Unabridged History

Leslie Bohm on the background of Catalyst
October 30, 2005

Prior to Catalyst
After building bikes at Smith Schwinn Cyclery in Berkley MI in 1971, I began a bike industry career as a product guy. With Bill Grey and Shaun Jackson, I started Eclipse in 1974, in my home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Baby-boomers were college-age and bicycle touring fit their foot-loose style. It became a significant part of the bike business.

Eclipse developed a number of unique products, earned a dozen or so mechanical patents, and successfully licensed our handlebar bag design to competitors including Cannondale. That design is still widely used around the world, 30 years later.

We also invented what's now become the American style of motorcycle tankbag replacing European models with straps and archaic design. Eclipse was also one of the first companies in the US, offering carbon fiber bikes (imported from France) in 1984.

I traveled the USA, mostly driving, 3 to 5 months a year for the 10 years I owned Eclipse. I worked with hundreds of our motorcycle and bicycle retailers and sales reps. The 70s were a special time for the bike industry. There was buoyant spirit as the baby boomers left college bringing an anything-goes attitude to business. Lots of ex-hippies took refuge in the bike business. Many of America's current leading bike suppliers and retailers started then. It was never particularly collegial, but we shared an excitement at supporting ourselves making stuff for bikes and growing up together.

I sold Eclipse to Shaun in 1984 and moved to Colorado.

The Fundamental Idea
From my years selling our products I'd gotten to know retailers in the bicycle, motorcycle, and luggage industries. Most admitted a dislike for marketing. That was a problem for manufacturers with products to sell.

In many industries, vendors and retailers are often at odds with each other. That friction is in the DNA of specialty retailing in every industry I know.

I saw the need for a "mediator" to help the makers and sellers cooperate to influence the buyers. To be a "catalyst."

From the beginning, I saw the need for improved communication between manufacturers and retailers. Better mutual understanding was and is key to moving our tiny industries forward.

"You'll never make that work in the bike industry"
We pioneered direct marketing for Independent Bicycle Dealers (IBDs). In the 1970s, most bike shops relied on yellow pages with occasional ads in local papers and radio. When we started, many were skeptical about retailers' ability to build and maintain mailing lists. There was even more cynicism for the notion of a mailer, the Cycling Guide, featuring fiercely competitive bike brands.

We overcame those concerns. The Cycling Guide helped popularize the magalog concept of combining information with product stories. From the start, we knew that when consumers know more, they buy more and buy better quality.

As we gained steam, Bill McCready creator of the SuperSale, sold it to us in 1986. Ray Keener (later to found Growth Cycle) joined then to run SuperSale. Mark Graff (later to found SmartEtailing) joined shortly after. Thomas Dooley (later to found TDA Advertising) started with us about 1989. I think Catalyst was his first real job. Gregg Thayer our current national sales manager started in 1994.

An audio retailer noticed the Cycling Guide and got us into the high-end audio/video market in 1988. Within two seasons we'd secured the participation of Sony, Bang & Olufson, Mitsubishi, and virtually every major vendor in home electronics. I sold that part of the business in 1993 and it is still operating successfully as Fidelity Communications.

Cooperative marketing requires cooperation. Cooperation requires understanding.
Our summer conferences were the first major non-product meetings between suppliers and retailers. They started in 1988 in Vermont and we had a total of 11. Their success inspired what has now become the Bicycle Leadership Conference. People still comment regularly on the insights and friendships those events nurtured.

Advocacy
Catalyst has always been a catalyst in advocacy. I was an early leader in Bicycle Colorado and some of its original meetings were held at Catalyst. The Catalyst staff participates in many community activities and Gregg Thayer and our team were critical members of the campaign that resulted in 358 bikes going from Boulder to Baton Rouge, LA for Hurricane Katrina victims.

Our conferences introduced advocacy and its champions to many in the industry. I attended the BPSA conference in San Diego (1998, I think) to present the case for industry support of Bikes Belong's efforts.

During the reauthorization of ISTEA in 1996 to 1998, the Catalyst staff put in a lot of extra effort to cover the 20 to 40 hours/month I was spending on the national campaign.

Total paradigm shift – not yet
Meanwhile, our bicycle industry business continued to grow until the advent of the Internet.

In the late 1990s it looked like print media might lose its impact. In 1999, we moved toward doing our cooperative marketing online. We raised private funding and hired a development staff including a team from Silicon Valley to build a portal website, Bikestore.com, that could be the center of bicycling activity in America. It was a dedicated search engine that could hold every bike event and trail in America. Catalyst grew to a staff of 24 working through 4 T1 lines.

The idea was that retailers and their customers would enter their local riding info, and we'd supply the retailers with their own customizable pages to wrap around it. Suppliers would pay for their messages to be on the dealers' sites. We built it, and it worked. It was a fantastic idea that would promote selling and riding. It launched in March 2000. We were so stoked we didn't do the Cycling Guide that year.

Then it became clear that web-users dislike advertising. At the same time, the dot com mass-hallucination faded.

We tried to morph the site into a retailer/supplier ordering portal. By using a common "back-end," retailers would only have to learn one system to do all their buying. Bikecommerce.com. Another good idea that died.

We shut down web operations in November and went back to print for the 2001 season.

By now, everyone realized that print and direct mail is not going away anytime soon. In fact, print is a leading driver of traffic to the web. So we improved the quality of the Cycling Guide and strengthened the SuperSale.

Response rates to direct mail started to climb and dealers built direct mail back into their advertising mix. Since its introduction in 1992, we have won the top award in our category at the American Catalog Awards more than anyone else - 7 times.

Outdoor Industry
In 2002, we entered the Outdoor Industry with the Outdoor Guide and within a year had secured the participation of virtually every major supplier (Patagonia, Mountain Hardwear, Merrell, etc.) and many independent retailers.

Working with Trek
At this point we'd been working with many of America's best bicycle retailers for almost two decades. In 2004, Trek approached us to work exclusively with Trek retailers. They recognized that our leading-edge direct marketing programs wereused by their top retailers and they wanted to bring that sophistication to many more of their retailers. We started that relationship in August of 2004.

Expanded online direct marketing
Now that retailers have been gathering email addresses, we are rolling out a comprehensive email and 1 to 1 marketing program. Our retailers will continue to have the same quality marketing tools used by merchants 500 times their size.