The Bikeconomics (Mega)Thread

I am not surprised Revel's remaining stock was selling fast at reduced prices and it gave pause. The few people I know on their bikes did really like them. 

I am hearing stories about a lot of orders for production of goods being cancelled and companies pausing import of goods. I am also hearing about lots of stuff sitting in ports waiting for tariff assessments and large increases on cost for such goods. Companies without some cash on hand could have a hard time waiting for things to pick up again, especially when the timeline for conditions to return to something near baseline that books were balanced on could be weeks, months, or years. Thank you, TJ from 7 mesh, and other business insiders, for chiming in on this forum and enlightening us about your strategies for the near future. 

If the supply of imported goods drops dramatically, and most of our bike stuff is imported, how long before we wind up in a situation where shortages start due to supply chain issues, like during covid, and opportunity/demand rise again and businesses innovate and things settle down? Anyone's guess, but interesting to think about. Maybe bike dudes who live to ride be stocking up a bit on expendables like brake pads, rotors, grips, tires and cable action GX/XT/SLX rear derailleurs. Am I gonna be ridin in an american made t shirt from here on out? Wait, why don't I ride in one already?

There are so many components from unbuilt and built bikes sitting in warehouses... Jenson will be supplying everyone for the next 5 years. There is no shortage of bikes, components and accessories in bike. Just some logistics to get those parts off pre built bikes etc. This will be an amazing time for the customer who looks for deals, doesn't need to newest latest and greatest stuff. SRAM parts will be a plenty. Shimano will be a bit harder to get but plenty of SLX and XT groups. Buyers market for 3+ years. If you are bike industry mid level type. Get on linkedin. Expect a ton of new direct to consumer vertically marketed component brands popping up from upper level types or those who have the ability to market and sell direct. Mechanics are going to be BUSY! Retail will be down and distributors will be pinched. QBP, HLC and BTI are in for a dog fight. Guy with the most cash, cheapest overhead and most nimble will win. Need a model to follow? Check Burton Snowboards. 2005ish they were 500m. Now they survive down around 50m (Estimated) and are small and stable. Bubbles burst. This one is exploding and just like 2008, politics will play a huge part in who survives. End of the day. Go ride your bike and save cash. In the words of the Wu Tang clan. Cash Rules Everything Around Me CREAM! 

Sounds like any hope they had of keeping things rolling is gone. From Pinkbikes Facebook this morning. 

In an email sent to dealers earlier today, Revel confirmed that it has run out of financial runway and has transferred control of the business to its senior lender.

One has to wonder at the impact of brands like Specialized having nearly their entire catalog on blowout pricing for the last 2 years has had on some of these small to medium size players and their ability to survive. Id have to guess it is notable but hard to quantify. If you're positioned in a semi-premium space selling frames and complete bikes, but a bunch of your fringe competition has their bikes/frames long term discount priced at $1-4k less what they used to be, that really changes the marketplace dynamics. Specialized dumping SJ and SJ Evos at stupid prices for such a long timeframe forced everyone to play that game - even if you were not sitting on excess inventory, you had to show some sort of price competitiveness if you wanted to move any product at all. 

At Sea Otter last year I happened to end up in a conversation with a group of folks that included a CEO of a small/med US bike company and also a CEO of a US component company among other people. This was at the height of the dumping period and the industry was making overly optimistic predictions about when things would be back to "normal". The phrase that stuck with me from that conversation was "It's a race to the bottom, and you cant afford to lose that race." 

I don't think you need to wonder much about it - the big players led the race to the bottom that dragged everyone else down. By quantity, they overproduced the most, and there are only so many physical units the market will purchase, especially combined with the bear market state of the industry.

