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We've obviously talked about this a lot, and I’m in a bit of a unique spot, having played the “CFO” role at a small, vertically integrated manufacturing company in the outdoor space. I don’t think I’m oversharing when I say it’s a labor of love. That’s not to say Intend isn’t profitable, but let’s be real: Kornelius could probably make a lot more money as a founder/design engineer in just about any other industry.
I touched on this in the podcast I did a while back, but the IQ level in the bike industry is wild. You’ve got incredibly talented people making a fraction of what they could elsewhere simply because they love this stuff. That’s not a bad thing, per se, but it does contribute to market saturation. And while we don’t talk about it enough, I think it’s a big factor in what’s gone down over the past few years. I love how many options I have with respect to literally every part on my bicycle, but in no way am I underserved in any single one of those areas. If anything, its dizzying to make a decision, especially if money doesn't really matter.
I was just looking at Intend’s sitec 8 forks, 1 shock, a full brakeset, and a bunch of other components. Designing, manufacturing, selling, and supporting that many products is no small feat. I don’t know if he’s doing most of the machining in-house or working with vendors in Germany, but I’d guess the team is more than four people probably closer to 8-12 just based on what it would take to keep all that running smoothly.
My guess? Kornelius is doing well for the bike industry. But I also doubt he’s ever had a 40-hour workweek (he probably works 7 days a week, and is never not thinking about it). Running a business like that juggling a bunch of SKUs, managing production planning, keeping margins in check, handling support it’s enough to make anyone’s head spin.
Huge respect to outfits like Intend doing aerospace-level work for a fraction of the net take-home.
Don’t they have Trickstuff too or do I need more coffee?
You need MOAR coffee: https://bikebiz.com/dt-swiss-acquires-german-brake-brand-trickstuff/
(Maybe you're thinking of the Trinity brakes? https://www.intend-bc.com/products/trinity/?v=0b3b97fa6688)
According to this "factory" visit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ8eDLTDafg (in German)
Intend has the following employees:
2 x 100% (one of them is Cornelius)
2 x 80%
1 x unspecified hours, sounded like a replacement for one of the 80% guys who was on parental leave when the video was filmed
Pretty small operation for how many products they have and what great customer service they deliver.
Machining is outsourced, assembly is all in house.
Super bummed when I got that email. FTF is my local shop. Always like going in and chatting with the crew and I have to say the bleeds they do on my brakes are always the envy of my riding crew. A lot of fond memories there. My dad got his Rocky Mountain Hammer w/ quadra 21r back in the 90s. We used to park down there and go ride up at forest park way back when and grab a slice at Escape from NY.
Intend doesn’t manufacture in house so that simplifies things a lot in regards to personnel. If Cascade didn’t have a shop we’d probably be a four person company.
Depends on how you define "manufacturing". 😉 They assemble all their product in house, but the machining, anodizing and such is outsourced. But I agree with you: if they would do all their machining in house, that would add 2-6 persons plus the CNC machines.
is it too hard to just click on the about link on their website!?
https://www.intend-bc.com/about-2/?v=d88fc6edf21e
Small piece of advice, take it or leave it, but there are more generous ways to say "hey, I found something too!" As I’ve mentioned a few times, this thread feels more like a collaborative 6th grade social studies project than high-level buy-side analysis. People generally give each other the benefit of the doubt, and the usual passive-aggressive Reddit snark tends to stay out of the room. Of course, do as you wish. I just like to believe there are better ways to engage.
@CascadeComponents this was exactly what I was curious about. Thanks for the thoughtful context.
In the end, none of this really changes the core math behind what I was getting at. Supporting this many products with a small team while making a sustainable living and not working a gagillion hours every week is hard for an operation like this, but it sure looks like thaey have it figured out. Cool company, cool product - would love to ride one!
If you engineer it we'll so you don't have much supporting to do and run manageable volumes but still make enough margin, maybe it works out?
Spreading yourself out looks like is the only way to have full time employment for a small company, you could possible be twiddling your thumbs a bit if you were making small batches of only one or two SKUs...
Avalanche Suspension entered the chat.
