The Angry Thread.

[Mark W]

21 minutes ago, Davetrials said:

This feels very personal. 

I'll assume the money being thrown at both Danny and Fabio is huge, I've also never really thought about what little these brands are doing for the sport, which is exactly zero.

Hey can I buy that bike? "no don't be daft, but here's a big £10,000 bouncy bike instead"

 

Pretty much.

I've heard rumours about the figures involved and it is substantial, although obviously pales when you compare it to the salaries for other 'athletes' to an extent - I imagine most Premier League footballers will earn more in a week than they earn from their bike sponsors in a year. 

Whichever metrics you use though, they obviously bring a massive amount of exposure to brands and help bolster their brand identities so it's presumably all worthwhile for brands. Relatively speaking it won't be a big deal to them either - Santa Cruz are donating over $1million (tax deductible...) to trail building projects, so they've obviously got some cash about. Worth bearing in mind they're owned by a company worth $2.2bn so they'll have the firepower.

Canyon are massive too (having listened to an interview with their founder about the growth of the company, it's insane how big they are now) so will also have a big chunk of money to play with. Their turnover for 2019/20 was €400m so they've sold a fair few bikes. They've also just been bought out by a company worth €13bn so again, don't think cash is likely to be much of a problem for them.

In terms of it being 'personal', that's only because I'm very much into this aspect of trials and it does kind of suck in that regard. SC/Canyon are obviously supporting Danny and Fabio (and everyone else who gets lured by massive paycheques) with what they want to do, but I strongly doubt that if Danny or Fabio turned around to their respective sponsors tomorrow and said they weren't looking to ride trials again that either Santa Cruz or Canyon would lose any sleep over it. They aren't selling trials bikes (at all for Santa Cruz, possibly 'yet' for Canyon), so either of those riders opting to bin trials off is only a good thing for them as it'll mean 100% of their riders media will feature them on bikes people can buy. It feels like they take a punt on riders hoping that they'll grow out of their phase of riding silly little impractical bikes and start riding some serious, marketable, grown-up bikes ASAP.

[Davetrials]

Which company has taken on Canyon?

[manuel]

Me and Martyn had this realisation back in '09. Trials bikes just don't sell in the numbers that makes any sense at all for any MTB companies to actually make a trials bike. We nearly jacked in trials bikes and talked about switching the team over to actual mountain bikes. Ride trials and make videos on bikes that sell gives a bike team a lot more power. I think Martyn would have done it, but the natural end of the bike team (and the fact that I would have been crap as hell on a mtb) ended the idea.

 

[Mark W]

1 hour ago, Davetrials said:

Which company has taken on Canyon?

Your friends and mine, Groupe Bruxelles Lambert... Savvy timing from Canyon though. That valuation will never have been better than it was at the tail end of last year when they opened it up. All the chat about it was them "betting that Canyon's strong growth will continue after the pandemic", which may be a little optimistic if they were basing them on the demand they saw last year...

50 minutes ago, manuel said:

Me and Martyn had this realisation back in '09. Trials bikes just don't sell in the numbers that makes any sense at all for any MTB companies to actually make a trials bike.

Nah, definitely not. That's why it seems weirder still that they won't allow them to ride other bikes. Canyon even made Fabio tape over all the Inspired logos on his bars, rims and any other parts he was using from Inspired after he switched to them, despite the fact that Canyon don't make any competing products. 

It just sucks in a way because the top riders really do help drive the evolution of bikes. The technology on the Fourplay now is derived from things that were created for the Skye, and that was largely because Inspired needed to create a bike that wouldn't break when Danny rode it. That pushed them to make better bikes, and that then trickles down and benefits the rest of their bikes over time. 

There is obviously still an incentive to keep making better bikes, but having the top riders for any discipline pushing things will inevitably help. If they just get cherry picked by random brands who can just chop out a one-off frame for them, that isn't really beneficial for anyone.

There was/are rumours of Canyon making production bikes, but the volume they'd do may not end up being something they're interested in, and with how impossible it is to get parts made and the super long lead times for OE parts from brands like SRAM and Magura, it's probably not something that's particularly easy to achieve right now either.