I worked for a small MTB company before, during, and after the COVID rush. We set ourselves apart based on value (and performance, but to take a "risk" on a small brand you haven't ridden before, price is a good incentive to try something new), so when we all of a sudden found ourselves in a pricing competition with the big boys, it just became a race to the bottom. We weren't overstocked horribly in comparison to the industry, but playing the price game isn't something most brands can afford to ignore. The vast majority of the market factors price as a large part of their decision making, even when desire still takes the first seat, so continuing to be competitive is a real pain for everyone when things are this heavily discounted, overstocked or not. 

Don't forget they ran around buying bike shops all over the US, then purging those shops of non-Specialized (and Trek did the same thing) inventory. 

My industry (cybersecurity) has been in 'race to the bottom' mode for years. In the end, we found a lot of customers don't know or care enough about the value presented by paying for higher quality products/services, they just wanna check a box off or get it done and move on. As a result, engineering and quality of products/services suffers because companies just race to beat each other on price and marketing instead of offering products/services that are actually good. For those that do care, it becomes an increasingly difficult problem finding quality. Innovation and quality further suffers because it becomes about scaling instead of what works best. Smaller companies/brands doing cool/good things suffer because they can't match the scale or reach of the larger ones. We can't make customers care enough to pay for good work/products, so a lot of potential customers are just a loss because they don't understand or care to pay for real work.

I feel like you can see this in the bike industry, which has done a great job selling people on various ideas that allow riders to justify mid or poor products that are really only optimized for manufacturing scale. A lot of riders just don't care or know. On the flip side, Sea Otter this year had what I'd consider to be a lot of interesting innovations from major brands - so maybe all isn't lost yet, but it's gonna be harder for smaller brands who do production overseas and have high up front costs to innovate and differentiate when the end user only sees a pricetag.

I agree that the comment on reflecting pricing was interesting, but I do understand how the significant demand could cause inventory analysis problems depending on how their internal system runs. Speaking from some experience, since it appears Revel assembles everything from the frame up in house, it can be a tricky game since plenty of parts are likely inventoried as individual components that are used in subassemblies of larger BOM's (only "assembled" once ordered), that are also shared between multiple builds/platforms. 

I have no clue how their inventory or ERP/webstore is set up, but as someone who has managed inventory allocation and the build queue of US assembled bikes for a small company during COVID, it can get out of hand when demand is beyond your normal processing capacity. There were a few months at the peak where orders were coming in faster than we (I) could process (and obviously build) them. That was a different time with different industry constraints, parts swapping, stock outages, constant shuffling, etc., but if Revel doesn't have everything automated front to back across all of their systems and all of a sudden saw crazy sales coming through, they might have needed some time to allow the dust to settle and process what had sold. It's a bummer to all of a sudden have such high demand after announcing closure, but this is a heavily price-influenced time in the market.

It's the Walmart method.

Price yourself just enough lower than everyone else for comparable goods that some consumers will get on-board...and then wait. Mom & pop stores will eventually close and you can raise your prices. If you have the cashflow to survive it - it doesn't hurt to have a large enough scale that you can get product on the shelves cheaper than others can and sacrifice a little bottom line in the shorter term - it's literally just a matter of time. Keep lowering prices and your profit margin in the short term to close the other brands and then you can raise your prices as high as customers with fewer brand options and fewer physical items available will tolerate to make the years of small losses back in a single year.

Around 7 years back, Walmart added a store west of me 20 minutes. They priced all the grocery items 20%-ish under the larger grocery chains in the area. Those grocery stores eventually closed and - surprise, surprise - Walmart's prices on those products started going up. They eventually leveled out at around 50% higher than the closed grocery store's prices.

