Originally Posted by
northernlights
This product is a subcategory of an already niche market or a niche of a niche if you will. It would have to come from an already established company to introduce and offer it in their product line.
Dahon or most companies won't be wasting money or time building a subcategory of a already niche product. I really doubt they got this big by selling bikes that no one really wants and that would also require them to market the hell out of it when their existing product sells really well already. What you are asking a company to do here is to waste resources to build a product that no one was really looking for. To say it will cost them literally nothing is a HUGE misconception! any frame they actually sell have to undergo rigorous standards testing (depending on the country you sell to you would have multiple tests) folding or non folding as well as warehousing the frames. Also when you are making them build these "niche" products they are not building their main product that sells pretty well already. If you want to see this category even start you'll have to do it yourself but I doubt you can convince the big players that there is even a market for such a thing.
oh and also to speak on your other quote that people would not buy into something from a no name company that just started up:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...ke/description
that kind of throws your argument there for a loop.
but this is what you where trying to make companies sell which is already the second time i've seen on kick starter.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...?ref=discovery
This seems to already tell you there is almost very little to no demand for such an item so it's already a failure to even think of starting. Spending money to market something that no one wants or needs is kind of a lousy business practice in my mind. Big companies don't really want to even start selling sure failures. If the product or design was good, all it would need is word of mouth to start up a storm on the internet these days but this was at most a light trickle.
But what you are wanting is a non folding folding bike frame with a long folding stem that can fold down which from my mind is a HORRIBLE design, you have the flexible stem of a folding bike vs the stiffness of a short stem mini velo and then you don't have a folding compactness of a folding bike which now takes up as much space as a full size bike because of the long package now. It basically does nothing great in either spectrum.