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NYC and SF Bay area seem the perfect places for marketing her products at a premium though. Plant one of those tricycles in the mission district and SF tech hip

by tinbad 11y ago

NYC and SF Bay area seem the perfect places for marketing her products at a premium though. Plant one of those tricycles in the mission district and SF tech hipsters will hand her their money.

reedlaw 11y ago
The bicycle helmets could be made anywhere and shipped. The article implies most of her business comes from online sales.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  If she's as successful as the article implies, the cost of rent probably isn't that big a deal to her. It's more important that she be in a place where she can forge local connections, especially with places to do manufacturing. That's why SanFran is a good choice: there's lots of tech manufacturing there. NYC, not so much. NYC keeps trying to push its "Silicon Alley" and various tech stuff, but it seems to fall flat. It's a shame too because there's tons of old factories and stuff there that aren't really being used well, and could be converted to low/mid-volume flexible manufacturing using modern automated equipment. I imagine there's a few factors working against this: 1) the very high rent costs make it hard to attract new people to the area (unlike the Bay Area where the tech people and tech companies are already there, and have been for decades), 2) the public transit isn't that great unless you're in or close to Manhattan (a lot of those old factories and such are in other boroughs or on the NJ side; anything in a decent place in Manhattan has likely already been renovated and converted into something else by now), and 3) the taxes and regulation probably stifle things too much (Silicon Valley certainly has its taxes and regulation too, but the local government has decades of experience in taxing and regulating in a way that mostly supports the tech economy and not driving it out). In a nutshell, inertia is a very, very hard thing to overcome.

by tinbad 11y ago

NYC and SF Bay area seem the perfect places for marketing her products at a premium though. Plant one of those tricycles in the mission district and SF tech hipsters will hand her their money.

reedlaw 11y ago

The bicycle helmets could be made anywhere and shipped. The article implies most of her business comes from online sales.

Grishnakh 11y ago
If she's as successful as the article implies, the cost of rent probably isn't that big a deal to her. It's more important that she be in a place where she can forge local connections, especially with places to do manufacturing. That's why SanFran is a good choice: there's lots of tech manufacturing there. NYC, not so much. NYC keeps trying to push its "Silicon Alley" and various tech stuff, but it seems to fall flat. It's a shame too because there's tons of old factories and stuff there that aren't really being used well, and could be converted to low/mid-volume flexible manufacturing using modern automated equipment. I imagine there's a few factors working against this: 1) the very high rent costs make it hard to attract new people to the area (unlike the Bay Area where the tech people and tech companies are already there, and have been for decades), 2) the public transit isn't that great unless you're in or close to Manhattan (a lot of those old factories and such are in other boroughs or on the NJ side; anything in a decent place in Manhattan has likely already been renovated and converted into something else by now), and 3) the taxes and regulation probably stifle things too much (Silicon Valley certainly has its taxes and regulation too, but the local government has decades of experience in taxing and regulating in a way that mostly supports the tech economy and not driving it out). In a nutshell, inertia is a very, very hard thing to overcome.