Two or three years ago if you were a teenager riding a laid-back cruiser bike, you would likely be a target for ridicule. Unless you rode a traditional BMX or mountain bike, you just weren’t cool.

Then along came television shows such as “Monster Garage” and “American Chopper,” which popularized custom chopper motorcycles, and on the heels of that followed a mini-revolution in the bike industry.

Flip through most manufacturers’ 2005 catalogues and near the back of them, usually under the “specialty bikes” heading, you’ll find some variation of the pedal-powered chopper bike.

Kona has the BikeHotRod. Giant has the Stiletto. Norco has the NNC Chopper. Now it seems you’re not cool if you’re not selling a chopper bike. Giant’s Stiletto, which was first shown at Expocycle and Interbike last fall, has been a magnet for customers.

“At the consumer show in B.C., we had the Stiletto out there with all of our composite bikes and a downhill bike, and the first thing everyone wanted to sit on was the Stiletto,” said Giant’s marketing director Wayne Bleakley. “It’s a pop-culture thing, so it appeals to more people than just those in the bicycle industry.”

Though Giant considers the Stiletto to be a fad-driven product with likely a fairly short lifespan, Bleakley said sales have been higher than expected.

“The response was huge. It was three to four times higher than our projections,” he said. “It’s a niche product and it’s definitely driven by all the stuff on TV.”

The chopper phenomenon also isn’t limited to just higher-priced specialty bike shop lines. The Schwinn Stingray first became popular in the U.S., but Canadian Tire starting selling the $249 youth bike across Canada.

“We knew it was already doing well in the States so it was taking off. We thought it would be a great thing to try and it was a good call,” said Irene Chiu, the bicycles category analyst for Canadian Tire, which is the exclusive retailer for the Schwinn Stingray in Canada.

The bike is co-branded between Schwinn and Orange County Choppers, making it a hot seller since it first arrived at Canadian Tire stores across the country just before Christmas. “That’s a huge selling feature because all of the other ones in other stores aren’t co-branded,” Chiu said. “So far sales have been pretty good. It seems to be a good novelty item.”

But the concept behind the chopper phenomenon really started with cruisers “” bicycles designed as comfortable alternatives to road or mountain bikes. Typically designed with sweeping handlebars and a far more upright riding position, cruisers take their cues from the old beachcomber bikes of years past. They open up a big new market for bike companies.

Electra Bicycles is the biggest player in the beach cruiser game. The California-based company, which is in its 12th year, is focused solely on cruiser bikes.

Electra started making its style of bikes long before it was a popular fad, and has clearly become the benchmark that other mainstream companies measure themselves against. Still, Electra doesn’t mind the copycats out there.

“It actually confirms what we’ve been doing for 12 years. It’s sort of affirmation that there are a lot of people who aren’t into full-suspension bikes,” said Barbara Mizuno, the director of marketing for Electra.

In Canada, Revolution Sport Supplies out of Calgary first imported the Electra line in 1997, but with limited success. However, with the cruiser boom in the last couple of years, Revolution’s Andrew Gomez picked them up again in 2003 and the demand is huge.

“It’s been unbelievable. In 1997, it was a struggle to sell 300 a year, but now our projections for 2005 are almost 10 times that,” said Gomez. “Electra has really been driving cruiser sails in the U.S. and the momentum has trickled north.”

Giant has just brought its lines of beach cruiser bikes north of the border for 2005 and, like the Stiletto, the response has been better than expected.

“We’ve always been strong in that category, but this is the first year we’ve brought the beach cruiser-style of bike into Canada and it has done quite well too,” said Bleakley. “I think it’s a limited market and there are a lot of people in the game now with these bikes.”

One company that doesn’t have a chopper or cruiser bike in its 2005 line-up is Specialized. Marketing director Dave Pecuch said the company is weighing the business sense of adding a cruiser to its line-up in 2006. A few years back, in 1996, Specialized sold a bike called the Shark Cruiser, which had a built-in bottle opener.

“There’s a possibility that we might have something like that, but you have to look at how much it would cost to develop it and how many you would be able to sell,” he said. “I can’t see selling a ton of these things because it’s more of a novelty item.”