That is one of the nicest versions of "don't be a d1ck" I have ever read, thank you for that.
We're all here because we love this stuff and it takes no effort to assume good intentions and be kind.
At first glance, this always seems like the safer way to approach a project, but in my experience, it usually ends up being the exact opposite.
To justify the costs of design engineering, tooling, assembly setup, and ongoing support, you typically need some amount of "real scale". Otherwise, it's super tough to amortize costs in a way that makes sense. And for smaller companies, juggling multiple production cycles, changing gears from "this" to "that" and supporting everything can get overwhelming fast, even if you’re outsourcing big chunks of it.
Not saying it can’t be done, but more often than not, I see businesses spinning their wheels due to SKU bloat way more than from not having enough options.
If I had to give one piece of advice to almost any business, it's this: reduce the number of choices you offer your customers. I've mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but the more small business financials I look at, the more this rings true—objectively so.
Fully agreed. The way I was looking at it is that if you don't have the volumes to manage and have employees that don't have a 100 % workload, isn't making them busy and opening additional revenue streams better than paying them for idle time or not paying them at all as you're not bringing in enough money? Part time work is a solution, but people have to live, eat, etc., so they usually need money. And part time employments are few and far in-between so people usually prefer stability and full time eployment. Starting a business, unless you have a financial safety net or enough work (revenue) on the horizon to warrant full time employment, I don't see most people quitting their cushy, safe jobs. I know I wouldn't...
But to agree with your point, if you don't have the money to pay people, you don't have the money to develop products... Chicken and egg situation.
FWIW, Cornelius said he's in the business of making products with a difference, so Intend is not entering any and all categories, only the ones where he thinks he can make a better product than what is offered by the market.
I think of intend as a engineering firm that puts out a limited batch of its latest idea. I think the new fork is a perfect example of how they make that model work. Engineer a fork. Get the parts. When it doesn’t sell engineer a diffirent fork that sells better using the parts you ordered.
both of you are right in that in general you want to increase customers while reducing overhead costs. But you also can increase sales to your repeat customer base by having options. Especially when you can’t produce the type of volume that you are really able to access the benefits of being a large purchaser. What’s the difference of making 50 of 10 forks vs 100 of 5 forks if your staff is capable of it.
Now if intends goal was to get in the mass production game they would need to do something diffirent. There is a big difference between making 5000 of 10 forks and 30,000 of 3 forks. But I don’t really think that’s the goal here.
I can't read the article (paywall) but KKR's acquisition of Accel has made the front page of the financial times....
"Is KKR’s bad bet on cycling the start of Europe’s private equity reckoning?"
https://www.ft.com/content/c724f779-3c36-4b3d-bfba-9e7c5465faf4
Great find!!! If anyone wants to read it, you can usually go into an incognito browser and then google the headline - click on the link - this gets you around the paywall.
I really want Robot to read it and select a few choice quotes, there are a high number in this one ("synergies", "strategic plan" and "operational improvements" are all mentioned in this single article).
https://web.archive.org/web/20250323064430/https://www.ft.com/content/c…
way too complicated. just use archive.today
boomer archive, archive.today is way better, just don’t tell Donald that those pesky Euros are looking at the precious American content for free
You saying that Craig is struggling, and/or shutting down his business?
Not at all, are neither are Intend and many other small peeps operations who focus on a limited range with maximum reuse, some for decades.
Intend has done a great job of taking German engineering and making it sexy, something most German bike component companies have failed at. Look at Syntace, x-12 axles anyone?, pretty much fell off the face of the US market and seem to have gotten caught up in KTM. Trickstuff is another one that got rolled into DT Swiss, but they took a long time to get a foothold in the US market and haven't really got to stick(try getting their brake pads). Props to them and I hope they kept up producing sick stuff!
Another note: Trickstuff and Intend are both from Freiburg, Germany, and there is a a lot of mtb passion there. You could definitely find bike-loving engineers who will move there and work for a lot less than any other engineering role. Fun fact: Dorel used to have an engineering office in Freiburg. It was conveniently situated between the brewery and the mtb trails.
