See also: Vista documents

Country: USA

As far as I can tell, Vista was a ‘house brand’ developed by the National Bicycle Dealers Association (of the USA). They appear to have organised bulk purchases of Vista branded bicycles from Columbia and from Japanese manufacturers. The idea seems to have been to enable Independent Bicycle Dealers in the USA to purchase Vista bicycles, in quantity, at prices that allowed them to compete with multiple retailers.

The derailleurs in this collection are Vista branded SunTour models that were fitted to their Japanese manufactured bicycles. The desire to ‘own brand’ the derailleur runs parallel to Schwinn’s desire to disguise the origins of the Shimano derailleurs that it was using on its Japanese manufactured models in the 1970’s.