And so and did that validate something? Like in the pit of your stomach, were you? Were you going, like I have a business here? And then your dad sat you down and you were like yes, confirmed, or, or, or, or. Was that a wake up call? Like where were you, uh, sort of mentally and emotionally, when he was sitting you down like did you still think it was maybe, yeah, just a bit of a flyer and we'll sell these 30 bikes? Like how are you?
Speaker 2:I was starting to really drink the kool-aid during those saturday test rides, you know, when people would ride them and they had nothing but positive feedback and back then the bike was really cheap because we had no overhead, you know. So we were. We priced it really low because I specifically wanted regular, real, everyday people to buy them and who would actually be riding them all the time, instead of like a bunch of rich guys that just put them in their garage, you know, and it was definitely the right move, because we learned so much about the bikes in the beginning and so I was already feeling good. But he impressed upon us like businesses grow, so you get like I was gonna were going to order another 30 bikes and he's like you need to triple that.
Speaker 2:And so I was like, okay, you know, let's work that out. So we ordered a hundred more bikes and again on Steve's line of credit. But we saw the sales. We knew that was the right thing to do. And then we went out and we did an indiegogo campaign on top of that to pre-sell more bikes. So I drove with a beachman on the back of my car to vancouver and this was the prototype of the 64, the current bike that we sell. Up until then we were calling it like the founder's edition and it was kind of similar, but it didn't have a lot of the custom parts that we wanted, only the stock parts. And so I took the steve 3d, printed a bunch of stuff and got things metal bent and cut at local metal shops. He makes this prototype. I put on the back of my car, I drive to vancouver and I shoot a commercial with my buddies from film school and we put that up on the internet and we do an Indiegogo campaign and we raised. In 30 days we raised like almost $400,000.
Speaker 2:And that was when it was like okay, it's a business, it's time to quit our jobs. So we both quit our jobs I think I left my job in October of 2021. And we got a retail store. We had 100 bikes coming in and we had 100 more pre-orders for the next generation of bike and we get to work on the design and we take out a lease on a warehouse to store all these 200 bikes. We got this coffee shop where it's like motorcycles and coffee. You know, going back to that whole meeting in the cafe thing and then, as soon as all that happens, that that boat got stuck in the Suez canal. Dude, that ruined my life. Remember that.
Speaker 1:Probably not as well as you remember it, that's for sure.
Speaker 2:And so like you have a.
Speaker 1:You have a bunch of bikes on a boat that is stuck behind the boat.
Speaker 2:That stuck essentially no, basically what happened is that event had a butterfly effect on international shipping, Compounded with 2022, there was that second wave of the Delta strain of COVID and it became really, really hard to get things shipped anywhere in the world. And so we went through this experience where the bikes were built. You had 105 bikes in a in a shipping crate these were the ones for indiegogo, and it's the winter of 2021. Into 2022, they're finished production. They're in a shipping crate in the docks in Shanghai and they're going to come to us. And the shipping guys go okay, your bike's going to ship out on March 22nd. And then on March 17th, they message us and say hey, walmart bumped your shipping crate off the boat and it's not going to ship out until April 3rd. And then on April 1st, they message us and go hey, unfortunately Ikea paid extra and your shipping crate, it's going to have to go out on April 20th.
Speaker 1:These are the days where people were doubling. They're just like I need to get product and so I'm just going to sort of pay whatever for shipping and you guys don't have that. Yeah Right, about that time actually, I was in Huntington Beach and I was down there with a buddy and we were surfing and I looked out on the horizon and I counted something like 78 boats.
Speaker 1:Like it was just like they couldn't. Even if they got here. There was such a backlog, they just couldn't get unloaded fast enough. The entire horizon was boats trying to get unloaded.
Speaker 2:Exactly because of that delta strain, all of the ports had lockdowns, so there was no dock workers. The ship crews could operate because they were all in a COVID bubble, living on a boat, in a COVID bubble, living on a boat, and so the boats were moving across the ocean, but the harbors in China and in LA and in Vancouver were just completely shut down. So, and then this was also that time, remember Canadian tire bought their own fleet of ships just so that they could guarantee that they were going to get stuff across the air. It was a really difficult time and us being the smallest fish in the pond, we just got bumped and bumped and we were bumped two weeks at a time for eight months.
Speaker 1:Oh, my God.
Speaker 2:Eight months of no inventory of any kind.
