Long Beach Dealer

Dealer Spotlight

Segway of Long Beach

Barry Fulton, the owner and “Segway King” of Segway of Long Beach, opened his store in 2005 at the Pike in Long Beach, California, a thriving downtown commercial retail development near the city’s top attractions, including the historic Queen Mary. In July 2007, we sat down with him for an interview.

Where are you from originally, Barry?

The San Francisco Bay area, but I’ve lived in Southern California for over 25 years.

Why Long Beach? What brought you here?

Actually it was strictly a Segway application. The area here at the Pike is new … it’s flat. The beach paths are nice and wide. And there are a lot of landmarks. There’s always something exciting to go see. So it creates an environment for tours because of all the landmarks and makes it very easy to get around. The sights are all just a little bit too far to walk … the Queen Mary to Shoreline Village, and on up to Pine Avenue. So it’s just a perfect Segway application.

How long has your shop been open?

My first location, which is at the Pike at Rainbow Harbor, has been in business for two years this May. And we opened a brand-new location right before Memorial Day this year in the lobby of the remodeled Renaissance Hotel at Ocean and Pine Avenue.

How many employees do you have?

I have four full-time employees, three part-time, and a summer intern who is working for us right now.

What do you think makes your dealership different from some other Segway dealers?

Well, we’ve found that to be successful and to have a retail environment like we do here at the Pike, that you really need to do almost everything. So we have several different tours and packages. We have a very, very strong rental program. We do a lot of corporate events, team building, and other things of that nature. We can take out 35 people at a time, so we can accommodate very large groups. We have the largest rental fleet of any Segway dealer that’s out there. We also have an advertising business where we employ a billboard that we designed and manufactured and we do a lot of corporate street team events. And we do that all over the country. We’re quite brisk in sales. We’re one of the top five dealers domestically in terms of volume of units sold. So you almost have to do a little bit of everything because when you’re slow in sales, then the tours pick up. And during the holidays when the tours are kind of slow, people want to buy Segways and take them home for Christmas. So it’s a nice combination of revenue stre

ams.

What are some of the tours you offer?

Our signature tour is a historic tour of Long Beach. You experience all the landmarks of Long Beach … the Queen Mary, Shoreline Village, the harbor, the Aquarium, and out along the Pacific Ocean. We actually take you on the sand and ride through the surfline, so you can say you “Segwayed” the Pacific Ocean. It’s a six-mile track and it’s guided, so you’re out with one of us. But the tour is also narrated, so you get an iPod and headphones and you listen to a historical track describing all the monuments as you go by them.

Besides tours, do you offer other programs? For example, what’s Seg2U on your website?

With Seg2U, we’ll bring Segways anywhere you’d like them. We’ll deliver them. We’ll train you. You go out and glide and have fun. It could be a corporate event. It could be a neighborhood outing. You could just be out having fun with your kids at El Dorado Park in Long Beach. Afterward, you call us, and we’ll come out and pick up the Segways. We offer a lot of other packages too in Long Beach. We’ve partnered with Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, so you can get a two-hour Segway glide and then a complete lunch over at Bubba Gump Shrimp, all for $75. Or, if you prefer, you can do the two-hour Segway glide and get an adult ticket into the Aquarium of the Pacific. So you have to decide if you want to eat fish or see fish.

[Laughter] That sounds like a lot of fun. So tell me about your Segway fleet ... You said it’s one of the largest?

We can take out over 35 people at a given time. So we have 35 Segways, and we have extra machines because we always guide a group of that size. So we typically have 40 Segways available.

Besides the business, how do you incorporate Segway into your personal life?

Well, I live at the beach, right off the beach path, so I commute to work every day by Segway when I can. We do have a warehouse and our administrative offices are out at Signal Hill, out by the 405 Freeway on Cherry Avenue. So, a lot of the time I do have to drive out there, but I much prefer going home and then coming in to check on the store and see how everyone’s doing and how the store’s doing. So I commute down here in the late afternoon and go back home about sunset, so it’s very enjoyable. It takes out the frustrations of the day.

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