Ehm - BikeYoke, 77Designz/Kavenz, Pinion, Rohlhoff, the list goes on. I can't do even without frikking Knipex or Wera. I don't know many other countries that can make boring tools sexy, maybe the Japanese?
Oh, and let's not forget about the Crab Link - the sexiest suspension design ever?
Forgot BikeYoke! One of the few other german companies that have gotten it right (in the US market that is). The newer crop of German bikes companies have learned that marketing actually matters. *German bike brand nerd here
Yeah I would agree with both points - from running my own shop to working in and dealing with different companies over the years, I would say that focusing on a core number of products or services and doing them well is crucial - but it is such a fine line between being diverse enough that you have enough turnover, agile enough to adapt as the industry changes and being able to give every area your full attention. Brands like Chris King are one of the ones I think of as being able to make amazing product in a sustainable way - but it does come at a price!
I guess the other thing I would say is companies always need to be looking ahead, looking to improve and not resting on their laurels. The industry moves fast, problems can appear in your products and manufacturing can take a punishing long time so brands need to be ready to make changes quickly and having a smaller number of SKU's goes a long way for helping with that. We mentioned Fox earlier - they still make the mistake of having way too many different products - the number of different shock eyelets and fork air shafts they make is insane, to the point where it is impossible to stock all the options so things that should be simple like changing fork travel is close to impossible (at least in this part of the world). The Float X2 was another one - they have had problems baked in since 2016 and Fox was achingly slow to do anything about it (if at all), so its still tough to guarantee they will be reliable in certain bikes
"If I had to give one piece of advice to almost any business, it's this: reduce the number of choices you offer your customers. I've mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but the more small business financials I look at, the more this rings true—objectively so."
Amen, brother. Preach.
For years, I've thought that exact same thing about the number of choices, in particular every time I look at the 5.10 shoe offerings, or the Maxxis tire catalog. We all know that there are like 3 good shoes in the 5.10 line, and somewhere between 3 and 5 good tread patterns in the Maxxis DH/Enduro line. Whenever I'd see some announcement of a new product that heavily overlapped with existing ones, I'd go "Why?", and that seems to have been bourn out by the apparent low penetration of these products in the market. Ain't nobody buying heavy and lame Hellcat shoes, or fast wearing low traction Dissector tires. Yet they thought it was a good idea to cut a new set of molds, etc...to offer customers "more options"? Instead, 5.10 would have been better off improving their durability, and Maxxis would have been better off ensuring their tires measured up near the stated size.
OK, rant over, and in both of those companies defense, they do seem to have pared down their lines in the past year or so.
Hoo boy, do I have some thoughts on this, but they’re probably better kept to myself.
I generally agree that too many options are a bad thing, though. It’s one of the reasons I don’t buy anything from Amazon, it’s an assault on my senses. I don’t need 40,000 different options for a phone case.
Scott Galloway likes to say that choice is really a tax on consumers. We don’t really want more choices we want to be more confident in the choice we do make.
And you need 40,000 listings of the same option even less. I don't know if that's a problem on Amazon because I don't use it, but it certainly is on eBay, and I assume it's a universal problem.
The Dissector out here catching strays... I'll just say it works well for my local terrain, since I don't want to derail this conversation too much. Especially because I generally agree with you. I'm often confused by companies offering a) many variants of essentially the same thing (Maxxis, for example, has so many different combinations of casing/width/sidewall color/rubber compound) or b) an ever-increasing range of products/services that seem to stretch the limits of the brand's original core competencies. (Apparel might be the most glaring example of this -- why did Yeti, for example, decide to launch a clothing line? To name just one of the brands that have decided to slap their name on some shorts or a $90 "tech tee.")
So why do they do it? That's an open question and a serious one. How much of the decision to continually increase a company's offerings is driven by pressure (internal or external) to grow a company in a way that just isn't possible if all you want to do is make one thing really well? How much is potentially driven by the constrained scope of sponsorship/visibility opportunities in this little world of ours (e.g. TRP developing a drivetrain so that teams can run its brakes without being in conflict with SRAM/Shimano deals)? What other reasons am I totally forgetting/overlooking?
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