VALUES

ENVO started in 2015 as a one-man business in a small flat in West End Vancouver. With a deep understanding of the environmental impact of fossil fuels, the ENVO team grew with passionate engineers who didn’t find, but created the company to evolve new e-mobility ideas creating products that lead to a greener future.

“I was only 8 years old struggling with a 3V micro electric motor from my Dad’s broken Tape player to make my 16in Cadillac bicycle wheel rotate; It did never work, but it was the beginning of a long journey…

In March 2002, when I was graduating my Mechanical Engineering degree, I patented the first Universal Electric Bike Conversion Kit using SLA battery and direct electric hub motor. It took a whole youth life for a dream to come to a reality.

As a creative product designer, my immigration to Canada was to move to a place where I can find a market for my intellectual products. I had to build from scratch; I founded ENVO DRIVE SYSTEMS. Ever since I have been working on the business during the business hours and on my product ideas after hours.

Primarily, the focus was on technically assessing 200+ varieties of bicycles in Canada, to design matching components for DIY Conversion Kits, as an online business.

Backed by popular demand, the company grew more than double in revenue annually ever since, by adding store front, more employees, warehouses, contractors, and support of customers.

Envo, as a tech and R&D company, has been introducing new Products every year (Full Electric Bikes; D35, Folding, ST, Flex, Snowbike, etc.)

I have been so lucky for finding passionate hard working partners and employees to share a vision, a mission and values in this ENVOlution as well as living in a time/place where the communities understands and supports it.”

ENVO has a bootstrapped business strategy. The next year’s growth plan has always been funded by and proportional to the past year’s achievement. The company’s sustainable growth owes to customers who support their business and the passionate and hardworking team.

The growth has been organic, multidimensional, and symmetrical focusing onthe operation and customers’ satisfaction. Envo’s simple ownership structure makes it goal focused. There has been no external investors to report to and satisfy and no go-to-market and cash-out strategy to be distracted with.

Influencing people’s life as well as creating a sustainable and growing business by realization of ideas, organizational development and team build up has been the focus in past years.

ENVO has an engineering and R&D team of 6+ who not only work on new ideas and product development, but also continuously work on product optimization and quality enhancement.

ENVO has a supply chain team of 12+ people including the production facilities (ENVO’s Burnaby factory) as well as distribution and fulfilment centre.

Sales and customers service, focus on expanding the reach of ENVO products to more and more geographical distribution by partnering up with break and mortar bike shops and sporting goods resellers.

Finance, marketing, HR, IT, operations, and systems are other departments of the company with over 33 fulltime employees in total.

In 2019 the company decided to separate the retail operations under the brand name of ebikeBC as an independent business so that ENVO be more focused on product development and partnership expansion.

ENVO is focused on electric micro mobility. Three mobility areas where fossil fuels are widely consumed are recreational, service, and commutes. As a sustainability solution provider, ENVO aims to impact these three domains directly. These three domains encompass electric bikes, e-trikes, e-scooters, e-velomobiles, e-ATVs, electric water bike, electric snowbike, and electric snowkart. These e-mobility options offer alternatives to cars, motorcycles, leisure activities and public transportation. 

ENVO at its core is an engineering company, we are committed to envisioning and realizing sustainable electric mobility solutions and while we have a successful line of products doing just that, we are working hard on the future of electric mobility. The following are few of the active projects ENVO team is working on:

Unlike the mainstream of competition in electric bike industry, ENVO products are not catalogue products. Electric bike is a huge industry in southeast Asia with hundreds of factories busy with designing and manufacturing e-bikes for local and international use. A small leak of their production to North American market is creating tens of ebike brands who order their catalogue products, labelled through a pure purchase trade. ENVO products are truly engineered in Canada and are based on domestic requirements, regulations, climate and applications.

There are 4 levels of production done by ENVO based on the complexity and cost effectiveness:

1. Engineered, manufactured and assembling in house like SnowKart
2. Engineered in house, parts manufactured overseas and assembled in house, like FLEX series
3. Engineered in house, manufactured, and assembled overseas, Like D35/ST series.
4. Re-engineered in house based on an existing production platform, manufactured overseas, like Lynx series.

In fact engineering in house makes the production and supply chain 10 times more difficult, but gives ENVO the power of offering what ENVO believes is the right product and specs for their community rather than what Asian manufacturers choose. On the other hand, by investing into in-house engineering, ENVO can manage the cost of production at the cost level of manufactured parts plus fees, rather than the catalogue pricing of a manufacturer which includes their overhead and profit margins. Here is the trick how ENVO provides quality product yet affordable.

In all levels, ENVO technical staff perform a 100% quality control checks and final assembly in house to enhance the quality level and guarantee customers satisfaction.

ENVO started as an online B2C retail model through Ebikebc.com. As their products gained popularity, ENVO became B2B towards local bike shops.

Independent bike shops have been servicing the community for many years in cycling culture. Over time the community started losing the quality of service and support from bike shops due to unfair competition from big box stores and online sellers. ENVO partnered up with local shops to share the business rather than compete, taking advantage of the expertise, customer service and
marketing synergy of hundreds of local bike shops across North America.

Besides the quality and unique features of ENVO products, the affordable quality of ENVO attracts local bike shops. Stocking ENVO products means they can offer well-supported, durable quality at a fair price against competitors. The pandemic created supply chain disruptions for ENVO; investing in alternative resources for supplies and pre-booking materials solved the issue. The hard work during the pandemic resulted in ENVO having a solid backup of materials and ready-made products available to ship and deliver. ENVO’s diligence makes them a reliable partner for bike shops and sporting goods retailers across the Country. As a Canadian west coast e-mobility company, ENVO has welcomed partnerships with distributors and big retail brands. ENVO developed new products for Costco and Bestbuy. These partnerships allowed ENVO to create a product for their target customers without impeding the business of their dealership programs and local bike shops.

As consumers become more aware of the environmental impacts of fossil fuels, emobility is seeing a massive shift in the lifestyles of North Americans. Electric bikes are widely known and potentially the most significant leader in the future of e-mobility. However, electric bikes are just one mode of electric transportation. ENVO aims to create a spectrum of electrical products to suit all lifestyles. From electric bikes to scooters, off-road, water, and snow machines.

ENVO has already started to develop ideas in different segments and curate them into product concepts and eventually release them to the market. To do so, ENVO is not only expanding the tech and engineering team, but also absorbs thoughts, ideas, and talents throughout, social media, community build-up as well as design and ideation contests such as ENVO NEXT MOVE contest.

ENVO looks to partner with other companies active in the industry with similar goals to accelerate their growth. ENVO has an employee ownership culture, and all full-time employees are or can be shareholders within the company’s stock plans. ENVO is getting prepared to go public in the stock market to support the ambitious plans financially. Electric micro-mobility will be the next big domain, and ENVO aims to be a global leader.​