Orange Bikes Announces ‘A New Dawn’

To get the discussion back on track – After the announcement of the news and the flooding of the used marketplace with overpriced Orange bikes with people hoping to prey on the nostalgia “always wanted an Orange now I worry I won’t ever be able to own one” market, hopefully we see the used prices drop on S/H Orange offerings.I’m quite fancying a hardtail for days I just want to get the miles in, they call that XC now don’t they? And seen a lovely clockwork outside of my local in summer last year, been fancying one since.

Hurrah for Orange. Love their bikes I’ve got 3 of them, had countless great days out and trips away on them.

Resume the pointless bickering.

I have no desire to sell my 1997 Orange P7.  Well, unless anyone wants to offer me £1500 for it?

Anyone?…

I believe Ball purchased Orange because it was an opportunity for him to take control of his biggest customer and therefore secure business for Bairstows.

Isn’t it more like Bairstows was a Wade family business, Ash is in some way part of that family (son in-law or something?), and he ended up with Bairstows at some point and then Orange too?

Either way, really easy to blame one guy for it all going wrong if you ignore all of the other variables.

I love this website. A business goes bust because sales, consumer demand and market share have all fallen through the floor and the advice from here is ‘you’re doing great, carry on with what you’re doing just lower the price’. Lower the price you say, why didn’t we think of that?

1st thing – You may be surprised to hear but Orange bikes aren’t really expensive compared to everything else on the showroom floor. Pick any bike in the Orange range and compare it to the equivalent (component spec) from another brand. The SRP’s will be pretty close.

£5,000 from Spesh gets you a GX equipped bike with high spec Rock Shox suspension and aluminium frame. Stumpjumper Evo Elite Alloy.

£4,500-£5,200 from Trek gets you a GX equipped bike with mid tier Fox suspension and an aluminium frame. Slash 9 & Fuel EX 8.

£4,800 from Orange gets you an SLX equipped bike with mid tier Fox suspension and a hand built in the UK aluminium frame. Stage 6 Evo Pro.

These aluminium anomalies from other brands is not why sales of Orange bikes collapsed, it’s because these other brands have carbon, multi-link bikes that start at £4,000 that consumers find more interesting.

Back in the mid noughties Orange mountain bikes were probably outselling Trek and Giant mountain bikes in the UK (by that I mean MTB’s with an SRP above £600) I know this based upon purchases from a specific Japanese componentry manufacturer. This is back when an aluminium monocoque frame was considered high end, think Specialized Enduro’s circa 02-04. The Orange Sub 5, Missile, Patriot, etc were all considered cutting edge frame designs. I’ve got no way of proving this but I’d wager that in 07-08 the Orange Five was the best selling bike at it’s price points in the UK.

Since 2008 other brands continued to develop and get better with multi-link designs. When was the last time you read a review of a single pivot Orange where the ride quality was said to be better than a multi-link bike, about 2010? In the mid-noughties a carbon mountain bike was crazy money and a high-end aluminium bike from Spesh, Trek, etc were the same price as a high-end aluminium bike from Orange. Other manufacturers continued to experiment with different materials and manufacturing techniques though and we now have carbon framed, multi-link bikes that are cheaper than Orange’s aluminium single pivots.

Orange’s history was always one of innovation and experimentation up until 2015. Before 2015 Orange had produced full suss frames that were single pivot; multi-pivot, single pivot with a linkage driven shock, URT’s, etc etc. Orange had sold bikes that were both handmade in the UK and produced in Asia out of steel, aluminium, titanium and carbon. As has already been mentioned before the company was sold in 2015 Orange stated that they were a couple of years away from manufacturing carbon frames in the UK. Since 2015 though the message from Orange has been it has to be a single-pivot and it has to be made out of aluminium. There was a definite change in the attitude towards product development and how the brand engaged the consumer post 2015. I know recently Orange have launched some linkage driven bikes but that was obviously too little, too late.

I’m not an advocate of one manufacturing method over another, I also don’t think that a frame made in Taiwan is necessarily better than a frame made in the UK and vice-versa. What I do think though is that if consumers are no longer purchasing your product because they are choosing a competitors instead then you have to do something about it. History suggests that the management at Orange pre-2015 would have done something about it, as if they didn’t move with consumer demand Orange would have still been making URT’s in 2015.

Often with a lot of little people being left to pick up the pieces of their businesses

Without wanting to sound harsh, this is exactly what credit insurance protects against.

Protecting yourself against such potential catastrophic losses should be of primary concern, either with robust credit checking/payment upfront, or insuring against it.

The harsh reality is that if any other business is so exposed to one customer that that customer defaulting puts them out of business, they need to have a a good, hard look at their business practices and how they manage risk. Certainly if you’re that exposed to one customer you’d want to think very carefully about extending them credit, and if you do you’d be well advised to have water tight trade credit insurance to protect you if they default. If you haven’t, and they do, then quite frankly it’s on you

Funnily, this is exactly what happened to Barstow’s when Orange didn’t need any more frames. Ash put his own company out of business then bought it over, presumably for next to nothing while writing off its debts and loads of people are congratulating him for it. I understand the jobs being retained argument but did they even try to find to find another buyer for either company? Given how quickly this was resolved it looks likely not and the debt write off was the plan all along. I don’t think the comparisons with directors bleeding companies dry is correct but Ash has clearly benefitted from a legal process instead of selling off the companies or assets to try to pay the debts.

