The future of Cake, a bankrupt electric motorcycle startup, is still uncertain, but most of its U.S. inventory is going to a guy in Florida.
Michael Joyce, who runs a retail store in St. Petersburg called Emoto, tells TechCrunch that he purchased all of the Cake Makka and Ösa motorcycles that were shipped to the United States, as well as accessories and spare parts. Joyce says he did not purchase any of the remaining Cake Kalk electric motorcycles as they were recalled due to a battery fire risk and steering column problems.
Joyce says he hopes to help keep the Swedish brand alive with the purchase. “The last thing I want as a distributor is for the consumer to be left alone and without trust in the brand,” he told TechCrunch in a recent interview. Joyce isn't doing this alone either. She's working with a new Detroit-based startup called Bloom, which will warehouse all inventory and help ship the motorcycles across the country, a sign of how this corner of the electric vehicle industry is adapting.
Cake filed for bankruptcy in early February after spending more than a year trying to raise a series C funding round. Founder and CEO Stefan Ytterborn told TechCrunch that the startup even tried to court companies like Harley-Davidson and traditional automakers after venture capital options were exhausted, although to no avail.
Joyce says Cake's bankruptcy was a shock and also presented a risk, as the brand is the only one currently selling on Emoto. Purchasing the inventory gives it “six to 12” months of runway, which will give it time to finish negotiating with other companies to sell electric motorcycles.
Joyce is confident she can sell Cake's inventory after spending most of the last year perfecting a good sales and marketing strategy. He started out as a simple distribution partner and says he had a “tough time” selling Cake's expensive products early last year. But Joyce says he eventually agreed to start carrying the company's products on consignment, which helped fill Emoto's retail space and allowed potential customers to interact more with Cake's bikes, driving monthly sales into double digits.
“Having the bikes fully assembled in front of them with accessories is a big difference,” he says. “Pointing it out and saying 'this can be yours' was beneficial.”
His biggest immediate concern was what to do with all the inventory he purchased. Joyce says she was touring warehouses in Florida for the past few weeks and trying to figure out how to fill motorcycle orders when she struck up a conversation with Blooma company launched last year by the founders of electric bike brands Propel and Vela that is based in Detroit's mobility innovation district known as Central Michigan.
Bloom's goal is to basically take some of the hard work away from startups in the space, including offering contract manufacturing, delivery, service and other logistics. It's an idea that co-founder Chris Nolte believes will resonate even more as companies like Cake or VanMoof continue to struggle to do everything themselves.
“With these brands, there was a big push to integrate vertically like some of the larger automotive players have done,” Nolte said in an interview with TechCrunch last month. “But the reality is that no one has the right scale on their own and the market is too volatile to do it properly.”
Joyce and Bloom aren't immediately ready to handle new sales; Inventory is currently being trucked from Los Angeles to Bloom's warehouse in Detroit. Once everything arrives, it will serve as one of the first tests of this new hybrid business model. Joyce hopes to find enough success to turn Emoto into a brand that becomes a one-stop shop for electric motorcycles, similar to some of the country's largest powersports dealers.
In the short term, if Cake can find a way to restructure and continue, Joyce says he wants to remain a partner in that new version of the company.
