Forum menu
You would have to think its more high end bike brands
I was wondering that. Say you're Colnago. You've a dealer network full of bikes and many customers have just laid out several thousand £/$/€ for their latest bikes. You have a massive stockpile but can't flog them off cheap as you'll piss off those customers and your dealers won't be able to sell the bikes they've already bought off you without making a loss and potentially going out of business. What's your move?
If the components are of a high enough value, then there might be a plan to strip them down but that takes manpower so not only is there an added cost, you're also widening the number of folk aware of your predicament.
Say you’re Colnago. You’ve a dealer network full of bikes and many customers have just laid out several thousand £/$/€ for their latest bikes. You have a massive stockpile but can’t flog them off cheap as you’ll piss off those customers and your dealers won’t be able to sell the bikes they’ve already bought off you without making a loss and potentially going out of business. What’s your move?
Rapha found themselves in this position when they started having predictable sales profiles. Everyone knew that in September there'd be an "end of summer clothing" sale, in December/January there'd be a Christmas/NY sale and so on - the result being that no-one* bought stuff at any other time, they'd all be waiting for the sales.
*Well OK, not "no-one" but certainly a lot of their big buying regular customers...
They had to really rationalise the process, remove all the predictable online sales stuff and just go with "archive sales" where they could lump 2 years worth of kit into a pop up store for a long weekend and just cash in on the rush.
And post-Chiggle fire sale, there’s a bit of my brain that won’t get out of bed for less than 75% off.
And they were selling at a loss before that madness even hit. If we except everyone else to sell at a huge loss, well...
Say you’re Colnago. What’s your move?
To be fair, Colnago are probably *fairly* well insulated from this as they tend to have models that hang around for a few years. Just with "this years colours".
The thing that hurts the well heeled dentist end of the market is new groupsets. No one is going to buy an 11 speed groupset on a £10+ grand bike. But they will buy a C68 in colours from 2021...
Someone with a wider spread in the market will be hurt a lot more. Making 10000 extra £1500 RRP bikes in a factory in Thailand and then only selling half of them is far more likely.
I'm an example of someone just not in the market. What ever discount. I've already a garage full of bikes and they don't get ridden enough as it is. The £££ is going into a pension so I can actually retire early... and then ride the bikes I've got more.
Now... if Toyota have a half price Land Cruiser sale... I'm in.
Ive had my eye on a new ebike that came to market in February (stock not due until June). Ticks all the boxes I want. I thought maybe I will wait until Dec/Jan . Hopefully there will still be some stock left as no one is buying stuff and hopefully it will have 20-30% off.
Already though 1 retailer is knocking 10% off the price of the bike and its not even arrived on the shelves yet !
Personally I would have thought it would be Santa Cruz - chuffing expensive bikes that the bubble of being special has now burst. until this year I never saw them in sales. But SC have been seen for huge discounts this year.
Back in the day I used to buy top end bikes ie Kleins or Cannondales. Back then top end bikes were expensive relative to wages, but you could justify saving the cash and it not denting your income too much. The last mtb I bought was in 2013 and cost me £1,300 for an XT equipped fairly posh full susser. Its gone crazy since then. I dont know how anyone can justify spending £10k on a bike these days.
They had to really rationalise the process, remove all the predictable online sales stuff and just go with “archive sales” where they could lump 2 years worth of kit into a pop up store for a long weekend and just cash in on the rush.
Given that Rapha appears to be posting consistent losses - £12 million pre-tax in the year up to January 2023 says google, sixth year in a row in the red - you might think people buying stuff in sales is the least of their problems. You have to envisage that something a bit more radical than simply changing the way they sell off end of line stock is needed.
At what point does a business that's posting consistent losses become unsustainable? It doesn't make much sense from where I'm sitting, though I get that the weird and whacky world of commercial accounting etc all sorts of non-intuitive stuff suddenly flies. I like Rapha, but I can't see how it works as a business unless the owners genuinely believe it's on a pathway to profitability on quite an impressive scale?
