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Flevobike is a family
business with father (Johan), mother (Hendrika) and three sons (Arjan, Erwin
and André). With the five of us, we form the Flevobike Technology VOF. It all
started with Johan, when he was working as a teacher. In order to travel the
distance between his home (Dronten) and his work (Lelystad), about 20
kilometers, Johan first used a racing bike. He had read in a Dutch bike
magazine something about a reclining bicycle. A reclining bicycle seemed to
Johan a much better and more comfortable way to travel the distance between his
house and his work than by racing bike. As a teacher of mechanical engineering,
he had the opportunity to make his very own reclining bicycles.
Ready for a ride (André, Hendrika en Johan)
Soon, he had
made more reclining bicycles and the models became more professional. After a
while Johan had designed a small, compact bike. He designed this simple bike
for students. The students could build this simple, small bike piece by piece.
At the moment, this bike is becoming better known as the ‘Flevobike'.
It didn't take much
time before colleagues and other people started asking for information about
this rather unusual bike. They really liked this cute bike and asked Johan if
he could build one for them. When Johan received a phone call during one of his
lessons at school, he decided that it couldn't continue that way any longer. He
decided to start his own company in 1989. In the beginning this was only in the
evenings, but soon that wasn't enough anymore. There was more work than Johan could
handle by himself. Erwin, his second son, did some welding in the evenings. But
even then the capacity was too low to handle all the work they
had to do.
Somebody else was needed. This person turned out to be Andre, Johan's third
son. By that time Johan had started to take more days off from his regular job,
so he could spend more time on fabricating the Flevobike. Two months later,
Erwin got a full time job at Flevobike. The production of the Flevobike was
getting better and better, and so was the turnover. In the mean time, the model
was modified and improved on some points. Hendrika, Johan's wife, was doing
more and more things for Flevobike also. About eighteen months after Erwin got
his job at Flevobike, Arjan, Johan's oldest son, also came to work for
Flevobike.
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Who are we 