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Local company’s Glide Bikes ride onto international path
Ed Mondello, President of Glide Bike’s, assembles a bike at the companies warehouse Dec. 7, 2010. Glide Bikes are sold locally at Bike Cycles and Brilliant Sky Toys & Books.
By Wayne Faulkner
Wayne.Faulkner@StarNewsOnline.com
Wilmington’s Glide Bikes company has definitely thrown off the training wheels as it brings out a new model and expands into three new countries.
Actually, Glide Bikes’ bicycles have never had training wheels. The lightweight products are designed to give a child the confidence and safety to learn to ride. Riders can just stand up if they lose their balance.
The products have proved popular enough – 8,000 were made this year – that the company began distribution in Canada in August through a Maine company, and shipments should already have arrived in its latest markets: the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
Plus, Glide Bikes, started by Ed Mondello in 2004 in the basement of his Boston home, has added a third product – Super Glider. It’s aimed at riders from 10 years old to adults and for people 5 to 6 feet tall.
“We’re getting our fifth prototype Dec. 29,” Mondello said.
“Most of the move abroad was customer-driven,” he said, explaining that his company’s website has been up five years. The customers came to them.
Glide Bikes sells its products on Amazon.com, from its website and through “a bunch of different toy vendors that sell online or in stores or bike shops,” Mondello said.
In Wilmington, the bikes are available at Bike Cycles and Brilliant Sky Toys & Books, both in the Mayfaire Town Center shopping area. They retail for $99 to $129.
The first bike in Glide Bikes’ line was the Mini Glider, meant for the littlest kids, up to 4 years old, Mondello said. Then came the Go Glider, targeted at ages 5 to 10.
The latest shipment of bikes arrived Sunday in the Port of Wilmington. Delivery to the company’s site off River Road was Tuesday.
Though the bikes are now made in China, Mondello started building them in his basement, when he owned an IT company.
The avid biker said the idea started “just as a way to get my daughter to learn how to ride a bike. I saw the idea at the bike show in Vegas in 2004.”
His daughter had tried a princess bike, but fell over and was trapped under it.
His first bike was made out of PVC pipe, “basically plumbing material,” he said.
Mondello sold his business and “came to Wilmington with the intention to build it here.
“I made them out of my garage in 2005 and realized I needed a bigger space. We rented a building on Sixth Street and made bikes there until July 2008,” Mondello said.
Because of cost, all of the bikes are now made in China. And they are now made of a strong, lightweight and rust-resistant alloy.
What makes Glide Bikes easier and safer to ride?
Mondello compared his product to a good, stable mountain bike: “The geometry was slacker than a normal bike. … If you can imagine going down a hill, it puts you farther back and front end higher up. It gives you more control at lower speeds.”
He took the same concept and applied it to a kid’s bike.
“It slowed (the ability to) balance to 1 to 2 miles an hour, rather than 4.
“The center of balance is farther down, closer to the back wheel. If (the kids) feel unstable, they just stand up. They just correct themselves. It gives them that confidence to keep trying.”
If the child does fall there is less danger of being pinned under the bike. The Mini Glider weighs 8 pounds and the Go Glider, 10, he said.
Most of the demand for the bikes comes from the Seattle and Portland areas, plus California, Colorado, New York, New England, Texas and Florida.
“If you go to Colorado every kid is riding their bike to school. Safe places to ride bikes there,” he said.
“Here (children) are less inclined to do it early.”
But “as infrastructure improves, the culture will change,” said Michael Bassano, sales manager. A friend of Mondello’s, he worked for several car dealerships in the Wilmington area and decided to try something different as he saw the company’s progress. Now his job is to add to the company’s reach and also to expand its sales force.
They both see an opportunity as Wilmington’s cross-city trail is completed.
With back orders on some of the company’s bikes – the pink Mini Glider, for instance, “we can scale up pretty easy.
“We have two factories we work with. If we need to double production we could do that,” explaining that it takes about four days for production of 1,200 to 1,300 bikes – enough to fill a container like the one delivered Tuesday.
The goal, however, is higher market penetration.
“A million new kids are born each year” in the United States, Mondello said. “I’d like for us to hit 1 percent of kids out there in the next couple of years.”
Wayne Faulkner: 343-2329
