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If your definition of making money in a cushy fashion is 4 days work for minus £40 and comments like this, then I must be that hanger on using mountain bikers for my benefit. Just to be clear, this was my decision to do this interview and I'm not unhappy about doing that at my cost. YT just covered the bulk of the travel to enable us to do it in-person, which I think provides not only a better quality audio and video experience for you all, but also makes the conversation flow better. This doesn't in any way change...

Thanks to those who've taken time to write kind words about Downtime. I was expecting to get some hate for this episode as there is definitely a lot of frustration out there on this topic and Markus appears to be a very polarising character. For what it's worth, I put in the time to understand the concerns of the MTB world as much as was possible from forums etc and I believe that all those key points were covered in this interview. I also took time to understand the mechanisms of Private Equity and just why growth is essential and...

Just a heads up, Fox Factory and GoPro both report results tonight. I'll do my best to aggregate results, listen to conference calls (at least with Fox) and put a little post together. Cheers!

I know KTM's troubles might go beyond the boundary of this thread but considering the number of similarities and the fact it was e-bikes that sank the company some of you may find my latest post worthwhile ( substack // blog) One thing I find very interesting is how much control KTM has over inventory control (dirt bikes, not e bikes) and re-stablizing the market. Turns out, when there are only a handful of players in a market, and one player has a particular niche cornered (KTM/Husky/GasGas owns the off road market), they can more easily fix a problem by...

New post up on the whole YT situation. Thanks to a sleuth-y VitalMTB member, financials were found (up until 2022). Huge shoutout...but I want to make sure he wants the shoutout first! Substack My Blog My Super Ugly Windows 98 Themed Blog (reader beware)

The fact that they're in self-administration indicates to me that there isn't that kind of money in the bike industry, if you're looking at a 5+ year time frame.

Flossman tried the vogue/vanity fair method. Razor thin margins because everything is spent on marketing and perpetuating the myth of great financial success when in reality you are just barely making a profit even when sales are good. Whether any of that portrayal was paid for with debt I have no idea. But clearly a large portion of yts “profits” were used for advertising and flossman’s personal gain. Then they required loans to get in inventory. And the house of cards came crashing down once they couldn’t flash sale their way out of trouble. Cause most bike buyers aren’t fashion...