The critical idea came from speaking to hundreds of riders around the country and understanding the growing demand in range anxiety in micro EVs (electric bikes), but countless riders (commuters, tourers together with explosive growth in gig-economy riders) simultaneously having nowhere to turn to as the traditional cycling industry as a whole has a very tight grip through all distributors, high street and service stations throughout the entire country, naturally stopping a great amount of exciting innovation from newcomer companies and leading nearly all bikes to behave and look the same.
Seeing we can solve a very quickly growing problem and help thousands of riders nationwide, we took action and kickstarted the development of the core flagship by continuously listening to critical rider feedback and creating very exciting new solutions to solve their problem (100-mile long-range, smart 360o active lights, effortless repair and affordable price tag/keeping in mind that the battery pack is the most expensive part of any good e-bike). We successfully avoided the dreaded 40-50% high street mark-up by going direct to consumer and making a very big saving for all incoming riders.
It all started in a little Beeston garage in Nottingham and due to the continues rise in demand has now grown into a large Midlands manufacturing plant. From eating noodles for more than 3 years, investing all our savings, declining on all salaries from day one, 100-hour workweeks, to sleeping on the factory floor, you name it, we have gone through it.
WAU – Right from the start, this prototype had fans, known officially as an early adopter audience. These lovely people would see the bike in action and would very kindly voice their approval. The most common piece of feedback, we noticed, was something along the lines of: ‘Oh, wow!’ And right there in the early days of our community, which would then continue to blossom, had given us our company name. Our ethos is about winning against all odds, but our story is all about the rider.
How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
During the pandemic our orders shot through the roof, stripping out all of our supplies, which then sparked a pivotal point for WAU to bring our operations, software and tooling back home to England from the far east. Focus here in the Midlands was on training our core team of engineers, improving factory efficiency, having our community of riders close to heart, allowing us to develop very exciting ideas forward even faster, and launch truly the coolest smart electric bike ever.
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What can we hope to see from WAU Bike in the future?
Our concrete vision from day one has been to be the number one long-range electric bike brand for rapidly expanding Range-Anxiety market (commuters and tourers) together with explosive Gig-Economy workers.
The core mission focus is to work directly with our quickly growing rider community and stay on clear track by successfully hitting a minimum of 20,000 WΛU flagship dispatch checkpoint by 2024 together with opening a new Giga-Plant with a 200-400 member onsite team.