The fact that it’s rumoured to have been a thing tells you quite a lot, but it seems a bit like something from ‘Things Fall Apart’ and personally I’d want something a little more concrete then people saying stuff ‘off the record’.
Yes, this.
-four days ago someone put a PSA on here about half price Epics and they are still available
I think that's the issue. The sale prices are what we expect to pay at RRP so they're not going to sell out quickly.
Spending £7+k on a bike is ridiculous to most of us, particularly analog ones. Hence we get to the point where the bikes are heavily discounted or even binned.
Same with Lindt easter bunnies. Pallets of them going for pig food, as they didnt want to discount, as it devalues the brand.
B-in-L worked for a waste disposal company. Except, most of what he was disposing wasn't waste..... Just excess stock, even food.
Sickening.
He said if these companies can just throw lorry loads of stock into an incinerator, what difference is it going to make if we recycle bits of packaging?
Can’t they just paint them a different colour and sell them as next year’s bikes?
Not that I condone binning perfectly good bikes, or anything else, but what would all the people who are employed to get next year’s bikes ready do for a job if they didn’t?
Never if you’re owned by the Waltons of Wal-mart fame. It’s basically a hobby.
Which is fine, I guess, if that's how they view it. A bit like Belstaff and INEOS.
Maybe change the supply of the bikes...companies manufacture a frame that they want to use for the next 3 years, they build a set number of bikes and have them painted in that year's colour way. If demand remains high they get a small number painted up and built and hopefully they have far fewer 'left over'. Next year, there is a new colour way and new groupset and the staff prep the frame for the right colour and built with the right kit...
Sort of what they do now, but without the yearly frame changes...
B-in-L worked for a waste disposal company. Except, most of what he was disposing wasn’t waste….. Just excess stock, even food.
You should see what supermarkets throw out on a daily basis. Problem is, because of food hygiene and storage laws, it's quite difficult to give it away and - as mentioned above - it'd impact the bottom line if everyone knew that at 6pm the supermarket would be throwing out a shedload of food so why bother going in at 10am and buying it?
Quite often the waste bins are secured to stop people accessing it.
^ MrsRNP has a relationship with a local supermarket, we collect their fresh 'food waste' on a Sunday evening when they close, she then cooks it up on Mondays in her community kitchen and feeds 60-80people FOC. There are also hampers/food parcels to see people through the week. Anything left over I take to another local community group on Tuesdays mornings.
There are lots of similar groups doing this all over the country.
[url= https://i.ibb.co/3spMDLj/IMG-6718.jp g" target="_blank">https://i.ibb.co/3spMDLj/IMG-6718.jp g"/> [/img][/url]
@XORA those ET cartridges have already been found. Documentary about it on Netflix i think.
I know, thats what I said 😀
Like all brands, Scott sold less bikes in 2023 than expected, thus they seem to be doing "hold over" bikes in the same color for 2024.
I think they've only added complete new bikes (ransom, voltageE, foil RC ) with few to no color changes to ranges in their expected life cycle
The spark 910 has been the same color for all 3 years that it's been available. Great for me as you'd have no idea my spark was 2 years old. Previously, the top spec bike of the range colors move to much lower spec bike the following year, emotionally challenging the owner to upgrade to the current years color of risk being viewed as a peasant by their riding peers.
Some spec changes (e.g. genius st910 gets axs t for 2024 vs old axs plus realigned/reduced pricing) so perhaps lining up with what you're suggesting on the higher sell through models.
"four days ago someone put a PSA on here about half price Epics and they are still available"
I would imagine Balfe's website stock display is not just their stock but includes what is also in the distributor's warehouse. And that lot isn't selling out in 4 days.
Peasants bike if that type of thing bothers you...it will to some and it'll be completely irrelevant to others, but I get your point. Consumerism drives the need for the latest and people.will.pay for.it, but I suspect that volume has decreased over the last 4 years - either due to cost of living impacts or more bikes to buy for various disciplines - point being there are fewer people looking to buy X at that RRP.