Marin have been implying they're making a trials frame from comments they've made on social media, but again, with the factors above I'd be pretty surprised if they went all out for it.

We'll see, I guess. A big brand like Canyon or Marin would have the potential to get some really good entry level bikes out there for a good price which can only really help get more people into it, but I don't know how much they'll really push things forward design-wise. Santa Cruz clearly didn't get things right with the frame they did for Danny judging from the issues they publicised about him breaking them, and considering they're the ones who appear to have spent the most time and money making one that doesn't really bode super well for other brands to raise the bar. It's not like Canyon have a stellar record with frame longevity judging from comments on Pinkbike and Facebook.

[Davetrials]

I would have thought a huge company like Marin, for example, to start churning out good well-priced street trials bikes would just write off the little guys, I mean is it as easy as them buying an inspired and pressing CTRL C -  CTRL V? 

Also whilst we're on the subject, how the bloody hell can crewkerz stay alive, there are just not that many people buying super high-end UCI bikes is there?

I'll assume I'm wrong, maybe as I'm not so much "in" the sport anymore, but I can only think of a few Uk riders that have them

 

[Mark W]

1 hour ago, Davetrials said:

I would have thought a huge company like Marin, for example, to start churning out good well-priced street trials bikes would just write off the little guys, I mean is it as easy as them buying an inspired and pressing CTRL C -  CTRL V? 

Also whilst we're on the subject, how the bloody hell can crewkerz stay alive, there are just not that many people buying super high-end UCI bikes is there?

I'll assume I'm wrong, maybe as I'm not so much "in" the sport anymore, but I can only think of a few Uk riders that have them

 

I think more people have Crewkerz bikes than you'd expect. There seem to be a decent number of them out there. Worth bearing in mind that in Europe, buying high end complete bikes is much more of a 'thing'. Just look at how big Trial-Bikes are now - they're a huge shop and they've focussed more on the comp side of things, and are based in the heartland of comp riding. The UK isn't hugely representative of trials as a whole really. Randomly, from my time more on the order side of things at TartyBikes, a decent number of their high end comp bike sales (Koxx, Clean, Crewkerz, Monty) would go to Japanese riders, so there's that to bear in mind as well. Luckily for companies like Crewkerz, there does seem to be a bit of a culture of buying a new bike for the new comp season, so I guess they probably get a bit of help from riders wanting a fresh build each year. Part of it is also probably similar to Inspired where they sell out of bikes annually long before demand is satisfied.

For the big brands/copying Inspired thing, you can theoretically just send parts to wherever you need them to go to and get them copied, but it's not quite as easy as that in some ways. If, say, you wanted to copy the forged BB yokes on some of the Inspired bikes, you're generally looking at - from my general understanding of the process - a 5-figure sum for tooling costs. You can make that cheaper by just CNCing them, but then you wind up paying more per unit simply because you're taking more time making each one. Either way, if you do it the 'proper' way and forge them it's a reasonably large up front cost that you then have to recoup. Big brands are all data driven, so they'll be able to run the numbers and see what's worth it to them in terms of bike sales, profit per sale, cost of R&D, cost of tooling, customer service, warranty support, etc.

That's not factoring in the delays currently hitting all disciplines though! I would have thought they'd be purely focussed on getting their core ranges out there. My local shop are really big on Marin stuff (as one of Marin's team riders is a local), and even though they ordered stuff a while back they really struggled to get much of anything simply because there's so much demand and production has been so disrupted.

[manuel]

2 hours ago, Davetrials said:

I would have thought a huge company like Marin, for example, to start churning out good well-priced street trials bikes would just write off the little guys, I mean is it as easy as them buying an inspired and pressing CTRL C -  CTRL V? 

Also whilst we're on the subject, how the bloody hell can crewkerz stay alive, there are just not that many people buying super high-end UCI bikes is there?

I'll assume I'm wrong, maybe as I'm not so much "in" the sport anymore, but I can only think of a few Uk riders that have them

 

I would be surprised if a big company like Marin could make good trials bikes in the low volumes required and for it to be cost effective. 

