All

This is Atherton's brand new HQ in Wales. Do you know how much a brand new purpose building like this costs? Lots of ££££££, before you pay dollar one on staff costs. Whenever I see big cool new shiny corporate HQ's in bike world, I think the companies think it's supposed to impress me, but it just worries me. A lot of the Bellingham companies got shiny new offices in high rent areas in the last 5-10 years and each of them took my breath away in a not-so-great way.

Since we're all beating this dead horse, I'll close with a few thoughts. Assumption on Capex: You all are right, AB could be outsourcing all of their additive manufacturing and CNC work. However, if this is true, its going to make scaling the business harder than it already is and per unit costs higher. Not saying its impossible, but you are either caught carrying all sorts of inventory in the form of lugs and links, or you are somehow ridiculously tight with the vendors that are doing all this work for you, and risk long lead times and lost sales...

I hear you, and again, I like a lot of what they’re doing. I want to be clear that when I’m being critical of a company, it’s not meant personally—it’s just an assessment of what I see, and requires a whole bunch of assumptions to be made (which might be wrong). Much like the original post I made in this thread about GG, I really do tip my cap to anyone who takes risks and makes things happen, but I’m also going to analyze where any company might’ve gone wrong or what I see as questionable decisions. This is largely...

I wanted to follow up my earlier post with a few more details as to why I made my Atherton Bikes (very speculative) prediction. Again, please take my thoughts with a giant grain of salt. This was a total hare brained speculative Monday morning musing I probably should have kept to myself. In any event, here is why I feel really any brand like AB has a challenging future ahead. All performance continues to asymptote. Paying more for a product is getting the bike rider less and less in the way of absolute performance. While I know Atherton has a...

We should probably do a few predictions posts, eh? I've got a number of thoughts going into the new year, and will synthesize them into one post, but I do think we're going to see more companies pull the plug this year. I'll go out on a limb and say Atherton Bikes may be one of those stragglers who calls it quits. I have literally no data on this, so please take this with a huge grain of salt, but when I was poking around their website I realized I can't just "buy it now" with respect to a frame...

From an industry perspective Enduro is almost ubiquitous for a few reasons: 1. They offer a lot of bicycle-specific sizes that can be very hard (and relatively expensive) to source elsewhere. They are one of the few suppliers with a wide range of max complement small bearings. Max complement is a big improvement in load capacity for the specific use case of suspension pivots (high dynamic load, low rotation speeds). 2. They are well known and have lots of international support for people replacing bearings. Go try replacing all the bearings on a Pivot Firebird with NTN equivalents. You might...

It's unlisted. Someone must have just leaked the private link.

Kolb to the mob https://youtu.be/o7OA0Xu-uqs

Remi on spesh. Ok - but no chance they’re paying him to travel around the world to get 30th on a circuit with zero coverage. I’m not being mean here - just truth. Same with Blenki - guy was cooked (results -wise) 3-4 years ago. There’s zero chance anyone picks him up to race wc dh. On a similar note, Lucas Cruz - has he ever had a result? And Norco is taking him to all the WCs? Again, not being mean - just facts. I think he has a family connection at Norco but there’s no way anyone’s expecting...

remember when danny hart chopped up his GT Fury for more compliance? https://www.vitalmtb.com/forums/hub/mtb-compliance-analysis-danny-harts…

We have entered the part of silly season where people float (and debate!) wild speculation that a 42 year old Dan Atherton returns to downhill (last result was 57th at Crankworx in 2018) on a new rubber band bike to chase a $100k podium. Perhaps we need an award for most ridiculous rumor every year. 🤣🤣🤣

Fox working on a new Float X2 👀 post from frameworks racing

There are a few factors: - Norco is owned by LTP, which is a distributor of other brands in Canada. Norco has long been financially floated by the relative profitability of LTP - At one time Norco had a solid XC team, a DH team, sponsored the Gehrigs for Enduro and had Jill Kintner and Bryn Atkinson, and a bunch of others at the same time not too long ago. They dropped everyone else. - They just split with their CEO with "no plans to replace him". The company was flying him in from California to BC every week as...