![]() When we were starting, I used to have a presentation slide I called my ‘doughnut slide.’ The centre of the doughnut was maybe three kilometres in any direction from City Hall or the CN Tower. What’s your sales pitch to customers who might not live in downtown Toronto or Vancouver? Food deliverers are great customers, and they have a real need for the bike, but they ride a long way. The supply chain is one component of that. The concept of leasing or renting a bike doesn’t require deep tech, but it is hard to manage. We have bikes, and we have bikes on order, and we’re looking towards next year.īut it continues to be a challenge. There is a natural lull in Canada at this time of year for bike rentals and purchases. Will that affect Zygg down the road? Are you comfortable for the next little while? There are still supply chain issue in China because of their COVID policies. We didn’t have enough bikes to meet that demand. Hundreds of people showed up in March to start riding as soon as the snow started melting. We call a bike that’s waiting for a part a ‘purple bike.’ At the beginning of this year, we had a lot of purple bikes that we couldn’t put on the road because they were waiting for something. What was it like trying to keep bikes repaired and maintained when it seemed no bike shop in Toronto had enough parts? My grandfather’s cousin started General Motors Canada. There is a historical connection as well. It took a car company for you guys to get off the ground. They sold us their inventory at a big discount. In the end, General Motors decided to close it. They had an electric bike division based in Markham and were trying to figure out what to do with it. That was a definitely difficult day to convince people who knew what was going on in the world that they should part with their money.Ī fellow at General Motors reached out to me. We were planning to close our first round of funding, our ‘friends and family’ round, on March 15, 2020. We were preparing to launch Zygg before the pandemic. That’s where the idea for Zygg comes from.ĭo you think it would have been possible to launch Zygg without the bike boom we saw in 2020?Ībsolutely. I came across a company called Swapfiets - ‘fiets’ is the Dutch word for bike - that offered subscription bicycles for around 15 euros a month. Eventually, I realized I was not going to have a long relationship with Free2Move, and I started thinking about what would come next. When I was doing that, I rode my first electric bike in San Francisco and really loved it. My role was to sign up scooter companies and car sharing companies to this platform. I was more or less based in Washington, D.C. You’d be able to open an app and see all of the shared bikes and cars on the service. In 2018, I started working for a company that’s now called Free2Move, which is Peugeot’s mobility services company. What made you decide, in 2020, to get into bike rentals? You founded Autoshare and Modo, two car-sharing companies. If I were to open your garage, how many bikes would I find? McLaughlin spoke to the Star about his “quiver” of bikes, the COVID bike boom, and how a car company help Zygg get its start: For anyone with a disability, or perhaps a fierce hatred of hills, e-bikes might be a welcome alternative to the so-called “acoustic bicycle.” McLaughlin says Zygg counts an 81-year-old among its subscribers. But they’ve proven remarkably popular for riders who never imagined themselves capable of cycling regularly. To the unfamiliar, e-bikes seem like something of an adult’s toy - a fad or plaything for riders able to drop $5,000 on a bike. Now, he’s turned to e-bikes at a time when electric assist is revolutionizing the bicycle world. car-sharing co-op Modo in the mid-1990s and founded - then sold off - Autoshare to Enterprise CarShare in the 2010s. Today, Zygg accommodates couriers and casual riders alike, all eager to try out e-bikes without breaking the bank. “When we started, (catering to couriers) was not at all part of the plan,” says Kevin McLaughlin, CEO of Zygg.Īt the very beginning, Zygg wasn’t even sure its insurance would cover the many food delivery couriers who began using them. It’s called Zygg, a subscription e-bike service founded in Toronto that, since launching in 2020, has become a staple of food delivery couriers looking for a beefy all-weather e-bike capable of ferrying them to their customers in July heat or February snow. In fact, it isn’t a food delivery app at all. One of the most consistent brands sported by food delivery couriers pedalling takeout across Toronto at all hours isn’t UberEats, Foodora, or SkipTheDishes. ![]()
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