The crazy, untold story of Lectric Ebikes’ secret deal to save Juiced Bikes

Juiced Bikes spent 15 years as a beloved e-bike brand building some of the most iconic and highest-performance electric bicycles in the US market. But financial troubles put the brand into a tailspin last year, ultimately culminating in bankruptcy and closure. The brand appeared to be a goner until two young e-bike entrepreneurs stepped up to try and salvage Juiced’s legacy in a deal whose details have never been revealed – until now.

I covered the apparent collapse of Juiced Bikes late last year, including watching the company’s assets eventually surface on an auction site seemingly run as a way to repay Juiced’s creditors.

The auction included everything from Juiced Bikes’ designs, patents, and other intellectual property (IP) to its wide assortment of e-bike inventory and spare parts, and even the company’s Sprinter delivery van. The submitters of the winning bid were revealed to be Levi Conlow and Robby Deziel, the free-spirited founders of the largest electric bicycle company in the US, Phoenix-based Lectric Ebikes. I reported on that revelation last month, but the rest of the story had remained a mystery.

I recently had the chance to talk to Lectric Ebikes’ CEO Levi Conlow about the rollercoaster ride of trying to buy Juiced Bikes, and what comes next in the long process of restoring the brand to its former glory.

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This is that story.

Levi, Robby, and the entire team at Lectric Ebikes have long shown a penchant for giving back not just to the broader e-bike community, but also for taking a wholistic approach to philanthropy as a company. In the past I’ve covered how they give away millions of dollars each year, both in terms of free e-bikes and donations to worthy causes.

Considering that the concept of doing the right thing is firmly engrained in the Lectric DNA, this seemed to Levi as another chance to give back to the larger e-bike community.

“We saw it as an opportunity to once again show the industry that Lectric can do the right thing,” said Levi. “We always pride ourselves on doing the right thing. We saw this as an opportunity to buy Juiced, give it a pathway to continue on, put the necessary resources into it to make it successful, but also to help resolve all these customers that had just gotten burned.”

That was a major sore spot in Juiced’s larger fall from grace. Not only did the brand cease operations and leave its tens of thousands of riders without support, but hundreds of customers had already paid in full for pre-ordered electric bikes that were never delivered.

“Our plan was to get that inventory and send those bikes to the customers that had already paid, and then we’d begin fresh once those customers are taken care of,” Levi explained. “We could pause for a bit then and rebuild the brand.”

The auction for Juiced’s assets, both physical and IP, included hundreds of e-bikes that were sitting in US logistics warehouses, waiting to be shipped to customers who had already paid for them.

After placing the winning bid in the auction, Levi and Robby intended to ship those e-bikes out to their original owners as quickly as possible. But the pair immediately ran into the first of what would soon become an ever-growing pile of obstacles.

“So we win the winning bid for this auction. And after we win the auction, I called the agency that ran the process and I was like, ‘Hey, my name is Levi Conlow. I just won this bid, what’s the next step?!’ and they were like, ‘Well, now it’s up to the creditors and the seller to decide if your bid is acceptable,’ and I’m thinking, ‘What?! What do you mean? I thought that was the point of the auction.’”

As it turned out, the $1.2 million winning bid wasn’t high enough to satisfy the creditors. Juiced owed significantly more than that. So Levi brought in the rest of his team and his board, then went back and forth with the company running the sale until new terms were finally accepted, and a deal was made to buy Juiced for a higher figure to get everything in the auction.

Now that Lectric had bought up Juiced’s assets for a higher number which Juiced’s creditors could live with, the next step was to start moving out those bikes. That would be its own logistical problem and so Levi wanted to get to work on solving it right away.

“We wanted to make sure we could physically go pick up the inventory, even though we now owned it,” Levi continued. “So we reached out to the different warehouses where the inventory was stored and quickly the warehouses responded ‘No, they owe us this sum of money, so they have to pay it before the inventory can be picked up.’ And the amount of money in warehouse storage costs was ridiculous, because they had not been paying for warehousing for, well for some locations it seemed like years, so it was this massive balance. So the inventory at the warehouses wasn’t even worth the amount that the warehouses were owed.”

Despite the massive storage fee debts that Juiced had racked up, Levi was under the impression that he had bought and owned all that inventory after working out the deal with Juiced’s creditors. Unfortunately, he was then informed that the inventory had already been sold out from under him. “They told me, ‘Oh, so that inventory was already sold to some other company, it was kind of a supplier debt, and they took ownership over it.’ So at one point this inventory was sold to customers, then it was sold to me, and then it was sold to another company.”

I had already discovered that the Chinese-owned e-bike brand Velowave had begun selling what appeared to be brand-new Juiced Ebikes on its US website, and Levi confirmed that Velowave was, in fact, the other company that had snatched up the inventory that was mostly pre-sold to existing customers.

With that US-based inventory lost, the next goal for Levi and Robby was to hopefully get ahold of the inventory and spare parts that were left in Asia.

However, Levi soon discovered that the Asian suppliers were owed around twice as much as the US-based creditors. “These Asian suppliers, many of them were left out of millions and millions of dollars owed to them. That relationship between Juiced and its suppliers is so far gone that there is no pathway for us to get bikes and parts from them. The non-proprietary stuff like Shimano parts and Tektro, the wheels and parts like that, that stuff is pretty easy to get. But the proprietary parts like controllers and motors, those are relationships that have really been damaged by the amount of money that Juiced owed.”