Speaker 1:And eight months of reaching out to those people on the Indiegogo campaign who likely had empathy for a period of time, like, oh, I get it, you're not just making excuses. I see this in the news, but some point, maybe around month six, especially if they're Canadian and the weather's changing and now it's. I've missed the whole summer. That's eight months of trying to keep that group of people happy who are going to be your big tranche of word of mouth, folks who are driving your bikes around right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And so not only is that happening, but that's eight months of we just quit our jobs and are paying ourselves salary out of this money from Indiegogo. We have the rent on the retail store and the rent on our warehouse and basically in those eight months we spent all the money, like there. The thing was that sounds like a really naive thing to do, but it's not like. We knew in March that it was going to be eight months. It was eight months of being delayed, like three to 12 days at a time. Over and over and over dozens of times this happened.
Speaker 1:In a world, frankly, ben, where we became so accustomed and reliant to essentially kind of just-in-time delivery that major retailers got rid of their warehousing because they would just have stuff come off a boat and go on the store on the shelf. So as a new business, you're starting up into a world that's got the infrastructure that you don't have to make plans for eight months delays. That's just extraordinary.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and it was a system that was incapable of predicting these delays. Because of that and so if we had known it was going to be eight months we thought maybe it'll be two or three and we'll weather the storm we would have just went back and just got full-time jobs and just waited it out, got rid of the coffee shop, all that, but there was no ability to not do it. So essentially, you know, we waited and we waited, and also in that period of time, british Columbia outlawed our bike as an e-bike.
Speaker 1:And why is that? Like design, weight, speed, what?
Speaker 2:was that the actual technical reason is that in British Columbia, e-bikes can't have throttles, they have to be pedal assist. Although that's kind of just a scapegoat for outlawing the big motorbike and Vespa scooter looking e-bikes, it's really what they use it to enforce against, and I think it makes sense. I mean, the two places that outlawed our e-bike were Quebec and British Columbia, and it was for the same reason, which is they have fantastic bicycle infrastructure and a bike of our size interrupting that really developed and crowded bike infrastructure was really disruptive for cyclists, and so they wanted it to be a moped, they wanted to go on the road, and that was what set us down that path of okay, we have to do certification now. What we didn't know is it was going to take us three years, and so there was this kind of bittersweet thing that happened where there were 28 customers from our Indiegogo in British Columbia and I had to email them and say guys, I legally can't send you your bikes. Are you willing to wait for us to certify it? It'll go faster, it'll be a real motorbike.
Speaker 2:In BC, mopeds only require a driver's license too, so it was a pretty low barrier of entry and everyone agreed. I think one person asked for a refund and everyone else was fine and basically those people saved our company because we came to the end of this year. The bikes arrive in like November, so I'm delivering them to people's houses like, literally, neil, like in snowstorms. Here's your motorbike. Enjoy it next year, delivering them to people's houses like, literally, neil, like in snowstorms. Yeah, yeah, here's your motorbike.
Speaker 1:Enjoy it next year.
Speaker 2:But the ones in BC. Basically, what happened is there was 28 bikes that we couldn't send and so we got to sell them twice because it was 28 more inventory and that literally saved the company from going bankrupt. And so we got those out to Ontario customers and we did everything we could to get the bike certified for British Columbia and, believe it or not, so this was 2022 that that happened this month it was April, I think 11th of 2025, we finally submitted our application to Transport Canada. It took us three years to get it done.
Speaker 1:And those 20 something customers. They're still patiently waiting.
Speaker 2:They're still waiting. I mean, it's been so many years. They've made the money back. It's no longer about the money, but essentially now what we're doing is and the funny thing was to show our dedication to these customers we could have sold a moped slash motorcycle version of our bike in the United States for like two and a half years now. That's how much easier it is to get certified in the States. It's kind of a joke in comparison and we didn't on purpose, because we knew how heartbreaking it would be for these people to see us just sending bikes.
Speaker 1:For these guys to see somebody else posting down in Arizona that they're on their new yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So we wanted to hold true to those people and to this day still everyone's waiting and I mean I can't express my gratitude to them enough. They're all literally a part of the reason my company still exists. But oh my god, I can't wait, neil, to this summer to get those bikes out to BC.
Speaker 1:We're definitely going to fly out and do a ride with everyone there and just kind of, you know the number of different parts of your brain that needed to be fired up over the course of time that you've just described to me you're talking about. You're talking about manufacturing. You're talking about design. You're talking about import. You're talking about you know you're talking about manufacturing. You're talking about design. You're talking about import. You're talking about logistics, um, you know. You're talking about like, oh, now also, we're going to, like, run a cafe. So you're actually running two businesses. You know you've quit your job, so there's a, there's a finance component to it. Like, did you anticipate that it would be as multidimensional as it is? And and what of those maybe were the biggest surprises to you? Where you're like oh geez, there's a whole other skill set here.
