Vaughan bicycle business provides comfy ride for baby boomers

YorkRegion.com
April 2, 2014
By Adam Martin-Robbins

A local bicycle design and manufacturing firm is riding the grey wave to success.

Maxarya Design & Manufacturing Inc. has grown over the last 15 years from a tiny operation producing and selling just 150 bikes for the Canadian market to a burgeoning firm with global sales in the thousands.

And much of its success is due to the popularity of its bikes with baby boomers looking to live a healthy, active lifestyle without putting too much strain on their aging bodies.

“The bike is kind of like an epidemic,” Max Ahmady, president of Maxarya said. “You sell one (to a guy). The guy goes on a trail and another person sees it and tries it. It’s kind of addictive.”

Mr. Ahmady started the company in 1998 with $50,000. Originally, he’d wanted to make motorcycles, but he quickly discovered there were just too many hurdles to clear.

After surveying the marketplace, Mr. Ahmady determined it was too tough to crack into the crowded mountain bike segment dominated by large, well-established manufacturers. Instead, he decided there was a growing niche market for high-performance bikes that provide a comfortable riding experience.

An engineer with a specialty in ergonomics, Mr. Ahmady set to work designing a recumbent bike, where the rider is in a reclining position, with the pedals located near the front tire, to distribute bodyweight over a larger area. At the time, there were only a few companies making recumbent bikes.

He developed a lighter, faster recumbent bike offering comfort and ease of pedalling with an ergonomic seat back and an extra-wide, adjustable seat meant to feel “like a soft pillow”.

“I had designed something different for people who want something they can ride comfortably — a baby boomer cannot ride on a bike with a skinny saddle,” he said.

Then, Mr. Ahmady sought out a manufacturer who could produce the custom components he’d designed at a low enough cost to be able to sell the bike at a reasonable price.

After several trips overseas, he struck a deal with a manufacturer in Taiwan that resulted in 150 bikes being produced to test out demand.

The price tag at the time ranged from $1,500 to $3,000, depending on the features.

Maxarya was operating out of a “humble” 800-square-foot facility on Avenue Road that had an office area and a small plant for assembly.

Mr. Ahmady hired a few part-time employees, set up a basic website, printed some promotional materials and went about trying to sell the bikes.  And sell them he did, all of them.

At the same time, Mr. Ahmady was hard at work refining and improving the design based on comments from his customers.

“It’s a pretty painstaking, but passionate thing,” he said,

He launched a new design in 2002/03 and took it to the Toronto International Bicycle Show. Many of the industry’s big players were there and he received positive feedback.

Mr. Ahmady connected with a half-dozen dealers across Canada interested in selling his bike.

“It was pretty successful,” Mr. Ahmady said. “We started to expand. I hired a couple  more engineers, five or six technical assemblers.”

The next goal was to crack into the American market. So, Mr. Ahmady booked a booth at the Interbike Show in Las Vegas in 2004.

From there, business really started rolling. The company now occupies about 3,800-square-feet in an industrial building in Thornhill and it has penetrated markets around the world.

“We’ve sold some to places we never expected,” Mr. Ahmady says.

For instance, a doctor in Brazil, where import duties are a staggering 64 per cent, has purchased four bikes for himself, his spouse and a couple of their friends, he said.

Maxarya’s bikes are also enjoying surprising success in Japan and South Korea, he said.

He hopes his new conventional, upright city bike, dubbed CT Limit, will enjoy the same degree of success.

Launched this year, CT Limit is lightweight and designed for maximum comfort with a cushy seat and a sloped top tube for ease of mounting and dismounting.

It also one comes with an optional Bionx electric-assist system, which makes riding even easier by giving you a boost from an electric motor while you’re pedaling.  

The electric-assist system truly makes cycling a viable alternative to using your car to get around town, Mr. Ahmady said.  

And that’s something the local businessman would like to see more of — not just because it’s good for his firm.

“You don’t pollute the air, you don’t put so much pressure on the economy and you get healthy,” he said

Mr. Ahmady, whose office is located just steps from the dedicated cycling lanes on Dufferin Street, finds it disheartening how few people ride their bikes to get around the city.

He feels local governments should do more to promote cycling and change the city’s car-dependent culture.

“What I see, especially in Vaughan, at 10 a.m., you go out and there are lots of SUVs,” he said. ”If you go to a school here, you will see maybe four bikes. In Germany, you will see about 200 bikes. Instead, here, you see the father in his SUV driving one kid to school. … Long term this is a disaster.”