Part IV - The Bicycle Industry Machine only knows how mimic enthusiasm to shake-down riders
Only passionate riders know how to mentor and bring up the next generation of riders
The Bicycle Industry Empire strikes back, but independent bicycle rebels will not be defeated. If you think things in the galaxy of bicycles are odd now, just wait, the bicycle industry is about to get really, really strange
In my previous posts, I outlined three points; 1. There is no such thing as the Bicycle Industry, 2. Independent folks within what the machine calls the Bicycle Industry were running a ministry, disguised as a business, and 3. Those independent individuals imbued with cycling passion, are viewed as a liability by marketers, corporate interests, holding companies, and venture capitalist.
Bicycle industry commentators, in their quest to understand how the industry got here, where we are now, and where we might go next, have missed not one, but all three of these points. Indeed, the very financial strings attached to this endeavor they call The Bicycle Industry, have all equally missed these three points. Therefore, you are all hereby fired.
“You’re fired.”
I am not firing you, boards of directors are not firing you, even current bicycle riders are not firing you. It is the yet-to-be-born, in fact, that are firing you. Young children who will come up riding are firing you. They will vote with their feet, future finances, and fathers decisions (I ask for grace; I’m working on my alliteration). The youth of today are already hypnotized by influences of ease and emptiness, and have succumbed to the white lies told them about instant gratification. Promises of the next product featuring “all the flavor, none of the calories!” have already been consumed. Indeed, it tastes delicious in the mouth, but turns to bitter gall in the stomach.
Let me be plain; bicycle ridership has always been cyclical. The reason for this is because current riders, parents, bicycle shops, and bicycle companies have been inconsistent at bringing up the next generation. It’s that simple. Bicycle Industry commentators, listen carefully - the Apostles of cycling regularly rise up, are cut down, and rise again. Don’t believe me? Why are so many passionate company founders who sold off their business, reclaiming the helm of those companies? Why does @mattyactive on YouTube have 55k loyal followers who are now excited about Wal-Mart’s Ozark Trail brand of bicycles? Why are the “Kids Ride Shotgun”, and “Woom” companies expanding in the marketplace?
“Go ye therefore and make disciples”
By the mid 1980’s, kids had been taping baseball cards to their bicycle frames in order to flap against the rotating wheel’s spokes to make motorcycle-like sounds. BMX, short for bicycle motor cross, took off. By the early 1990’s, the bicycle industry began riding a new wave of bicycle disciples going out into the world, and making new disciples in their own name. We saw the fruit of this in new bike sales, parts and accessories purchases, service and repairs, and bicycle racing. But the most important sector where we saw this trend of growth, was in the independent, organic growth of bicycle “shop rats”. Don’t believe me? Ask the last generation of bicycle business owners & operators how they got their start. Ask that generation, now considering early retirement, or jumping ship into other industries, how they got into riding bicycles. I guarantee that they can name the person who fed them the sacrament, the tool that inspired their passion, and the bike shop that facilitated their new religion.
During those days, wild personalities reigned, crazy ideas were hatched by passionate enthusiasts, and new riders were authentically recruited through genuine grassroots relationship-building. Excitement beget more excitement. Kids grew up riding bikes, hanging out in bike shops, and becoming mentored when they finally first began to turn a wrench. However, money was hard to come by, and this rag-tag group of enthusiasts leveraged everything, even their own name, to fund the endeavor.
Don’t doubt, influence your way out
There have always been false prophets and false gods in what you may call the Bicycle Industry. There has always been a bifurcation between the “true believers” in cycling, and those who see dollar signs over discipleship. Back in my day, even Mercedes tried to put their name on an AMP branded bicycle. A company called “Specialized” had ripped-off the early mountain bike visionaries designs, only to replicate them in mass, cheaply in Taiwan. Part of the wild-west movement meant that bicycle enthusiasts, who happened to be in other industries, found ingenious ways of using economies-of-scale in those other industries, to launch bicycle related undertakings. Thomson seatposts, AMP Research, and a lot of the CNC machining companies, were made possible by the welders and machinists, dreamers and inventors who all had day-jobs doing other related work.