Speaker 2:I had no idea, man. Oh my God, If I could go back in time and describe to my 18-year-old self the things I'm going to be putting myself through, I don't know if I would do it, man, but no, I definitely would. That's what you need is that kind of crazy will to just keep going. But it's funny the other day I was reflecting on that this year has been crazy with the tariffs and everything. And I came home from work and I was just sitting there alone in my apartment just worrying about tariffs from Donaldald trump and the you know trade regulations and everything, and I was just like, oh my god, I in this moment envy my normal friends that just go home from work and that's it. The work day is over and they just watch severance or something you know, and the level of connection that you have like your business is your life. You know there's no dividing line at all. Like I'm about to leave on a two week vacation and I know that the second week I'm going to be in Greece on my laptop taking meetings and um.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I think the stuff that surprised me the most was definitely like the regulatory and financial groundwork I've done Like I went to film school. You know I have no business education of any kind. But in 2023, we finally raised equity. You know, up until then all of it was on Steve's line of credit and profits. And, um, we saw the writing on the wall that we had to expand pretty massively to make an actual factory here when we were going to switch over to building the bikes here. We're going to need to hire new staff, we're going to need a facility of our own, we're going to sign a huge lease. So I went out and I raised a million dollars and I did it privately with and how did you do that?
Speaker 1:raise like friends and family, institutional investing like yeah, so it's all angels.
Speaker 2:So, um, it's, you know it's kind of a weird, like it doesn't follow any. You know, the normal like seed, pre-seed maybe, like any of that. Basically we were, we were already three years in and our seed whatever was just our own money initially, really just steve's money. I, you know, I was whatever like 21 or something, when we started and had nothing to bring to the table financially. At least, I brought a lot of eight-dollar power.
Speaker 1:I was going to say, yeah, I think you might be underselling yourself a little bit there, but fair enough.
Speaker 2:But anyway. So essentially that raise was. I sent an email out to our customer base saying we're raising money and a bunch of people emailed me back and we got the money. So the vast majority of my investors are customers or they were fans of Beachman, followed it on Instagram and they're all, pretty much with the exception of one guy, they're all former entrepreneurs who successfully built a business and exited, and so for us that's the ultimate vote of confidence as someone who's done the thing already and they recognize themselves a bit in what they see us doing and they know that it's a real business that we're building. And they came in with their personal money. And, yeah, it was a decently quick process, I think from the first email to closing the raise it was like six months and initially we were raising 2 million and then we kind of sat down and realized we could probably do it on one and just scrape by, give up less equity, make sure that we stay hungry and efficient.
Speaker 1:I was going to say give up less equity, have fewer people to kind of answer to. Exactly, exactly, whatever. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But for me, learning all the financial compliance stuff and sophisticating our operation to be able to produce the financial documents and financial due diligence that's required for investors. And then the other thing that was a really big challenge on my side was international business, so incorporating a US entity and creating cross-border transaction policies and doing tax policy in all the different various US states and territories, and there's just so much that comes from it that, my God, it would be useful if I had an've.
Speaker 1:You know your NBA would have been a bunch of hypotheticals. You're, you've gotten. You know you've gotten a PhD in running your business. You just did it by being in the operating room Like it's a and you've kept the patient alive.
Speaker 2:If I want to continue the analogy.
Speaker 1:So international sales that's one of the things I was thinking of is, you know I was looking at the at the product and I was. I was thinking about. You know I was looking at the product and I was thinking about. You know, years ago I was in Bali and you know everybody's driving dirt bikes there and there's lots of places in the world where this mode of transport is maybe a little bit more commonplace Outside of the US. Where else do you sell? Are you thinking about selling? Is it just kind of like too much to contemplate right now, because you've got lots of irons in the fire, like what does the international stuff look like, including the US?
Speaker 2:First of all you nailed it.
Speaker 1:The next international market we're bringing online is actually Bali. I like to try to nail it at least once in each episode, so I appreciate you saying that.
Speaker 2:That's it, you got it, man. So there's a really cool business out there called mala madre motorcycles which, uh, your listeners can look up, and it's run by this guy, dirk. He's a really cool dude and, um, they make gas cafe racers that you can buy or you can rent as a tourist there, and it's a very successful business. They have three locations across the island and and he saw this Instagram ad that we ran and reached out to me and he's going to open up, you know, distributorship for all of Indonesia for us, starting off in Bali and then moving throughout the country. And aside from him, we are currently active as of like three weeks ago. Costa Rica has come online, so one of the investors that came on during that raise the conditions of his investment was he gets distribution rights, for Costa Rica has come online, so one of the investors that came on during that raise the conditions of his investment was he gets distribution rights for Costa Rica, and so he's a guy who had a successful business here in Ontario and basically retired to live down there, and this is kind of his next thing is just running Beachman Costa and he's loving it.
