Day 38 - Worksman Bikes

I wish I had more pictures to share the experience visually with you, but I spent an hour or so this morning with Wayne Sossin of Worksman Business Cycles in Ozone Park, Queens.

I was interviewing Wayne to learn more about his 110 year old business building "business cycles". These are not Lance Armstrong's cycles, though if you want a bike that will live strong for a generation or two, these are the ones to buy. Worksman markets most of their products for industrial or work-related uses: moving small payloads around factory floors, letting mobile maintenance crews at a plant zip around as needed, delivering pizza or groceries to apartments in the neighborhood. They have also branched into similar lines of work, including heavier-duty recreation bikes that provide a sturdiness for older folks or special-needs riders.

Wayne quipped, “You’re not going to ride a century on a Worksman cycle, but if you need to get from here to there and need to have reliability that when you run into a curb there’s nothing at all is going to happen to your wheel, but the curb might break, that’s what we’re all about.”

Nothing like naming your business to clearly identify yourself, right?

Dumb luck, actually. Or an enterprising immigrant who recognized the power of changing one's name for the right business opportunity.

Morris Worksman was a Russian immigrant who came to New York and set up a sundries business in lower Manhattan near the turn of the 20th century. He saw an application for using the newly popular bicycle to help move goods around factories and, importantly, to make deliveries instead of the typical horse-and-cart. It was an apparent success. Fast-forward three decades and Worksman had its next big source of demand: mobile vending.

In the 1930s, an Ohio-based confectionery who had recently invented a sweet treat that froze sweetened cream on wooden sticks had just sold its invention--Good Humor ice cream bars--to a New York investor who subsequently expanded and franchised Good Humor routes across the country. In the suburbs, Good Humor Men may have rode around and sold their sweet wares out of their signature trucks. But in NYC and other urban areas, Good Humor Men often used bicycles—Morris Worksman’s bicycles. The basic need hasn't changed much: the need for a sturdy, dependable machine to carry a lot of weight easily and efficiently.

Seems a little anachronistic these days, no? Or, at least, not a growth industry.

Maybe not. But Wayne points to the fact that he has had sales that have held steady over the past several years while several other US-based bicycle manufacturers have either closed or moved their production off-shore. In fact, according to the National Bike Dealers Association, over 99% of bicycles sold in the US in 2006 were imported.

To grow his business he is working with several universities to use his bikes and trikes to set up bike-sharing programs like ones written about recently in Paris and Berlin and openly discussed in some circles in New York City by the New York Bike Share Project.

The other thing Wayne is doing--and almost all savvy New York City manufacturers know they have to do this--is to reduce his biggest costs. Wayne's lucky. He bought the building he's in now a number of years ago. While it required a large capital outlay (which he was lucky to be able to pull together--not all manufacturers can) it has insulated him from the market's recent overheating. He also has some of his fabrication completed overseas before receiving them here to do the bulk of the building and customizing work for customers. And he's working the the New York Industrial Retention Network to figure out how to use his factory building's large rooftop to generate some of the electricity he uses from solar energy to further reduce his ongoing costs. This and similar programs are offered by NYIRN through RenewableNY.

It's not easy doing business in New York, but Wayne says he couldn't imagine doing it anywhere else.

“Being born in NYC holds a special place in my heart," Wayne says. "Being able to have a business here where we employ a decent number of NY residents is a wonderful feeling and I’m committed to make sure that that continues. It would be really easy for us to pack it in in NYC and move to a more modern place where costs are lower. But the beautiful thing about being here is that there is a certain magic of the NYC resident."

Describing his 60 or so employees from a half-dozen countries, Wayne continues, "They’re resilient and hard working. There is a great pool of labor in NYC which I think is often overlooked. You can see the ethnicities based on what they’re eating for lunch. We definitely have some interesting aromas here around 12:30.”