The on consignment thing is similar to what's called Channel Stuffing in the IT hardware industry. If you're a vendor or distributor and need to pump those numbers up, you send your stock to disties (if you're a vendor) or resellers / other disties (if you're a distributor) and mark it as sold. That gives your quarterly number a bit of a pump, and the receiving party either returns, sells or buys at a discount. A few scenarios I covered as a journo way back when:
A distributor used to send lorryloads of expensive hardware for long, long laps of the M25 once a quarter. Unfortunately one of the lorries was ripped off, causing all kinds of issues, as the kit it was carrying should have been in a warehouse or sold - but was neither.
A very, very large vendor's sales teams used to oversell kit to customers. If you needed, say, 500 of something, they'd sell you 1,500 at a massive discount to hit their numbers. Often that spare thou would end up on the grey market - and at least one distributor was founded on buying grey market kit legitimately sold as a stuffing exercise, or by exploiting the Treaty of Rome and buying in kit sold cheaper in Greece or another EU country.
One very large server manufacturer that was absolutely slaughtered during the dotcom bust as they sold / loaned / traded for stock all kinds of kit at a discount to startups which then went bust, quickly followed by receivers and administrators selling that kit on to second hand dealers, sometimes still in its shipping containers.
The landfill rumour may or may not be fact - but equally it's not necessarily the vendors who can't shift it- it might be the contract manufacturers who are suddenly lumbered with thousands of really quite distinct frames they can't shift and are obliged to scrap by contract. The vendor may have to pay a kill fee of some sort to stop them reselling as a white label, too. So - bear in mind this may be more of a supply chain thing than a brand name thing.
If the bikes are alloy, it's likely the frames have scrap value and can be recycled. Carbon not so much. I have to say I've seen loads of discounted kit from some of the brands named above on sale, so I doubt it's them. Also bear in mind some stuff can be repainted for 2025, or pushed further down the model rank to the more basic models, something I think Cannondale did at one point. That's often the case with big makers anyway, as they trickle building techniques, designs, specs or even overstock frames down a rung; that's how and why you can pick up boost hardtail frames with through axles now when a few years back they were 135 or 142 qr.
I'd be looking for the large scale manufacturers whose bikes are not as easy to find on discount.
There are lots of similar groups doing this all over the country.
There's a charity that do it nationally: https://fareshare.org.uk/what-we-do/
What would that achieve?
I and a few folk I know would never buy from that bike brand again. It would also help form up regulations against this sort of thing. Could result in fines for the company. Opens up a world of hurt and damage to reputation and brand if they’ve made any bold green claims. This sort of behaviour, quite frankly, needs to stop regardless of what sector it is in.
I and a few folk I know would never buy from that bike brand again. It would also help form up regulations against this sort of thing.
Regulations? How?
We went and had a look at a Trek Powerfly for my wife this morning. RRP was £3,500 reduced to £2,500. The original price was wildly optimistic given the spec , even the shop guy agreed that the lower price was more online with it's actual worth .
I think it highlights the greed ? Post Pandemic by companies and a much needed reset is happening.Ive thought for a long time that model years is a joke if it's just the same bike with a different paintjob , unless there's significant changes .
Don't get me wrong, if it actually has happened, then it's lamentable on sustainability grounds in particular, but unless it's actually broken the law, I'm not sure there's much that can be done about it. Of course, people could choose to make buying decisions informed by the brand's actions and probably would.
But as far as I can see, at the moment, this is basically an unsubstantiated rumour. And if it did happen, you have to think that it would have been a pretty desperate measure taken on existential grounds - ie: without it, the company goes bust, people lose their jobs etc.
But unless it really has happened, it's all a bit of a moot point.
The original price was wildly optimistic given the spec , even the shop guy agreed that the lower price was more online with it’s actual worth .
