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Race Face Send out a complete if you break one of their complete wheels.
I've been running RF for awhile which is arc30's, turbine and the new ERA's. they've been great.
Stop thinking practically and start thinking like a greedy sob and that pretty much sums up the market these days.
Sure from the standpoint of consumers the move makes no sense. It will probably hurt their bottom line in the short/medium term. But if you are trying to convince investors that you have some giant market share of a niche form of social media the thing to do is to stomp on anyone who looks like competition.
Of course I don’t agree with that from a moral standpoint. But morals don’t pay the bills when it comes to owning a fragment of something and expecting to make decent money off of it.
I can't think of any standpoint that this makes sense, other than the very basic "I've got lawyers and I know how to use them, sorta". It's unclear to me how this even has a short term play to their benefit. Frankly I'm surprised they were able to find a lawyer to take this on (I know, money) knowing how easily the case against it could be made (took dcrainmaker probably 2 days to research and write that article?). Maybe just getting attention before their IPO so people outside the sports industry know the exist? By taking the risk of having some of their IP protection invalidated?
I don’t disagree they are likely misguided and their lawyers aren’t helping.
I think it’s more about what they are targeting. They don’t want trailforks to have activities. They don’t want garmin have segments or heat maps.
I assume the plan is eventually once public you’ll have to pay or see ads. I don’t even record rides with rare exception despite owning a garmin. But I turn Strava on nearly everyday to see what other people are upto. They are trying to prevent me from doing that with someone else.
As soon as I saw the lawsuit and read through the details, i was ready to quit Strava. Garmin gives me more information for free from just buying the device, where Strava has shut down services over the years, including using Bluetooth sensors back in the day. Other than the social side of it, Strava is useless if you already have any devices app, such as Garmin connect.
Maybe they're trying to hurt Garmin and release their own devices for the run up to an IPO, which is likely too late in the game unless they are absolutely game changing. But if you need to hurt the competition with questionable lawsuits, it's likely that it would not be.
I’m not sure but I would think you are in the minority with checking Strava to see what others are up to. I mostly use it to keep track of my stats or to keep track of personal progression/regression (I’m 45 if I can keep up with old me I am doing ok) . Others can correct me if I’m wrong but that is the common theme I have heard.
I have a Suunto app that also has heat maps….. and gives me all the info Strava would without the segments and route build but I personally don’t need that.
I'm certain you know this, but it's possible to patent almost anything. You don't even have to demonstrate that your idea works – there are plenty of perpetual motion machines and other such nonsense in the patent records.
Software patents, which it seems that Strava is relying on, have been a battleground in the IT world for decades. Most people who actually write software hate the idea. The spirit of patent protection is supposed to be to describe an implementation of an idea, not the idea itself.
There are tons of people berating me for keeping everything private (not being able to give me kudos), asking me why I don't give kudos and the like. People for sure do check strava like a social network. For some it is the social network.
Strava is a social media platform.. The only difference is that you generally have to go do something to post there..
Strava is the only social media that I'm still on. It's actually pretty shitty as that, but I like seeing where my friends are riding and what the conditions are like. Every other feature I actually use from it, I could get from Garmin (daily/annual mileage/vert, safety beacon, etc.). The Beacon was the main reason I started using it so that my wife could see how close I was to being home.
Hilarious this is now hidden due to downvotes 🤣
I caught the podcast today and thought it was one of the best I've listened to in a while, very informative and I appreciated the discussion. I'm not in the bike industry but I am a bike geek who works with municipal governments on capital projects and I spend a lot of time analyzing how organizations make decisions and the parallels regardless of industry are undeniable. I am amazed that anything gets built and I'm always pretty sure shit is going to start to fail at any minute. 😅
Sneaky name change caught me out...... Loved the pod cast.
Listening to the podcast now... But, looks like we have an example of the barbell effect.. KHS shutting down in January..
source on KHS? they're one of those brands that i'm kinda surprised is still around, couldn't tell you the last time i saw one in person.
An industry group I belong to on FB.. Several dealers said they were told this by their reps.. I think they were surviving based on distribution more than bikes.. Plus, the big 3 have done a better job on cheaper bikes. KHS used to be a pretty good value, but not from what I've seen over the past 10 years or so..
A bit of a shame as my first bike was a KHS hardtail, but KHS has been wholly irrelevant since like 2012 (or realistically after whenever the last time Binggeli rode rampage), frankly I'm surprised it took this long. I don't know why a dealer would ever sell KHS when there's dozens of brands that offer way better mid- and high-end stuff, roughly the same if not slightly better entry level stuff, and have any semblance of brand recognition and media presence. Maybe I'm being too harsh, I'm guessing they sold lots of $300 bike things in Sportchek equivalents in the states, right?
