Miele bicycles
Miele is a bicycle manufacturing division of Procycle Group Inc. based in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada.
Miele bicycles were originally manufactured by the Guvin Company beginning in 1982 in Mississauga, Ontario. The company was founded by Jim Miele and several family partners. Miele had immigrated from Italy.
The company originally manufactured quality Italian style road bikes. They even sponsored a local Giro in their native Italy. Later the company diversified to produce a wide spectrum of bicycles including children, city and mountain bikes.
Prospering for many years it began to face difficult times when cheap Chinese bicycles began to enter the Canadian market in the early 1990s driving profits down. Faced with this competition the company went into bankruptcy ceasing operations in 1996.
Jim Miele died January 12, 2003 in Toronto, Ontario from a heart attack, a few years after he stopped producing Miele bicycles.
In 1997 the trade mark was purchased from the bankruptcy trustee by a company in Montreal called BKH Summit. BKH Summit intended to reintroduced the brand with small-scale production of high-end road bikes in St. Laurent, Quebec. However Jim Miele continued to sell bicycles in a Toronto factory outlet after his bankruptcy under the Miele brand name. BKH Summit complained to the RCMP about the use of the trade market. Faced with a costly legal action to assert their trade mark rights BKH Summit in 1999 they sold the trade mark to Groupe Procycle of Beauce, Quebec the largest producer of bicycles in Canada without ever reintroducing the brand.
Groupe Procycle for many years had produced Peugeot bicycles under license marketing them in Canada and the United States. Having lost the Peugeot license Groupe Procycle replaced it with the Miele brand.
References
| ||||||||||||||