Opinion/Analysis
After this weekend? I’ve now read two different articles about Lance and U.S. Postal drug charges. (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20: "Cyclists Armstrong, Hincapie Broaden Legal Team"; Wall Street Journal, Sept. 4, U.S. Mulls Joining Cycling Lawsuit.")
The all-too-prevalent idea is that 2.0 bike shops somehow don’t count. Well, enough of that stuff. Let’s look at some actual facts.
Read with interest about the new Giro Cycling Shoe line and it sounds interesting. Not that anyone should enter the shoe market thinking it's not going to be a hyper competitive smackdown of ultimate fighting proportions. Giro knows from past experience. If anyone can pull it off it might be Giro. Greg Shapleigh is smart, understands high quality product development and their current distribution and brand strength speaks for itself.
It doesn't happen very often...getting weepy while reading the Wall Street Journal today...
Sept 1 article in the personal journal titled "look ma, no pedals"....all about ditching the training wheels with balance bikes for the toddlers...it's wonderful on several pedal-less fronts...
Last week was Secreto Numero Uno, which was to write press releases that magazines want to publish. And we gave suggestions for how to do that (or, if you recognize you can’t, at least the suggestion to hire someone who does).
I was in downtown Chicago yesterday for three business meetings.
Plus…where else can you go to a big city that smells like concrete and donuts?
This is an unusual post, inasmuch as I’m only writing it because so many editors (you know who you are) have asked me to.
Last week we took on Size, Retailer-Friendliness, Anti-Advocacy, Anti-Preseason, and A Business Model as five things Bike 2.0 isn’t.
After more than a year of blogs about Bike 2.0 and what it might look like in various contexts, perhaps it’s time to look at what it ain’t.
The preseason Dating Game is an outdated answer to a question that hasn’t been relevant in 15 years. So what’s the Right Question? Glad you asked.
Why do so many suppliers and retailers keep putting their money into The Dating Game year after year? Rick has some alternate ideas.
One CEO of a top-ten bike brand tells me that as a very rough estimate, he thinks financing in all its various elements ends up representing as much as 10% of his wholesale pricing. 10% of the approximately half of all BPSA bikes pre-seasoned last year means cyclists (consumers) ended up paying almost $125 million (at retail) to support wholesale finance costs in 2009.
The old Bike 1.0 business model as practiced by Trek, Giant, and Specialized relies on a shrinking market where a relatively few “smart” retailers prosper at the expense of a majority of “dumb” ones.
The final day of BRAIN's D.C. Dealer Tour took us through a grittier part of the city as we cycled outside the Beltway on our way to Arrow Bicycles in Hyattsville, Maryland, a cool neighborhood Giant shop. On the way we rode on the new Met Branch trail, a recently opened Rails to Trails project in Northeast D.C. that the Washington Area Bicyclist Association has been working on securing funding and easements for since the early 1990s.
The second day of BRAIN's D.C. led us from Alexandria through tony Georgetown and into the heart of the district where we rode past many of the D.C. must-sees such as the White House, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials.
BRAIN kicked off its Dealer Tour of Washington D.C. on Tuesday with stops at shops in Alexandria, Crystal City and Arlington. We capped a long day by joining 200 local riders for Conte's Tuesday night shop ride. Here are some pictures from the first day:
Shannon Haslam, who used to work for Tifosi Optics and now lives in Nashville, Tennessee informed me that a local charity needs some help after the rain and floods that have recently swept through the area.