I can completely understand canyon wanting nothing else branded on Fabio, they are trying to buy into a brand and an association, get their logo over tons of YouTube views - they can’t have it diluted with other bike brands - especially if they aren’t selling anything. 

[La Bourde]

YT uses to produce a slopestyle frame in carbon

Only 25 units were produced. The whole bike cost 3000€. That is pretty cheap for the really small amount of unit. How many units of a trial frame are produced? 100, 200?

[AdamR28]

33 minutes ago, La Bourde said:

YT uses to produce a slopestyle frame in carbon

Only 25 units were produced. The whole bike cost 3000€.

Loss leader / advertising tool?

Though I guess without a full drivetrain, only one brake and no dropper, that saves a lot of cash. 

 

 

[Mark W]

14 hours ago, Adam@TartyBikes said:

Loss leader / advertising tool?

 

Essentially, yes. It allowed them the chance to run this snappy bit of ad copy: "YT does not care about rules. No one would stick to them anyway. Young Talents live uncaged! But still, the guys at YT want to play."

If they're saying from the get-go that it's a limited run of 25 then you can afford to run them at way less margin that you typically would for a bike because you know it's a one-time event, and it's not something that needs to be sustainable. Although "YT does not care about rules", they did set the rule that that bike was only available in Europe, so that kind of suggests that they were definitely cutting margins too. Shipping bikes internationally isn't cheap, so keeping that price low elsewhere might have eaten in their margins too much.

As far as trials bikes go, I honestly don't know the specifics but I'd assume low hundreds at most for most brands. The thing to bear in mind is that company size plays a large part in how easy things are to get made (in terms of production scheduling, getting factories to agree to doing limited runs, how amenable they are to random changes) and how much they cost to get made. A brand like YT will be getting a huge amount of frames made so you'd assume they'd get a better rate than a brand getting a handful of frames made. That will probably carry over to smaller runs like this simply because of the amount of leverage they have - their business is worth a lot to the factories they work with.

[La Bourde]

On 15.3.2021 at 9:47 PM, Adam@TartyBikes said:

Loss leader / advertising tool?

Though I guess without a full drivetrain, only one brake and no dropper, that saves a lot of cash. 

 

 

I guess it was for advertissing purpose.

 

Getting a production slot in Asia is indeed much easier for Yt than for Crewkerz.

I did not want to blame the trial companies, I just wanted to highlight that some bigger MTB companies may produce a specific frame just for a different purpose.

I think it can be a cheap way to get a lot of coverage. Some MTB Youtubers, while they aren't the most talented riders, are sponsored by some big brands due to their media exposure (e.g. bkxc or Paul the Punter). Media coverage is so important now

 

Merida also produced a street/trial frame based on the tubeset of their dirt frame:

AFAIK, only three frames were built.

Maybe will Marin do the same for Duncan based on the Alcatraz? I doubt, but who knows.

[Mark W]

It's definitely possible - the first Canyon frame Fabio had was based on their dirt jump frame. It's easy enough for them to do, but won't generally last too long.

[Mikee]

Inspired seem very dominant in the street trials market. But I wouldn't be surprised if even Inspired's whole market share, wasn't enough to get a lot of the big companies interested. Let alone just a slice of the pie.

[Mark W]

On 17/03/2021 at 0:30 PM, Mikee said:

Let alone just a slice of the pie.

If a company came in and did it right I think rather than just taking a slice of the pie, they could make the overall pie much bigger. Inspired (and now Crewkerz) have generally not had the supply to match demand, so there are certainly some sales left on the table at the current price points.

Looking below what's currently available though, the Alias 24.1 is similar-ish to the Onza Zoot in terms of opening up that part of the market. The parts kit on the Alias 24.1 is broadly speaking in line with the Zoot, but the frame is not a million miles off an Arcade which is what drives the price up.

If a company came in and just did a super simple frame and fork you could feasibly make the bike overall a chunk cheaper, and with the preferential pricing big brands get I'm sure you could get the build kit lower in cost too. If you went similar to the Zoot and did it strictly V-Brake only on the build it would take an even bigger chunk off the cost compared to an Alias as well.

