Everything Bicycles — Howie Cohen's BMX Wholesaler That Brought Kuwahara, Powerlite, and the E.T. Bike Deal to America (1978 to 1989)

A Legend Bike Co. company history page. This is the company chapter — for the man behind it, see our Howie Cohen page. Sourced from Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, Howie Cohen's own proteanpaper.com collection site, 23mag.com's Powerlite company page, Wikipedia's Kuwahara (bicycle company) article, and bmxmuseum.com forum threads.

A wholesaler born out of a short retirement

Howie Cohen had already had one career in bicycles by the time Everything Bicycles existed. He'd built the Nishiki and Azuki lines at his family's distributorship, West Coast Cycle, and retired from the business in 1976 at age 37. Retirement didn't take. In 1978 Cohen came back and launched a new company, Everything Bicycles, out of Torrance, California — this time built around one category only: BMX.

1978 — a BMX-only wholesaler

Everything Bicycles distributed Kuwahara, the Osaka, Japan-built line Cohen imported through an existing relationship with the manufacturer, plus Powerlite and Torker. A 1978 Everything Bicycles advertisement pictured the Powerlite stem — identical in shape to the DG stem of the era, shown in polished aluminum — alongside the rest of the line. Cohen ran a promotion giving free stickers to any kid who called a toll-free number and could correctly pronounce "Kuwahara," and Everything Bicycles was among the first wholesalers to bring anodized chainwheels, brake levers, and other components into the American BMX market.

The E.T. deal — mechanics of a marketing coup

Kuwaharas took flight — literally — in Steven Spielberg's 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Universal Pictures contracted Cohen and rider Robert Cardoza of Everything Bicycles, working out of Torrance, to build the BMX bikes used in the film: 25 bikes total, five identical builds for each of the five boys on screen. The bikes were built and delivered to Universal around 1981, ahead of the film's 1982 release. Beyond the build contract, Cohen negotiated something bigger for the company: the worldwide rights to sell bikes carrying the E.T. name. That licensing deal, more than the film work itself, is what turned Kuwahara into a smash-hit brand almost overnight. Full story of the bikes and the stunt sequence: the E.T. BMX page.

The rest of the catalog

Cohen's own account of his career, published on his personal collection website, lists a broader run of brands across his career in bicycles — Nishiki, Kuwahara, Cycle Pro, Azuki, American Eagle, and American Flyer among them — built first through his family's retail chain, Playrite Bicycle and Supply Co., then through West Coast Cycle, then through Everything Bicycles. Kuwahara was the brand that made Everything Bicycles itself a name in BMX, but it sat inside a career built on finding good bicycles other people hadn't found yet.

1989 — selling it back

Cohen sold the Kuwahara name back to its Japanese parent company in 1989 and formally retired from the industry a second time. He kept doing occasional consulting work afterward. In his later years he turned to cataloging his own collection of bicycle memorabilia — thousands of items accumulated since 1957 — on a personal website, with a stated plan to eventually transfer the collection to a museum for public and industry use.

What we don't know

The exact incorporation date of Everything Bicycles within 1978 isn't confirmed in the sources we could verify. Whether Everything Bicycles continued operating as a company after the 1989 Kuwahara sale, or wound down at that point, isn't documented anywhere we found — the record goes quiet on the corporate entity itself once Cohen's personal story moves to consulting and collecting. And beyond Kuwahara, Powerlite, and Torker, we don't have a verified, complete list of every brand the wholesaler carried over its run.

Everything Bicycles and Legend Bike Co.

Everything Bicycles distributed Torker — the brand Bill Ryan owns and runs today — starting in 1978. The BMX distribution networks Cohen built in Torrance are part of the same industry infrastructure that put Torker, and later Legend Bike Co., in front of American BMX riders.

Related pages

Howie Cohen · Kuwahara · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the Kuwahara BMX · Torker · History of BMX

Sources

Bicycle Retailer and Industry News — "Beloved industry figure Howie Cohen, 74, dies" (July 12, 2013) and "Howie Cohen remembered at Colorado service" (September 23, 2013). proteanpaper.com — Howie Cohen's own "About Howie Cohen and Everything Bicycles" page from his personal collection website, first-person account of the family brands and Playrite Bicycle and Supply Co. origins. 23mag.com — Powerlite company history page, showing the 1978 Everything Bicycles advertisement featuring the Powerlite stem. Wikipedia — Kuwahara (bicycle company). bmxmuseum.com community forum threads referencing Everything Bicycles and Howie Cohen's death, accessed via search snippet. bmxsociety.com community forum — "Welcome Howie Cohen" thread; accessed via search snippet only, as the forum is JavaScript-rendered and could not be loaded directly.