Honda Changes the Game

We found out about this law on December 28th 2008 after a Trials bicycle riding friend said the niche bicycle industry (Trials/BMX etc) were projecting imminent doom. We checked out the CPSIA law, and the deeper we got, the crazier it appeared. We were horrified that, despite the law being signed by President Bush in August 2008, the CPSC, who were given the task of enacting the law, had really failed to inform businesses around the Country that this Law was coming into effect. There was no machinery in place. Each business had to find out for themselves. We were in the process of ordering another container of bikes, and stopped it immediately. On January 6th, we gave our Operations Manager a months notice. Clearly, if we could not sell bikes, we could not employ anything more than a skeleton crew.

As February 10th loomed, we were in a state of confusion. We had heard virtually nothing from affected industries, so had no idea how they were playing it. There was an assumption that the law would be fixed by the Feb 10th deadline. There was even a ruling set for Feb 9th that could potentially fix the law.

On February 2nd, we discovered that Honda had sent a letter to their dealers instructing them to remove all kids bikes and ATVs from their showrooms on Feb 10th, and to cease sales of bikes & parts for those bikes. This caused a domino effect through the industry. Yamaha was next, then Kawasaki, Suzuki, KTM, Polaris etc followed suit. This was clearly a game changer, and OSET decided to follow suit.