The two Super73 riders the rapper (née Rakim Athelaston Mayers) came upon last September captured the exchange on a video that went viral.
It marked yet another example of the marketing and branding muscle the Irvine-based company—with its entry-level bike priced at $1,395—has commanded and leveraged since its 2016 start.
That effort has built an ultra-loyal following around its bikes, which are an eco-friendly mashup of a dirt bike and motorcycle but don’t require a special driver’s license like typical motorcycles. The e-bikes can go 28 mph or more, with a battery range of 20 to 60 miles depending on the ride conditions.
The company’s following only got bigger last year with shelter-in-place orders.
One gathering last year saw 91 Super73 riders showing up in L.A. just to ride their bikes.
It caused LAPD to ask if the group was part of a protest. When the police were told “no,” they pressed further to find out where the group was riding, to which one of the riders responded, “I don’t know. In circles.”
“The point is people just want to ride, and ride in communities. They’re socially distanced. You’re going at high rates of speed. There’s something really charming about hearing birds and hearing the wind as it passes by you and smelling the grass. It’s cliché, but connecting with your community is one of the most important things we’ve done out of everything we’ve accomplished,” said Super73 co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Michael Cannavo.
$20M Funding
The community focus is also part of the backbone to the company’s successes, with Volition Capital Managing Partner Larry Cheng saying, “Super73 has all the ingredients to become a great consumer brand—fanatical customers, insatiable demand for its products and a distinctive design philosophy.”
Strong brand equity was one of the reasons Super73 closed on a $20 million round of funding last month from Boston-based Volition. It will use the capital to bolster its inventory, supply chain and customer service to accommodate the growth it saw last year and expects in the coming years.
The company launched on Kickstarter and raised roughly $500,000 on the fundraising platform. Two years later it closed on an $8.75 million Series A from New York investment firm Tiger Global Management LLC.
Growth has come quickly, with revenue nearly tripling annually since 2016. Cannavo sees that expansion only continuing in the coming years.
Managing Growth
Last year proved a boon with stay-at-home orders and many trying to find ways of keeping busy outdoors. At one point last year, Cannavo said, revenue was up 700%, pushing the company to go on a hiring spree. Super73 entered the pandemic with 26 employees and now has more than 75.
The team is expected to double by mid-2021 to around 150, which includes hiring a new chief operating officer.
The customer service team of four pre-pandemic was fine handling inquiries ranging from bike troubleshooting to general purchasing questions, but once the pandemic hit, the team was receiving around 10,000 emails a week.
Lucky for Super73, it began scooping up many laid-off customer service reps from the Disneyland Resort to help it get through 2020.
Most of the team is still working from home, with those who are coming into the office on a staggered work schedule. The current situation may be a good thing with Cannavo saying if the entire workforce was in the office, employees would likely be sharing desks. That’s one of the reasons why the company is now actively looking at options for office space. It’s currently in a business park near The District at Tustin Legacy shopping center.
“It’s funny because people are, like, [success] never [happens] overnight, but in this case it was an overnight moment,” he said.
Inventory Shortage
The team is now moving quickly to shore up gaps to accommodate the demand.
Outside of bolstering the Super73 worker headcount, last year’s inventory shortage—one of the reasons A$AP Rocky had inquired in that now viral video how the two riders had gotten their hands on a bike—proved changes need to be made at the production level, Cannavo said.
With inventory sitting on boats at the ports, Super73 is looking at what can be done domestically moving forward given most of its manufacturing is handled in Taiwan, where Cannavo said the “artists of the e-bike world” are located.
Once they get a handle on inventory levels, it could open the doors to wholesale. Currently, the bikes are sold direct-to-consumer, even though there is a demand from retailers to carry the brand.
Having stock on hand will also help on the international front.
Demand in Europe is high with the company opening headquarters there in Amsterdam last year. It’s also eyeing growth in South America and Asia, Cannavo said.
More than Bikes
The focus in the short term for product will be on e-bikes, but the team is clearly more ambitious for the longer term.
“Right now, because we have such a demand for them, we’re really focused on e-bikes,” Cannavo said. “It’s our passion here at Super73, but when we initially launched it was called Lithium Cycles. We changed that name pretty quickly because we didn’t want to be locked into cycles.
“Super73, we call it a lifestyle brand.”
In fact, when Super73 launched on Kickstarter, it was with T-shirts and so the thinking goes, it has the potential to very much be akin to a Harley-Davidson type of brand where the bikes are the halo product that drives and legitimizes all other products.