Did the big players dropping prices affect smaller companies?  You bet it did.. Lance Canfield addresses the issue nicely here..

https://youtu.be/BUTjyhPd8IE?si=nJ3W96qHLeANTI9y

his video was very good, it calmed me down ; ).. Now I need one from Keith @ Banshee stating all is fine 

THE LIST. Okay, here's the updated post-Covid bike brand graveyard list from this thread. Let me know if I'm missing anyone. Arguably I could have included KTM motorcycles, but that doesn't really fit. We're an MTB website:

1. Kitsbow

2. Guerrilla Gravity

3. Ridefast Racing

4. Nukeproof/Ragley/Vitus/Chainreaction/Wiggle (Nukeproof maybe living again, in skeletal form?)

5. Blackspire

6. Eminent Cycles

7. BLine indoor MTB park in Calgary

8. Pole

9. Kona (back up and running mostly?)

10. Planet Cyclery/Colorado Cyclist

11. Stages Cycling

12. Tweedlove Events

13. Teton Gravity Research

14. Fat Tire Farm (iconic Portland Bike Shop)

15. Lama Cycles Distribution

16. Revel Bikes
 

RIP

kona is fully alive and running. they just launched the new hei hei a week ago - https://www.vitalmtb.com/community/Konaworld/blog/04/17/2025/entry/133526

gasgas ran out of fuelfuel.

also do we want this thread clogged up w/ the actual list edits/tweaks?

Noted on Kona.

Hoping there aren't too many errors/edits/tweaks to THE LIST. I last updated THE LIST in April 2024, and instead of scrolling through 50 pages of this thread to update it today, I posted the old list (items 1-11) plus my best memory of companies that have closed down since (items 12-16). 

The Pros Closet (but came back under new ownership)

Wrenchscience.com

When did Teton Gravity go under? Do you mean G3?

Pretty sure TGR was never in danger.

G3 might have been/get resuscitated.

How about brands that have “paused” such as GT?

North Shore Indoor Bike Park (on THE North Shore, Van BC) is getting killed by pickleball. It appears they are carrying on and moving out to the lower rent, and less geriatric zone of Maple Ridge. 

There's an interesting side story here of how the popularity of pickleball appears to be competing for, and taking over spaces that smaller groups of people enjoy, like tennis courts, outdoor skate parks, and indoor rec facilities for more niche sports.

We're getting a new indoor facility in Calgary eventually, hopefully with better investment and business model to keep it alive: https://unreal-yyc.com/

Craftworks (maker of the ENR) had been pretty quiet since selling a batch of ENR v1.1s a few years ago (pre-covid!), but it finally let its website registration lapse last year.

I wouldn't say it's a victim of the current economic climate, though.

Off topic for a second..

With some of the people here, maybe a Vital Fourm member podcast? Plus, my mtb content is lacking lately..

And, back to our regularly scheduled program already in progress..

Do we get to add GT and Rocky Mountain to this? 

Leo from Pole Bicycles has start making the first small steps hoping getting the brand back into business in the near future if everything goes well

Rocky Mountain is still selling bikes, offering support to dealers and consumers (warranty and spare parts), and delivered some 2025 product in the last few weeks/months. The ongoing restructuring process should come to a close in the next few weeks, with likely some new owners/investors, so not quite fitting the definition of being added to the "graveyard" list.

Same applies to GT I guess considering they are taking a "pause".

The Pros Closet

Edit: someone already mentioned it

You heard the one they did w/ @jeff.brines ?

And it was quite good..

To add on to what Alex said (who I'm sure  has unique insider knowledge but is not in a position to share), I last heard the administrator was looking closely at a few of the bids and checking everyone's credit/financing/ability to pay/proposed timing. Original owner in the mix as well as large-ish distros.

I'm pretty sure Stages was acquired/absorbed by another company.  

https://escapecollective.com/giant-officially-takes-ownership-of-stages/

I was talking to the owner of Unreal about a month ago and it sounds like he's got a legit plan. He owns the property/building so he won't have to worry about renting a space. It will be a multi-use facility, primarily focused on bikes, but also have climbing, licensed restaurant/bar, etc. I think he said there will be something like 11-12 businesses operating out of that address. He's been in contact with Red Bull Canada and has other connections in the mtb world about using it as a training facility during the off season (with space for athletes to sleep if they're travelling), having competitions, etc. 

The owner is a business guy who rides bikes, not a biker trying to figure out how to run a business. Sounds he's got a plan for it to go the distance.