But hidden in that cost is shipping (hugely more expensive now than it used to be plus disruptions due to piracy around Yemen), energy costs to run the factories and shops (also hugely increased in price), inflation plus margins for distributor and retailer.
It's not as simple as just going "everyone got greedy and it's biting them on the arse".
Should be named and shamed in my opinion.
What would that achieve?
They might stop doing it.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90895425/adidas-yeezy-shoes-stock-unsold-charity-ye-partnership
So, is there any actual evidence that any manufacturer sent bikes to landfill?
Sadly it seems they've buried the evidence
I think it highlights the greed ?
Really? Costs have gone up hugely... where's the greed in bike companies and shops trying to avoid loses, staying open, and paying their staff?
Which Powerfly was it by the way? There's a big range under that umbrella model name. Some are definitely worth more than £2.5k. Some perhaps not.
What we need to know, is where these bikes are buried !
That's Giant suing Stages for unpaid invoices, including over $5m for product they've manufactured and are still storing. I can see how that might end up as landfill.
Regulations? How?
Times are changing, WEEE regs are a thing. EPR is taking off, massive ball ache that it is. Reusable packaging regs are on the horizon. Doesn’t take much of a leap to move to hefty fines or tight regs about what does and doesn’t go to landfill.
All these regulations are coming in as we aren't bothering about this proactively. If we did, things would be in a slightly better place, I suspect.
For plastic, sorry, carbon?
Not bikes, but Rapha laying off staff 😕
(Apologies if it has already been posted)
Really? Costs have gone up hugely… where’s the greed in bike companies and shops trying to avoid loses, staying open, and paying their staff?
You know what though... They haven't. Staff and energy costs have gone up, but parts and manufacturing have actually gone down slightly (since 2023) and they didn't soar in 2023 either. Shipping went up for a while but has fallen back, and on a 3K bike it remained a small %age even when it was high.
Super doooper inflation was quite a western thing, Taiwan didnt even breach 4%. So in terms of the cost of a bike, the %age of its value that is directly attributable to the costs associated with staff in western countries, and their offices did go up, but thats maybe 20% on 10% of the cost of a bike?
Not bikes, but Rapha laying off staff 😕
Rapha North America Abruptly Closes Bentonville Office, Lays Off Staff
Shows how much I know.
BillOddieFull Member
At what point does a business that’s posting consistent losses become unsustainable?
Never if you’re owned by the Waltons of Wal-mart fame. It’s basically a hobby.
Also Walmart have just bought the Smart TV firm Vizio, which has raised some eyebrows from privacy and competition standpoint.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/20/24078060/walmart-vizio-acquisition-deal
oldfart
Full MemberWe went and had a look at a Trek Powerfly for my wife this morning. RRP was £3,500 reduced to £2,500. The original price was wildly optimistic given the spec , even the shop guy agreed that the lower price was more online with it’s actual worth .
I think it highlights the greed ? Post Pandemic by companies and a much needed reset is happening.
Trek have done this forever, it seems to be more or less an early adopter strategy- sell a bunch of bikes at an inflated price to the less price sensitive crowd, then drop them once that market's drying up. My last Trek was a 2014, I reckon you had to be absolutely mad to buy it at RRP but they dropped to a sensible price after about a year, then popped back up with a "new" (different spec, same frame) release, then dropped again.
I like Rapha, but I can’t see how it works as a business unless the owners genuinely believe it’s on a pathway to profitability on quite an impressive scale?
I like Rapha as well, but I don’t think it’s as good as it used to be, and I suspect like any ‘luxury’ brand dependent on discretionary spend, it’s suffering at the moment.
but I don’t think it’s as good as it used to be
Their bottles went from rebranded Camelbacks (nice) to some generic rubbish. I’m still using the former, but won’t be buying the latter.
Core shorts are still my go to. They’ve been consistently excellent. Never paid full price though. I also have base and indoor layers, again not full price.
Well you can always try things like.
and
or
There are things that can be done to limit waste. But then again we're British and what can we learn from anyone else......