Today, Super73 sells everything from bike parts and helmets to T-shirts and hoodies with the aspiration to become an American heritage brand with global reach.
Cannavo said apparel sales at some point could eventually compete with the e-bike sales and that “a very large chunk of revenue in 2021 and 2022” is likely to come from clothing and accessories.
“Our apparel can be more than just slapping a bike on a T-shirt,” Cannavo said. “[Co-founder] Aaron Wong has been devoted to learning the space and really focusing on ‘Hey, what makes a fashion brand, but also one that really resonates with our audience which is strongly Gen Z and millennial.’ We are really looking to grow [apparel] this year and have a few different lines with influencers backing them. It’s pretty easy to launch new products when they can post and share them with the world.”
Beginnings
Cannavo and team make the building of their brand and business look easy.
He met co-founder Wong at cargo scooter maker Nimble and the two decided to combine Cannavo’s marketing experience with Wong’s design and graphics expertise to create a lifestyle brand around an e-bike. When LeGrand Crewse caught wind of what the pair were doing, at the time he was running an e-bike company, and reached out about working together. Crewse sold his business and relocated from Nevada to Irvine, parking his RV out behind corporate headquarters to help build the business. Today, he is Super73’s CEO.
“Little gang of misfits is a little cliché, but we all had different ideas and we came together and the magic was there,” Cannavo said.
Star Wars Speeders
One major factor in getting the bikes to stand out online has no doubt been social media.
The breakthrough was a 2017 video that redesigned the Super73 into Star Wars speeder bikes that were taken for a ride through Manhattan by costumed riders.
The YouTube video received more than 10 million views.
That’s since been parlayed into many other directions for the brand at events such as New York Fashion Week, a 24-karat gold custom bike for singer Post Malone and art exhibition with Tom Sachs.
High-profile company riders range from actors and actresses to models and music artists such as Will Smith, Snoop Dogg, Madonna, Lil Nas X, Kelly Slater, Ryan Reynolds, Dennis Rodman and Cara Delevingne to name a few.
Cannavo, who spoke with the Business Journal from his Irvine office filled with Star Wars memorabilia and bike parts, said many companies aim to be lifestyle brands, but most fail to be authentic.
“They’re throwing these huge sums of money at these influencers to do something cool with no value behind the why,” he said.
“This is something Aaron says a lot, ‘Let’s just do things we love, and we’ll figure out ways to bring the bike into it.’ With Star Wars, I had the know-how. I had the costumes. I had the blueprints for those speeder bikes. Our designers were all Star Wars fans, so it was seamless. There was no corporate angle to it. We didn’t even put our logo on the bike.”
Youth Marketing
For Cannavo, he got his start on the video-sharing platform Vine, growing his follower base there to roughly 35,000. That network proved beneficial for when Super73 launched.
For the Mission Viejo-born Cannavo, Super73’s growth has taken him on a wild ride, allowing him to travel throughout the U.S.
“I was literally making pizzas. I thought that was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life,” he said. “There was no marketing education for me; it was just figuring it out.”
It’s that organic fan base that has allowed the company to skirt the need to pay influencers to post about their bikes. The most they’ve ever done is gift product.
“I grew the Instagram account and the YouTube account and said, ‘Hey, we need to be an influencer ourselves.’ You should look at our DMs; it is wild. The direct connection we have with these celebrities I’ve learned is unheard of—that ability to slide into people’s DMs and then suddenly you see typing and they respond within minutes.”
The company recently hired a 19-year-old to handle its TikTok account full time.
It also paid “a good chunk of change,” Cannavo said, to an 18 and 19-year-old to handle an advertising campaign for Super73.
It begs the question then if Super73 could have the success it’s seen in less than five years, largely without the aid of traditional marketing and PR firms. Is there a need for them in the future?
“That’s super interesting and I think it’s hard to replicate what we’ve done at Super73 because if you don’t have all those right pieces, you have to pay-to-play,” he said. “That’s what’s helped us stand out is that we have these pieces in our team. I have six or seven employees that all have hundreds of thousands of followers, and that’s not something you find anywhere else. So, these older, dinosaur companies are going to have to continue to pay-to-play.”
With a strong community of Super73 fans essentially helping build the brand, recently added Internet of Things chips allowing connectivity between the bikes and users’ phones could prove powerful in the future as it relates to the ability to share content with other riders or find out where the nearest meetup spot may be for a group ride.
“The interconnectivity between our riders,” Cannavo said, “is going to be something that is, we hope, groundbreaking in bringing them together and creating marketplaces among riders.”
