Tioga - The Company

 Tioga is the brand name used for marketing purposes as a part of
the trading organization known as Oriental Boeki with offices
located in the San Fernando Valley of California. Tioga to the best
of our knowledge has no manufacturing facility, instead it relies
on factories, many already involved in making bike parts, to
manufacture on their behalf. In some instances they establish
designs or specifications for goods they want made. In other
instances they merely sell the goods the factory already makes
but has the Tioga brand name imprinted on the goods or the
packaging. An example of this is the Sugino rear wheel Tension
Disc, which Tioga markets as their Disk Drive or Disk Drive Pro.
With the factory contacts and contracts established, the
specifications of the goods to made under the Tioga brand are
announced to importer/distributors who then can buy the Tioga
brand goods generally by letter of credit with Marui Ltd. an export
company. Once the order arrives and the method of payment has
been established, then the manufacturing factory will actually
begin making the ordered goods which will ultimately be
delivered to the importer/distributor. If none of the
importer/distributors privileged to buy Tioga brand goods
actually orders one of the announced products, in all likelihood
you will never see it as a consumer.

  The legend of Oriental Boeki goes further, to the best of our
knowledge, one of the principals, or perhaps the only person with
ownership interest in Oriental Boeki is "Rio" Marui. Rio is a
Japanese businessman who is said to have to have made his first
fortune through shoe outlets in Japan. He business interests
expanded and he became involved in exporting from Japan bicycle
parts through his business Marui Ltd. It is said that he once, (and
may still have), sole export control of Shimano bicycle parts to
at least the United States and could possibly have been
worldwide. One of the other export relationships Marui
Ltd./Oriental Boeki/Tioga enjoys is with a Japanese company
called Mitsuboshi. Based in the Osaka area of Japan Mitsuboshi is
a manufacturer largely of what we call "V pulley belts". You
know, the type of pulley belt that operates the water pump on
your automobile engine. A small part of Mitsuboshi capacity is
used to manufacture bicycle tires. At least in the case of the
United States, to the best of our knowledge, every bicycle tire
made by Mitsuboshi that's imported to the United States seems to
be exported through Marui Ltd. Mitsuboshi once sold tires in the
US under their own name and using their own trade mark which
was Three Stars in a Triangle, but the only time it's seen in the
U.S. now is on Tioga brand tires.

 Don't get us wrong, Mitsuboshi does great work and it would be our
factory of choice for making tires with our own brand name, but
they are so busy making Tioga and Specialized tires that, to our
knowledge, additional manufacturing under new brand names is no
longer considered.

 That's right Specialized, Michael Sinyard the founder of what was
then Specialized Bicycle Imports established a relationship with
Marui Ltd., and thereby Mitsuboshi, many years ago to have their
high end tires made for them by Mitsuboshi in Japan.

 One of the people who once worked at Oriental Boeki, is a fellow
named David Ajiki. He worked at developing new product ideas for
goods under the Tioga brand name. David left to found, with
another partner, the bike parts company known as Onza.David later
bought his partner Danny
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