The future of bankrupt electric motorcycle startup Cake is still uncertain, but most of its US stock is going to a man in Florida.
Michael Joyce, who runs a St. Petersburg retailer called Emoto, tells TechCrunch that he bought all the Cake Makka and Ösa motorcycles that were shipped stateside, as well as accessories and parts. Joyce says he hasn’t bought any of the other Cake Kalk electric bikes since they were recalled for a battery fire risk and problems with the steering column.
Joyce says he hopes to help keep the Swedish brand alive with the purchase. “The last thing I want as a marketer is for the consumer to be left alone and not trust the brand,” he told TechCrunch in a recent interview. Joyce is also not doing this alone. It’s partnering with a new Detroit-based startup called Bloom, which will store all the inventory and help ship the bikes around the country — a sign of how this corner of the EV industry is adapting.
Cake filed for bankruptcy in early February after spending more than a year trying to raise a Series C round of funding. Founder and CEO Stefan Ytterborn told TechCrunch that the startup even tried courting the likes of Harley-Davidson and traditional automakers , after venture capital options were exhausted, albeit to no avail.
Joyce says Cake’s bankruptcy came as a shock and also presented a risk, as the brand is the only one currently selling to Emoto. The stock purchase gives it “six to 12” months of runway, which will give it time to complete negotiations with other companies to sell electric motorcycles.
Joyce is confident he can sell Cake’s stock after spending most of the last year working on a good sales and marketing strategy. He started out as a simple dealer partner and says he had a “difficult time” selling Cake’s expensive products early last year. But Joyce says he eventually agreed to start taking the company’s products on consignment, which helped fill the Emoto retail space and allow potential customers to interact more with Cake’s bikes, driving monthly sales into the double digits.
“Having the bikes fully assembled in front of them with accessories makes a big difference,” he says. “To show it and say, ‘this could be yours’ — it was a beneficial thing.”
His biggest immediate concern was what to do with all the stock he bought. Joyce says he had been touring warehouses in Florida for the past few weeks trying to figure out how to fulfill orders for the motorcycles when he struck up a conversation with blossoma company launched last year by the founders of e-bike brands Propel and Vela based in Detroit’s mobility innovation district known as Michigan Central.
Bloom’s goal is basically to take some of the hardest work out of the hands of startups in the space, including offering manufacturing, delivery, service and other logistics. It’s an idea that co-founder Chris Nolte believes will have even more traction as companies like Cake or VanMoof continue to struggle to do it all on their own.
“With these brands, there’s been a big push for vertical integration, as some of the biggest players in the auto industry have done,” Nolte said in an interview with TechCrunch last month. “But the reality is that no one really has the right scale on their own, and the market is too volatile to do that adequately.”
Joyce and Bloom are not immediately ready to handle new sales — inventory is currently being transferred from Los Angeles to Bloom’s warehouse in Detroit. Once they all arrive, 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 will become an electric motorcycle showroom, similar to some of the country’s biggest 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 this new version of the company.