Speaker 2:And then, obviously, the United States is huge. Last year it was 15% of the sales. We anticipate it's going to be 60 or more this year. And once we sort out the U? S this year, next summer, the next big step and really the final big step for the business um, at least in terms of our plans, before we might go to sell it is to open up Europe. So in 2026, we're going to start in France and it's a similar situation to Costa Rica. One of our investors, who's also a board member, this guy, matthew. He came on and is going to be taking over our European operations, so basing the operations out of the Brittany area of France and doing distribution from there for the entire European Union. So we've already got all the patents and trademarks and everything ready to go. But the last step is doing the homologation process, which is that motorcycle safety and transport standards certification for the European Union. So once we have our Canadian approval, we go for that in Europe and then, as soon as we have it, we start sending bikes to France.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. I was also thinking when you mentioned that you had early customers, entrepreneurs being those investors. One thing that came to mind was that I imagine that opens up some really interesting kind of advisor opportunities. I hadn't imagined that also maybe opened up some licensing opportunities, but it must be a wonderful feeling that it is this community that is passionate about the brand and passionate about the product that is helping to fuel that growth. I think so often you get it's sort of like extractive capital a little bit right. It's like someone invests because they just kind of want to squeeze two pennies out for every penny they put in, versus someone who is really passionate about what the vision is and wanting to partner to help bring that vision to life. That must feel nice to have that as part of the accelerant of the business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's amazing, neil, like throughout this story, the kind of missing no, it's amazing, neil, throughout this story, the missing business partner honestly is our customers. We grew this thing completely by word of mouth. It was Facebook, marketplace and Instagram, and we didn't run ads. Even to this day, we sell a beach one every day and I think we sold five bikes today. My ad budget right now is $100 a month and it's just word of mouth, it's reputation and it's our, it's our customers being our biggest advocates, and so, you know, I am like infinitely grateful to the people who've who've come to you know, love the bikes and and make them a part of their lives, because without that really tight knit community and you know, like, for instance, we we don't, um, we don't have a Facebook page, but we have a subreddit and it's super active and it's full of, like awesome fans that are helping each other customize the bikes, and for a community that's kind of split up, especially in the US where you know, we have, like, one guy in Kentucky, two guys in Ohio, like that kind of thing, as we're growing there, it's cool that everyone's able to connect online and give each other, you know, tips and tell stories and stuff like that and continue to grow it. But yeah, it's, it's, it's really an amazing group of people and I think it's because we have such a strong emotive brand.
Speaker 2:When you look at the motorcycle space, but especially the e-bike space I mean talking about the e-bike space in particular I don't think there are any brands. There's logos and there's products, but there's really no lifestyle brand of any sort, aside from Beachman that I've come across and that aspect, which is what I've been working on for 10 years. I think it's paid a lot of dividends to us because it does work for us when we're not in the room and you know, we have everything from spotify playlists like we like a thousand hours of beachman spotify playlists that the thousands of followers and ways that we've incorporated the brand outside of just the bikes themselves into the lives of our community that I think it really allows it to flourish on its own.
Speaker 1:I always try to figure out what is a right point to wrap up on. I think you just nailed the close. That's a phenomenal point to end off on. Is that customers in the community? This has been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate all you've shared. Honestly, I feel like this could be, you know, part one of a three-part segment, so at some point I may be calling you back for part two to figure out how the European and Indonesian and US expansion is gone. But this has been just a fantastic conversation. I appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, my pleasure, man. And um, uh yeah, if we talk again, I think we got to get Steve in here, cause you know, for all of my side of the business, there's an entire other world of all this engineering and problem solving. That he's done, and and we have a new bike coming out this year, which is Steve's finally had the resources from the success of the brand to design his own bike from scratch from the ground up, and it is beautiful and, uh, we're so excited for that thing to release this summer. So it would be great to um, get his side of things and and it's a whole other world of problem solving and innovation going on there.
Speaker 1:So, I feel like we've got a part two teed up for the fall, so let people know where they can find this instagram. You've talked about the website. Where can people go find the bikes?
Speaker 2:On Instagram. We are just at Beachman, which shout out to my friend Jordan, who somehow got me the actual handle of my brand, and you can also find us on YouTube under Beachman. We also have a YouTube channel called Beachman Garage, which is like long form, like 30 minute videos of all the not only the process of like building the bikes, but we also do an entire other arm of our business, which is converting cars and motorcycles from gas to electric, on old, vintage cars and trucks and stuff like that and and um. So we also have a YouTube channel tracking that called Beachman garage, and our website is uh beachmanca if you're Canadian, uh beachmanbikescom for the U S. So amazing.
Speaker 1:Thanks again, Ben.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thanks, Neil. I'm really glad we did this. Man have a great week.