Originally Posted by Scooper
Regarding the ownership of the name "Paramount", the book No Hands - The Rise and Fall of the Schwinn Bicycle Company, An American Institution has this to say in describing the terms of the sale of Schwinn assets to Zell-Chilmark during the 1993 bankruptcy:
The task of engineering the optimal payout to unsecured creditors fell to Kattens Mark Thomas, who worked to reduce the size of questionable claims and negotiated to get the best deals possible for the assets of the Schwinn Estate not picked up by Zell-Chilmark. One of those unwanted holdings was Schwinn's Paramount machine shop in Waterford, Wisconsin. Shortly after the close of the Zell-Chilmark deal, the estate sold the Paramount Design Group to Richard Schwinn, who is forging his own path in the bike business. Richard and partners George Garner and former Schwinn designer Marc Muller paid $145,000 for the subsidiary that hand-crafted bikes. Yet even Richard cannot lay claim to the family's famed Paramount brand. The Zell Group owns that name, too. Garner bailed out one year after the purchase, following disagreements with Richard. Ed's younger brother - the only Schwinn left in the bicycle manufacturing business - must make the diminished enterprise spin with a new handle, Waterford Precision Cycles.
The name "Paramount" was a Schwinn asset given to Zell-Chilmark, and unless somehow reacquired by Richard Schwinn/Waterford in the past 13 years, now belongs to Dorel Industries, parent of Pacific Cycle.
Richard Schwinn at Waterford informed me this afternoon that Dorel/Pacific does currently own the legal right to name a bike "Schwinn Paramount". It is heartbreaking that so many of the great brand names in cycling have lost their name to sleezeball shlockmeisters.
But, if any of us ever see a "Schwinn Paramount" at Wal-Mart, we would recognize it as a fake. There is only one real Schwinn making top quality road bikes, and that is Richard Schwinn at Waterford Bikes.