They have built strong relationships with good retailers who can educate customers on the merits of a quality product. As the parent company of such legendary brands as Schwinn and Mongoose, Pacific Cycle delivers some of the biggest names in outdoor recreation. But it’s not just the names customer’s trust, it’s the look and feel of our products, schwinn dealers our superior quality, and our outstanding customer service that help us bring these premium brands to the hands and feet of our customers. In late 1997, Questor Partners Fund, led by Jay Alix and Dan Lufkin, purchased Schwinn Bicycles. Questor/Schwinn later purchased GT Bicycles in 1998 for $8 a share in cash, roughly $80 million.
Find out how to choose the right size bike for your height. You can find the right size electric, hybrid, mountain, or road bike with our bike size chart. Indoor exercise bikes are a great workout, but is a recumbent or upright bike better for you?
Trusted by the best athletes in the world, the same technology is now available to indoor riders. Whether it’s tracking calories or in-depth power analysis, the 4iiii crank offers accurate results to help riders reach their full potential. The local bike dealer starts road bikes at around $999 and goes up schwinn dealers to maybe $10,000, with most sales in the $1,400 to $3,000 range. You’ll find many similar bikes being sold for pocket change on Craigslist, because they don’t look the part. Novices literally don’t know what a decent bicycle looks like and the big box retailers are happy to pander to their misconceptions.
A generation of people came to believe that bicycles were inherently heavy, dangerous and unreliable. Marc Muller, a young new Schwinn engineer, was given the responsibility to head up the project. The Paramount operations were moved to Waterford, Wisconsin, where the Paramount was reborn with a modern factory and workforce. Schwinn then partnered with 7-Eleven, establishing a team including Eric Heiden. When 7-Eleven decided to hit the big time in racing, Schwinn went its own way due to a lack of funding. Schwinn was, however, able to recruit an up-and- coming rider named Lance Armstrong to its ranks.
Joe Magnani developed the component side of the Paramount, working on race wheel building, Campagnolo derailleur systems and other top of the line equipment. Joe had quite a glorious history in racing including a stint in Europe before World War II. The Paramounts received the best of everything, including hand sprayed paint and the delicate pinstriping of Frank’s father, Joe Brilando and Adam Smith. As mountain biking evolved to more general street use, mountain bikes also became highly subject to the same dynamic which had affected earlier classes of bikes. Usually, I ride a bike for a couple years, and then some part of the frame cracks. Disappointingly, this almost never happens to the cheap department store “mountain” bikes.
You might think that these are the same, but they are not. By the end of the 60’s, resentment inside the factory over these lugs and shells was so high that when the supply finally ran out in the late 60’s, Schwinn sourced the Prugnat lugs as a substitute. The builders loved it, but the move was not popular among dealers and riders, since most people favored the carefully filed and beautifully ornate Nervex lugs. Schwinn compromised by keeping the Prugnat bottom bracket shell while returning to the Nervex lugset.
Schwinn decided to meet the challenge by developing two lines of sport or road ‘racer’ bicycles. One was already in the catalog — the limited production Paramount series. The Paramount series had limited production numbers, making vintage examples quite rare today.
The Paramount continued as a limited production model, built in small numbers in a small apportioned area of the old Chicago assembly factory. The new frame and component technology incorporated in the Paramount largely failed to reach Schwinn’s mass-market bicycle lines. W. Schwinn, grandson Frank Valentine Schwinn took over management of the company.