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This just goes to show there are intelligent people capable of helping this industry, but brands generally do not seek them out.
I feel the same way about marketing (my area of work). Very few brands are using any kind of modern intelligence in their marketing departments.
Personally I'd say most of us subscribed to this thread do. If you find his posts too long winded then fair enough, don't read them, but for me Jeff brings great insight and knowledge to the thread, he's certainly given me a better understanding of the financial side of the bike world.
I read it all.
I read all of his posts. They're interesting, Jeff seems knowledgeable, and any insight into the machinations of that world are thought provoking.
I have very little interest in or ability to take part in big money finance or business. But I'm curious. I like to understand why people do what they do, why things that seem obvious aren't obvious, and why things that seem complicated aren't so complicated.
It's pretty telling that you took an opportunity to fire a dart at someone in an attempt to posture some self-assumed dominance over someone else when the easiest thing in the world to do would have been to just move on. Second easiest would have been to close the window. Third easiest would have been to go get a glass of water. You kept rummaging through the bucket of most useless things a person could do and eventually - satisfied with what you found - proudly displayed flaccid competition.
Cool.
Seconded; I find the topic fascinating and am grateful to Jeff and the other contributors for sharing their knowledge and opinions.
Is your attention span that low that you couldn't sit through the 30 seconds it takes to get through his post? Like I'm not even sure HOW he could make it much more compact without missing out on key detail.
Thanks for your thoughts @jeff.brines as always!
Where I live, Volvo dealerships are the douchiest and shittiest of them all, and it is one of the reasons I will never drive a Volvo again. I hope RM isn't even remotely similar.
Surely Rocky are large enough to have a CFO full time. It's a company with 70m+ revenue each year, I'd certainly want someone employed to safeguard the risks that come with selling consumer products to that amount.
The largest business I've worked for had revenues of 3 million, and we even paid for modelling of potential downturns and profitability forecasts in the event of input costs unexpectedly rising, because we wanted some level of knowledge of the risks to our investment.
It's as if the internet discovered this year that some bike companies are badly run and most of them could be considered short-lived
https://jalopnik.com/ktm-has-265-000-unsold-bikes-just-sitting-around-1851727595
sheesh
Jesus. I thought Rocky's inventory of 100k+ bikes is bad, but 265k motor bikes is insane!
Pierer sounds like an absolute fool.
Fire sale when
Several MTB brands have had this issue, they had to lock orders in and they still got made regardless.
Pivot, Specialized, trek(Ebikes not selling either), bold, commencal and rocky(apparently) all got smashed, Giant Have a sh1t ton of Ebikes to sell before Giant & yamaha can launch their new ebike.
Giant, YT, Marin/polygon did really well managing most of their models by looks of stocks levels
Canyon? who knows, they are hard to track due to how they can 'assemble to order' -I'd love to know how many Frames canyon sends out for warranty.
I've had 3 of their bikes and Each of them atleast had 1 full frame swap, My torque AL had 4.
AND they will get smashed from their battery drama. thats expensive but does anyone know if business insurance covers a design flaw?
Marin use a much smaller factory in Asia, it's lower production capacity and shorter production run's actually give Marin an edge as more flexible in changing the orders. The down side is this also causes Marin's occasional "We've run out.... SORRY!" and more limited availability of hot stock lines for the international distributors.
Given that Polygon owns Marin, surely they'd use Polygon's factory/ies?
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
Always fascinating isn't it the set up of businesses. Could potentially hurt RM's main fabricator in the far east - Axman, I believe RM account for nearly 50% of their production. Data taken from an article by Jayu Yang taken from https://statementdog.com/
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got all Quebec has to offer about an hour away. Sentiers du Moulin, Empire 47, and of course St. Anne is just an hour and a half away. St. Georges itself has a small hill right next to town with decent trails.
Also losing 17.8 million in 2023 was not good and poor business operations. It seems to me that the head CEO Raymond wanted to step back burned out or retiring in 2022 and the new CEO Katy started in 2022 and then jumped ship in Sept of 2024 knowing that it was heading south. So either she ran it into the ground and or made poor CEO decision on managing the finances. I would think a company this size should have a CFO?
Question for the collective: How well-known are the frame manufacturing companies in Asia? Is it relatively easy to link a manufacturing company to a specific frame brand, or is the process more opaque? I’d love to map this out if possible.
Here’s an analogy from semiconductors to explain what I’m asking:
Nvidia designs, engineers, and sells GPUs
TSMC manufactures Nvidia’s chips
ASML provides the machinery TSMC uses to produce those chips
To be clear, I'm not concerned about who makes the tooling for bike frame manufacturers (e.g., the mill), but I’m curious if there are key suppliers to these frame manufacturing companies—like those providing CNC parts, molds, or similar components.
Also, thanks for the kind words, everyone! As always, if anything I say makes you think, "What on earth is Jeff talking about?" feel free to ask—I may have misstated something. And yes, I know I can get a bit long-winded. Sorry about that!
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of Finance" filling those shoes.
To be fair to this person, they might be an amazing, pragmatic, disciplined, process oriented person who really did have the insights to guide the company appropriately during this time. The reality is, if the CEO (or board) doesn't want to listen, it doesn't matter how right this person is. The buck usually stops with the CEO (or if it goes to the board, Chairman/a vote).
Companies are almost always headquartered where their owner wants to live in my experience. When an owner decides to move to Florida, the company usually "finds a competitive advantage in FL" really quickly afterwards. Have to imagine Sainte-George is where Raymond Dutil lives and grew up.
And agreed, it's close to amazing riding right now, especially with the recent rise of the Quebec trail centers. And MSE and the ski hills have been big mtb spots for a really long time. But the company is named "Rocky Mountain", and Saint-George on the other side of the river from the big deal riding and feels like a very different cultural environment than around Quebec city to me.
Good to know there are some trails local to St George, sure hope they would be with a +$100M revenue bike company hq there!
Search "Taiwan Bicycle Source catalogue"
Many, many moons ago, I actually saw the Taiwan Bicycle Guide in book form while working for Diamondback. It was fun flipping through it and seeing all these different frames that I was used to see branded by various companies..
I'm going to assume corporate locations are more about tax advantages. The owner can technically live and work from anywhere in the world.
It's certainly not widely publicized, but anyone who's spent a good amount of time in product management, engineering, or sales for bike or OE-specced component brands knows the big players, at least on the assembly side (there are frame factories then there's assembly factories, as well as factories that do both). Some times you'll see these names referenced in trade media and, for instance, when someone goes belly-up and you see who they owed money to. Also, if you know some of the names you can look at their websites and see what bikes are in their pictures.
Side note, I used to enjoy investigating vendor booths at trade shows and spotting castings or forgings I recognized – "oh, so that's who does the rocker links for so-and-so." Obviously a level down from frame and assembly there are factories that provide the other parts for bikes, from components all the way down to fasteners and cable covers.
Just don’t tell Supreme Leader Legault that or he will lose his sh!t
Yes, they are owned and made by Insera Sena, They have recently updated one of their production lines that recently made the new marin bikes(alpine xr) etc They've massively increased quality of welding etc.
the Alpine XR's quality is some of the best on the market now.
Turned this up: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caroline-baillargeon-6469864a/
An hour away is close??
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