I don’t think the comparisons with directors bleeding companies dry is correct but Ash has clearly benefitted from a legal process instead of selling off the companies or assets to try to pay the debts.

Yeah – it was definitely intended to be a quiet pre-pack. Alluded to above, and ties up with the whispers from employees that it would all be fine. My betting is that we’ll see the revenue owed a lot of VAT and tax, there’s a local garage that seems to phoenix every few years having owed a ton of VAT etc. Indeed Architrail did just that and phoenixed as Velosolutions a few years ago. Presumably then Shimano/SRAM, although the fact that they managed to lose money during Covid makes me think they bought their groupsets etc more ‘just in time’ and that supply dried up, so maybe not. Pure guesswork of course really until the documentation comes out.

My betting is that we’ll see the revenue owed a lot of VAT and tax, there’s a local garage that seems to phoenix every few years having owed a ton of VAT etc

Mate is a site manager for the building trade and sees this all the time with building companies. Wipe their hands of all debts, guarantees and responsibilities and move onto the next and the next with no consequences. That’s what really annoys me about the current system. Only other winners are these specialist companies that arrange it all, making damn sure there’s enough money to cover their fees before any of the creditors get paid.

Imagine not paying your mortgage and the bank is going to repossess your house. You offer them £1 instead because if they don’t take it, you and your family will have nowhere to live. They’d just laugh at you.

 “You may be surprised to hear but Orange bikes aren’t really expensive compared to everything else on the showroom floor.”
They have been known for their piss-taking prices on full builds for years now. You’ve said this and then picked some other expensive brands as comparison.

Years ago I said that Orange were in the business of making frames; and reluctantly (and expensively*) sold full builds to people unwilling or unable to build their own.

In contrast some of the big big brands seemed to be in the business of reselling mass bought bike components, by assembling them on to a full bike with a frame of their own design.

And occasionally and reluctantly offering a frame only at a ludicrous and offputting price similar to their cheapest full build, as any frame purchase means missing out on the profit of selling a pile of components to that customer.

*back when droppers were an optional extra, they charged full RRP for a reverb for the upgrade (in a time when nobody paid RRP for rockshox anything) and didn’t even give you the static seatpost of the base model that you’d paid for as a spare.

I seldom bought anything that wasn’t at least 60% off but back in 2010-2014 being able to find components with a 60%-80% discount that you could use was fairly easy.

Thats because of two reasons: strong GBP and weak OE protections. You could easily find OE/Grey market parts that were sold in USD originally and so became very cheap when converted to GBP. The currency lost 20% of its value since then and so everything got 20% more expensive to bring in. Add in shipping and other costs, plus the clamping down on grey market goods leaking out of the system means that the discounts shrank and options shrank too.

Over ordering / deliberately over ordering… Thats the difference between the two. Recently its been accidental over ordering, perviously it had been very much deliberate.

My betting is they took all the available Covid loans without a realistic way of ever paying them back. From their accounts their loan debts increased massively whilst other creditors decreased

Kind of had to though. Suppliers lead times and order volumes were increasing for everybody, you had to keep your place in the food chain somehow. If they hadn’t they could have manufactured loads of frames but had no parts to put on them. Difficult to sell frame only with no shocks or e-bikes with no motor.  It’s came back to bite all companies when they’ve now too many bikes and not enough customers. Bigger companies have just had enough resources or investors to hold them up, so far.

Over ordering / deliberately over ordering… Thats the difference between the two. Recently its been accidental over ordering, perviously it had been very much deliberate

Even though it might not have been done for the right reason, I think it did help a lot of bike companies get started.

It was much easier to build a bike up and have the price at least be in the ball park of a complete build so people were able to buy just a frame and go from there.  I guess going straight to selling complete bikes is far more of a commitment.

It probably says more about just how much component manufacturers are taking the piss on everything except their OEM prices than anything else, though.

> HUGS <

I’m not qualified to summarise it for you but skimming through it struck me as a rather tragic tale not some corporate scam (discounting the bank). Am I reading it correctly that the company owned the property that will now be sold to pay debts (to the bank then maybe HMRC if anything left)?

I can’t interpret it completely, but there are some big number there.  Looks like £590k owed to the (hardtail) frame builder in Taiwan, £3.odd million to hsbc and £900k to his uncle Steve.   That’ll be an interesting Christmas family lunch.

£3.5 million in stock sold for £350,000, ouch.
£3 million to HSBC will be unpaid mortgage on property.
£350,000 owed to himself as well.
Lots of small figures to big companies, but stuff like £1200 to the guys at Misspent Summers must hurt.

It’s now on the filing history for Orange Mountainbikes at companies house.