Tracking The Health Of The Bike Industry In 2023

Mystic smeg:

If there’s a dip in bike sales, they will rocket in a couple of years.

“Next up, Neptune will move into Aries (from 2025 to 2039). Aries is a fire sign associated with passion, impulsivity, and determination, so this will be a very different manifestation of Neptune’s energy. (Fun fact: Neptune hasn’t occupied Aries since the mid-1800s.)”

Everyone will go crazy for sports.
Anticipate a lot of action at a&e.

Anyone else starting to yearn for adventure?

(For me, Neptune in Pisces was a 12 year long indulgence in coffee and carrot cake. Now, I feel like I’m being drawn to khatmandu, Bali, etc).

Who can forget the wonderful range of Emmelle MTBs?

My first ever new bike was a pink & grey smoke swirls Emmelle with fandangled new underbar shifters….

Edit: these STI’s…

Woah!

Emmelle. M L. Moore & Large.

Really?

Onion please tell me you knew that!

(p.s. thanks for the wee waves yesterday and today)

I really, really didn’t. Or I’ve simply forgotten (age doesn’t come alone). I put it on a par with folk who don’t know that the blue triangle in the Garmin branding points North…😂

Only if you are facing that way when you read the branding! 😉

A £3k bike with a RockShox 35 fork on is taking the piss and they know it.

Yeah but you’re forgetting the expensive words that really bump up the price.
“Trail tune” “pro”, “expert” “Race geometry” etc etc,they add hundreds to the base line.

Work as a mechanic – have some 15 years of experience on the job.

The bike I ride most is a 2008 Kona Unit 2-9 steel framed rigid bike. It has got XT hubs, cranks, Dura ace + Paul thumbmount shifter and a 1×9 transmission, Jones bar and Deore brakes from a few years ago. I have some 4 XT 9-speed shifters, brand new – I bought them from shops I have worked in when I found them unsold in storage. I have cassettes (9 and 10, plus a couple 11), chains and wear-out parts for everything at home. I never ride the “latest and greatest” – I ride what was best or second best 10 years ago.

That bike has more than 50 000 km on it, possibly close to 100k. But for the price of one 12-speed SRAM cassette, I ride for years on my 9 and 10-speed XTs…And it is still a great bike – its just like these gravel and bikepacking bikes are now. I have never understood the allure of the most expensive bling. I want stuff that works well and doesnt cost a fortune. I do have an ebike with 11-speed, but that too was a shop test bike that I got for peanuts – a 2018 model, well kept and maintained, on its second motor and third set of frame bearings. Got 4 identical serviced shocks for it – they are all Monarchs – because a Monarch from over 10 years ago uses the same service parts as a Monarch from 2 years back.

What really made me smile once was a customer ogling my Unit, asking how much it costs – in a shop with S-Works and what not bikes around it. I smugly said “its not for sale, its my personal bike and it is priceless compared to these other ones!”

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matt_outandabout
Full Member
Who can forget the wonderful range of Emmelle MTBs?

My first ever new bike was a pink & grey smoke swirls Emmelle with fandangled new underbar shifters….

Edit: these STI’s…

Mine was an Emmelle Cougar about 87 it ended up getting a crack in the head tube.

Sadly, it looks like the distributor Moore Large are the latest to add to the list. Probably not a household name to the consumer but well known in the industry and have been around a while.

Cadence active limited registered Feb 9th 2023 smells like Cullen skink no ?

@trail_rat
Isn’t that a soup?

A fishy kinda soup…..

Cadence active limited registered Feb 9th 2023 smells like Cullen skink no ?

Yes. Four days before we all lost our jobs. It did not go unnoticed.

ProBikeKit the latest to add to the list.

ProBikeKit the latest to add to the list.

I’m glad I’ve read that. I was just in the process of buying some kit off them but for some reason my card kept getting declined.

Sounds lucky on my part.

Sucks for the people working at THG, but will anyone miss PBK?

CRC/Wiggle are equally corporate machines that happen to sell bike bits, but at least you can use them as a one stop shop, plus in-house brands etc. PBK were just the kind of shop that occasionally came up cheapest on google. And I never understood why they didn’t let you buy other THD brands on the same order and combine postage. I might actually have used them frequently if I’d be able to buy protein etc at the same time.

will anyone miss PBK? PBK were just the kind of shop that occasionally came up cheapest on google.

True, but that counts for most online retailers these days. I haven’t used them loads but still probably once or twice a year over the last (checks) 13 years.

Morvelo are also a part of THG – considering the recent woes of other smaller cycle clothes brands hopefully they won’t be next for the chop.

Sucks for the people working at THG, but will anyone miss PBK?

I certainly will.
For the things I’ve bought off them, including a couple of AXS Reverbs, they’ve been a considerable amount cheaper than other places and the service has been faultless.

probikekit is still trading, I assume running down stock based on the link above? I ordered from them earlier in the week and it has been shipped.

I remember when my boss started selling emmelles, “if anyone asks, they’re french”

To Mrauer…. sure you appreciate the irony that if everyone does what you do you won’t be a bike mechnanic for much longer…

There was always going to be a post covid correction. Nobody sensible should infer continued growth based on pandemic buying habits

Cost of living crisis has exacerbated a reduction in spend that was always going to happen.

Don’t believe me? look on eBay.

There are a lot of signs that the bike industry is going to struggle in 2023, so we thought we’d start a story to track some of the stories we hear ab …

By stwhannah

Get the full story here:

Tracking The Health Of The Bike Industry In 2023

Article in the Grauniad on the subject:

So what went wrong?

“We could see it before anyone else,” said Martin Shepherd at Reynolds Technology in Birmingham, which for the past 125 years has made steel tubes used to create bicycle frames.

“During the pandemic, you couldn’t ship bikes fast enough,” he said. “Everybody’s lead time for orders [mostly to Taiwanese factories] started to go up nine months in advance, 12 months in advance.

“Now we’ve come out of the other side of it, there’s just vast amounts of inventory because all those people who were having to order 500 bikes 18 months in advance were suddenly swamped with stock.”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/nov/04/brexit-lack-of-cash-politics-has-the-uk-cycling-revolution-run-out-of-road