Boston Company Eyes Market Leader by Building Own Pedicabs
The company that started as Boston Pedicab is getting into the manufacturing game, as part of its ongoing mission to become what founder Ben Morris envisions as “a global hub’’ for all things related to the tricycle-taxi industry.
Coaster Pedicab, as Boston Pedicab’s parent company is now known, has been working on its namesake Coaster rickshaw model for the last 2.5 years, and it’s now for sale. The pedicab market has long been dominated by one big player, Main Street Pedicab out of Colorado. “We felt like we could do it our own, and we felt we could make a better product,’’ Morris said.
Morris launched Boston Pedicab in 2005. The Boston operation now has a fleet of more than 20 trikes, whose riders are seen out and about in the city offering three-wheeled rides from spring through fall. They’ve become a mainstay outside of sporting events, and at major city shindigs like the Boston Marathon. Morris has since launched fleets in a handful of other cities—with San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Maine, among them.
The new Coaster pedicab model.
The Coaster pedicabs will be used to supplant those existing fleets over the next couple of years. You can expect to start seeing them hit the streets of Boston this summer, Morris said. The prototypes, seen in the photo above, are red, but Morris said: “I don’t believe we have seen the last of our iconic green.’’
However, the intent is also to sell to other pedicab companies. Morris said there are hundreds of such companies across the country. Some are sole proprietors who bought their own pedicab, others own and operate fleets, and most of them buy from Main Street Pedicab.
Coaster already has a history of working with outside pedicab companies, and said he hopes to leverage those connections to boost sales of the new product. For example, Pedicab Outdoor, a subsidiary that manages advertising for the company, also partners with non-affiliated pedicab companies to place ads on their cabs. And Pedicab Manager, a software program to help pedicab companies manage their internal operations, has also sprung from the company.
The different operations—the advertising service, the software wing, the fleets, and now the manufacturing arm—are subsidiaries under a Boston-based umbrella organization, which is adopting the Coaster Pedicab monniker after changing its name from USA Pedicab last year. That’s a fairly diverse business model for a company best associated with neon-clad tricyclists hawking rides from Faneuil Hall to Fenway.
The new Coaster pedicab was designed by Wisconsin-based Design Concepts, and was engineered based on input from drivers, riders, mechanics, and owners of pedicab companies, Morris said. They are being contract manufactured in Montana, by bicycle company Lightfoot Cycles, and range in price from $4,500 to $5,250 a piece, with price breaks based on bulk purchases, according to Coaster’s website.
That makes Main Street Pedicab, whose models sell for between $3,200 and $3,900, the cheaper option. Morris declined to talk specifics about sales of the new Coaster models. He said he has received significant interest, including some from overseas.
Disclosure: The author worked as an independent contractor for Boston Pedicab for about 10 shifts in 2011. He never met Ben Morris.
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