The damage done by the trail of debt left in Juiced’s wake is a problem that Lectric is now wading through.

“That’s one of the biggest hurdles we have to overcome,” sighed Levi. “There are a couple of suppliers that overlap with Lectric’s supply chain or where their sister companies already work with Lectric. And Lectric’s checks always clear – we’ve never missed a payment, we always pay on time. So there are a couple suppliers that we’re going to be able to resolve with and be able to get some warranty parts, but something that it’s important for people to know and prepare for is that for the vast majority, unfortunately, we are not going to be able to remedy those relationships. That’s basically been most of the work I’ve been doing recently, is trying to repair those relationships.”

Now, Levi and Robby are working on a solution to make things right for the hundreds of Juiced customers who are left empty-handed, out thousands of dollars for their pre-order and with no e-bike to show for it. But even that work has been hampered by the slow process of physically taking over Juiced’s digital assets, including access to the company’s website and the sales info trapped inside of it.

“Even getting into a platform like Shopify to figure out which customers didn’t get paid and what is owed to certain customers, that’s basically one of our only options right now for Rob and I, is to figure out who hasn’t been paid, reach out to those customers and write them a check to reimburse them or maybe offer them an e-bike from Lectric’s lineup. But we can’t even get into Shopify yet because Shopify was also owed a ton of money, and we can’t get into the email list because the email list was owed a lot of money too. All of those things are resolved through the bankruptcy, but there’s a legal process of providing the proper documentation and reporting in order for us to get access to those things. So there’s a lot of work before I can even turn the website on and email my first customer. But that is priority #1 right now, is to get the website live and communicate with customers.”

From there, the next step will be rebuilding the high-performance e-bike lineup that Juiced spent years developing. As involved as Levi and Robby will be, they also still have to run North America’s largest e-bike company, Lectric Ebikes, and so Juiced will still need a dedicated team of its own. “The first real hire we’re going to make is probably to hire a product manager. With how long development will take, maybe we can get it done in 9-12 months, but that really requires someone dedicating their full focus on it. So our day one objective is to hire someone to start rebuilding the product portfolio from the ground up,” explained Levi, before offering to toss that massive undertaking my way. “Are you bored? Are you looking for more work, Micah?,” he laughed.

As awesome of a job as that would be, the mere 24 hours I get in a day don’t seem quite enough for me, and I can only imagine how daunting of a task that will be for someone coming in ready to throw their entire focus at it. But Levi sounds excited about the possibilities, even as he acknowledges the headwinds they will face.

The direction that the new Juiced e-bikes will go is still uncertain, but it sounds like the designs will remain true to the style and performance of e-bikes that helped Juiced build its massive fanbase over the last decade and a half.

“There’s an iconicness to bikes like the Scrambler, Scorpion, and Juiced’s products like that,” Levi reflected. “I think we need to carry forward that performance and platform, but some industrial design needs to happen there as well. For the most part, the things that made us like Juiced over the last 15 years as a community of riders, that stuff is going to carry over into the next 15 years. The high performance, the awesome torque and acceleration, it’s something special. And we ought to carry that on because that’s what people really loved about the brand in the first place, so it’d be foolish to lose that.”

As for the division between Lectric Ebikes and Juiced moving forward, Levi has clear intentions there. It appears that Juiced will remain a separate company from Lectric, even if it benefits from the relationships and the purchasing power that Lectric enjoys. “I’m really looking forward to this challenge,” Levi continued, “because I see an extremely clear pathway to making this successful. You know, Lectric is the #1 selling bike company here in North America, and I think that the expectation for how Rob and I should push ourselves is to try and get Juiced to #2.”

That clear pathway in Levi’s mind is based upon a tried and true formula that he and his Lectric co-founder Robby Deziel developed over the last six years of building Lectric Ebikes. “So how do you do that?” Levi asked himself. “You’ve got to have the world’s best performance, the best price point, and exceptional customer service. And those are things that we have a ton of experience with. We know exactly how those formulas work. And so we have very high aspirations for Juiced.”

That experience is going to be a major benefit to rebuilding Juiced Bikes. “On day one, Juiced will get the benefit of our economies of scale. Our shipping rates are 75% less than what Juiced was paying to ship to customers. I haven’t fully run the numbers yet, but maybe that one thing alone is enough to take Juiced from unprofitable to breaking even. And then if you look at Lectric’s rates for shipping containers or our optimization for how we run every aspect of our business, there’s a very clear path to Juiced not just being reborn, but being a good business, fundamentally.”

It sounds like Levi, Robby, and the rest of their team at Lectric Ebikes have their work cut out for them. It’s not something foreign to any of them, and now they have the benefit of years of experience doing this once before.

However, they must also forge ahead against the headwinds of tariff uncertainty and without the boost offered by a post-pandemic e-bike buying spree. If there was ever an e-bike brand whose iconic legacy was worth fighting for though, Juiced Bikes is it.

As a final note, I contacted Juiced Bikes’ founder and former CEO, Tora Harris, for comment on this story but did not receive a response.