[Closed] Wiggle sold??

Wasn't me 🙄

Hope they used their £100 off Chrimbo voucher......

Bit over estimated there, but here is the truth,

Mitch Dall, who together with fellow entrepreneur Harvey Jones founded Wiggle with just £2,000, has sold his 26pc stake in the company.

ISIS Equity Partners, the private equity group, and Wiggle's existing management team have bought out Mr Dall's shares in the retailer.

Mr Jones, Wiggle's managing director, will retain his interest in the company but has opted to step back from day-to-day duties. The company is searching for a new chief executive.

The sale brings to an end a three-year partnership between ISIS and Mr Dall after the buyout group led a £12.3m refinancing of the retailer in July 2006 in exchange for a 42pc stake in the business.
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Wiggle, which sells clothing and accessories for outdoor pursuits, has grown rapidly since the buyout, taking advantage of the growth of the online retail market and the British public's burgeoning interest in cycling.

"The growth at Wiggle has been phenomenal," said Mr Dall, "but I enjoyed the embryonic stage."

Mr Dall used the first ISIS investment to launch mobiwasher.co.uk, an online retailer that specialises in selling mobile pressure washers for bicycles and other outdoor accessories.

ISIS also owns Fisher Outdoor Leisure, one of the UK's leading distributors of bicycle parts to the retail trade.

With that type of debt to service, I can't see wiggle being competitive in the market place any more.

They've spent a good while concentrating on price shagging to grow turnover at the expense of actual profit, with view to an easy sale based on growth... operating profit dropped from about 13% to 11.5% in last figures.

covering that sort of investment, with the investor expecting a reasonable return, there's no way they can continue with the USP of low margin, and will wither on the vine.

It works for Amazon, though.

covering that sort of investment, with the investor expecting a reasonable return, there's no way they can continue with the USP of low margin, and will wither on the vine

I think they are looking at the vertical integration with Fishers as part of the commercial setup

I bought it with my Platinum discount and the extra £10 off email.

A partial mbo is interesting enough. But Isis will beon a 3 or 5 year exit strategy. Interesting to see what the ipo or trade sale value will be then.

problem with a vertical integration with fishers, is that again it makes the retail price shagging difficult, if Wiggle sell anything from the fisher catalogue cheaply, then Fisher will lose the LBS market, which as much as we don't want to accept it ourselves is far, far bigger than the internet market - and to an extent, the internet market itself relies on leaching off the back of a physical presence in shops (look at it in store, buy online)

look at the brands that are under the Chain Reaction family wing - you don't see them shagging them out.

The other problem vertical integration creates is foreign sales - if in this example, the brand importer for SRAM from one country (Fisher) sells through their retail arm (Wiggle) into another region (Australia) then there is going to be hell to pay behind the scenes with the australian SRAM importer going ape over the UK importer shagging his market.

complex and messy this is going to be!

Good to hear that these ISIS guys have picked themselves up after their flawed bottom bracket design of a few years ago. 😆

Wiggle used to be a good alternative to CRC.. then I percieved less bargains and an upping of prices such that they never seemed better value for pretty much everything... and I have rarely visited since.. that was about 8 years ago?