As a side-note, I just checked the KHS website for the first time in like 4 years, and it's extremely funny that they took a website that looked like it came from 2004 and replaced it with one that looks like it was design in... 2008.
Any word on other weird outliers like Jamis? We've already had some talk on Diamondback...
Edit: This is crazy. Apparently they released the 7500 in "limited edition black" which as a colour looks like it might be kind of cool (ignoring that the bike probably came out in 2018), but if you image search the thing, there's actually zero pictures other than the SINGLE one the website contains. How did it take until January 2026???
KHS does a decent parts distribution business.. They my #2 to order from at 2 of the last 3 shops i worked at.. I think that's what kept them going. The bikes are probably what dragged them down.
That's just something I'd have no idea about as a Canadian... but good Lord I hope the B2B was better than that website. Shame they couldn't see the writing on the wall and cull the bikes before too late, if that really was a big problem for them.
This does raise an interesting topic though that I'd be happy to hear comment from other folks: Distributor companies with in-house bike brands. When I started working in shops it wasn't that uncommon for distributors to have an in-house bike brand for entry- and mid-range stuff. By the time I left, they were almost all gone, except LTP/Norco. I get that it makes a ton of sense for P&A, clothes, etc., to capture that margin, build booking orders, and get more shop floor space, but it's a tough proposition when you're expecting an LBS to sell your brand alongside brands that carry deep product lines at a variety of price points like Trek, Specialized, or Giant. Was the plan to only sell into the third-rate shops moving into markets where all the main players were taken up in exclusivity deals? Those shops... never seemed to do too well where I was around. Who else is left?
I worked in a couple shops that brought in Opus [wholly owned by distributor OGC Canada], and they offered pretty decent value in the urban, road, gravel and kids categories. They didn't update models or frame colours as often as the big brands, so we could sit on inventory for longer without it becoming too stale. I think they were a bigger brand in ON/QC, especially for road. If a shop was carrying Giro/Blackburn/Kryptonite and wanted to hit minimums with some hybrids and kids bikes, they were a solid bet in most urban markets, especially for smaller stores.
Wait what was the name of this thread before?
YT is even selling brand new helmets on FB marketplace its got so bad 🤣
Looks like a DIY sticker job...
wasn't KHS just selling rebadged Astro catalogue frames?
Can someone make the title of this thread read “Bike-onomics, “bike-o-nomics,” or even “bikeUHnomics?” Just really anything that eliminates that clunky C in the middle? It’s really bad. Thanks in advance.
It's just bi-co-nomics...
ya i was ignoring the notifications like 'i never posted in this thread' until i realized it was pinging so much (was literally gonna unfollow) and realized its the old thread.
meh. shoulda made a new one. its gonna get even harder to check this now from the future. this will be a very useful thread one day. to better understand similar scenarios like this that challenge the industry. i can only assume its gonna dilute more and more as time goes on.
i blame Markus for making this thread drag on lol
When this thread will come in handy again it will be burried and forgotten by the Internet. Just as we discussed already here. People leave industries after painful cycles so they are bound to repeat.
Just listened to the 2yr anniversary pod of this post, so many crazy parallels to a PE backed industry I was in at the time you posted: carwash both retail and mfg/services (aka platform) sides are heavily leveraged bc of low interest rates, membership models grew retail millionaires everywhere in the US and a Bain study that said we have room for another 11K full tunnel washes across US alone (as opposed to rollovers or convenience stores)… it was all on fire…(I came in in 2022 to lead people and culture for NCS) our ability to create margins on the chemicals (17-21 different ones across any express tunnel carwash) allowed us to sell equipment and install at very low margins and collect profit on 5yr high margin contracts on chem, parts and services. Rasor-Rasorbalde model. Retail getting rolled up by PE at a rapid pace, the two major platforms are PE roll up’s, both out in 2023 w CIMs, massive interest in us and Sonny’s probably 30+ LOIs down to many IOIs and rt as u posted this 3 of the biggest retail players said not gonna do new builds in 2024!! PE saw ghosts, pens down, processes ended, essentially dead $ for 3-5yrs and IRRs in jeopardy! I’m 50% vested plus my own preferred shares but moved on, maybe it will come back unlikely in the same shape or form but double digit CAGRs are gone and PE now has to find off ramps for these assets bc funds are near their term. Just thought u might find interesting compare so I shared. The money guys are just playing Draft Kings but w OPM so its place the bets inside a fund all you need is what net <15% IRR to win, affords you 40-50% as write offs and the rest as moderate 1-2x wins? What a scam!
Yeah but was still funny it came up when it did
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