Likewise with 'normal' trials bikes too. There's certainly scope for someone to put out the kind of bikes Onza used to. That would definitely be more niche and wouldn't get the same amount of sales as a cheap street-style bike would, but depending on how they did the parts kits you could theoretically share some parts across the range and keep costs even lower/margins higher that way.

 

[La Bourde]

Is Jitsie not trying to fill this hole? Their prices is pretty good and the specs OK. They focus on comp trial but maybe we will see a real street/trial in 24" soon? (I don't consider the current 24" one good for street/trials, but I never rode it - I had a yaabaa 799 though and it felt really like crap)

 

[JT!]

Heard a massive pop, wtf was that? Innertube burst on one of my bikes and blew half of the tire off the rim. Dunno how I managed to f**k up that installation but I suppose I did.

[Stephen Morris]

I really hate Jamie Oliver.

[Mark W]

On 19/03/2021 at 1:00 PM, La Bourde said:

Is Jitsie not trying to fill this hole? Their prices is pretty good and the specs OK. They focus on comp trial but maybe we will see a real street/trial in 24" soon? (I don't consider the current 24" one good for street/trials, but I never rode it - I had a yaabaa 799 though and it felt really like crap)

 

Just going back to this - I'm not sure which bit you're referring to, but when I was talking about cheap bikes, I mean cheap bikes - Onzas used to be about a 1/3 the price of a Jitsie is now. Obviously inflation kicks in, costs go up, etc., but it should be doable to get a bike for less than £500, and that's quite a big psychological barrier.

As far as Jitsie and street, as far as I'm aware they believe they have done a real street/trials bike. I mean they also thought that putting a Pivotal seat on a Varial 26" made it "street style", so... yeah...

[isitafox]

Yeah when Onza released the Zoot (the recent green/black one) I saw a lot of kids riding them and despite the weak frame issue they were a fantastic step into street trials and trials in general. 

I did a comp at Shipley Glen with a guy who had bought one to get back into riding and it was perfect! 

[Mikee]

Why did Onza step away from the trials market?

[Mark W]

Seems there was potentially more money in the MTB market for them, although having seen how cheaply they're selling those hardtails second hand now...

[Mikee]

There must be more to it then that. Onza could have stayed in the trials market as well, of which they were very well established. I can't see why they would throw in the towel, if trials bike sales were still profitable.

[Mark W]

Depends what 'profitable' means to them in a way - margins in the MTB world seem to be way higher than the trials world, so if they can make more while having to do less work (if you're just buying groupsets, forks, cockpits and stuff from OE suppliers) it's probably simpler.

I think Joe replied to a thread about Onza on here and said they had had a reduction in sales, but it'd be interesting to know how that broke down. It seemed their range was fairly cluttered at one point - for example there was one year where the Bird and the Ska were separated by £30. The Ska had an upgrade to FFW and had better brake pads, so nobody bought Birds. They got offered to TartyBikes on mega discount because they just weren't selling. Can remember helping unload them and that was a tedious process... 

If you're dealing with issues like that, it's probably not making that sector appealing to the people who have bought your company out and are looking to maximise their return.

Onza have ended up stripping sales back to just the Tyke and Sting AFAIK, but from my experience at TB it seemed like there was (and possibly still is?) scope for doing the mega cheap 20" front and rear style bike, a 20" front/19" rear cheap bike and a cheap 24". You don't necessarily need to have a bike at every £50 price point.

EDIT: Obvious caveat here is that it's much easier to hypothesise about running a company than actually doing it, I'm sure there was/is other stuff going on.

[JT!]

16 hours ago, Stephen Morris said:

I really hate Jamie Oliver.

What's he done now? Last I heard he took a big break after trying to get American children to eat healthier and then his restaurants went bankrupt.

[Stephen Morris]

4 hours ago, JT! said:

What's he done now? Last I heard he took a big break after trying to get American children to eat healthier and then his restaurants went bankrupt.

I just think he has a smug ‘holier than thou’ attitude when it comes to food.