By the 2000’s a new trend emerged. The corporate sponsorships of X-games, road tours, and Red Bull riders, combined together with the financial strings of capital investors, to create and then completely control what they called “The Bicycle Industry”. Put plainly; every single dollar needed to continue the bicycle riding project, had a string equally attached to the continued funding of that project. And not just finacial strings attached to new bicycle enterprises. Not just financial strings attached to independent bicycle shops’ ability to buy inventory. Not even just financial strings attached to all business entities having to do with bicycle riding. But even strings attached to individual riders continuing to ride themselves. Don’t believe me? How did we get to Giant concept stores, Specialized concept stores, and Trek’s purchase of so many of their “special partner” independent dealers? Additionally, when did Giant Bicycles introduce bicycle purchase financing? Ride now, pay later was the motto, easy application and quick approval, and the hijacking of bicycle riding itself was complete.
Today, an independent bicycle business, run by enthusiast seeking to bring up the next generation of enthusiasts, is as close to impossible you can get.
Return on investment is the main metric used in the new landscape, only it’s purely financial. Behind the curtain of “every butt on a bike” campaigns, is a wizard of Oz dispassionately hawking widgets with a spreadsheet to track earnings. Marketers, sales managers, boards of directors, and the venture capitalists who feed them, are all buying and selling what is most important to you and I as market commodities and stock trades. They will sell you out for the next “outdoor sports” trend coming along that looks good in the portfolio. But they have a blindspot just as big as the hole in their own heads - they don’t understand Apostleship.
By the 2010’s an odd trend began to take shape. Corporate bicycle interests believed they could turn to a new marketing phenomenon in light of lagging sales - social media influencers. Since the uncontrollable passionate individuals running discipleship ministries were getting in the way of raw profits, corporate interests martyred them to make larger margins. This presented with a problem, because internal marketers could never quite figure out the customers their companies were selling product to. The solution to this problem, was initially to hire some of the high-profile passionate ones who could be controlled and toe the company line. However, controlling the uncontrollable became more like using their likeness and putting words in their mouth until they rebelled or retired, so that tact didn’t last very long. Why not instead, just 1099 anyone willing to cheaply shill your product? Why not just utilize directly those who were already willing to prostitute themselves to the highest bidder? Why not just pay this new breed of home-taught algorithm-learned amateur marketers who had figured out a thing called “engagement”, to hawk your products as independent contractors?
What good is it to invest in pump tracks and skate parks, without bringing up the next generation of riders and skaters to ride them?
As of this writing, the corporate Bicycle Industry controllers are now bringing marketing back “in-house”. They are getting another new round of investment capital, consolidating, selling off underperforming assets, and hiring new marketing managers. Don’t believe me? Look up a company called Revelyst, and search the job postings over the last year. The direct-to-consumer model was designed to cut out uncontrollable independent bike shops. The original swap between brand representation by uncontrollable bicycle personalities, to bought-and-paid-for fake influencers, is now being swapped out again, but this time, for more direct control of messaging. Oh by the way, they will be using AI to steal your passion, repackage it as their own, and sell it back to you at a healthy margin. We don’t need a crystal ball to understand what is coming, but simply an honest map of what got us here in the first place.
A complete bifurcation of the industry is already upon us, and a wider gap is coming. There are genuine, true grassroots, rider-driven endeavors coming back online as we speak (and some that never went away, but survived the slings and arrows). There is a glimmer of hope, as these riders are discipling new riders. However, the financing to create another movement, especially if it to be more sustainable, must come from the independent bicycle riders themselves, supported by one another. Simply riding another wave of beholden corporate investment, without shrewdly using that machine as a pawn to build new generations of riders, will lead to even more fruitless cycles. Watch closely, as one group of passionate individuals will “plant trees whose shade they will never enjoy themselves”, while the other group of rent seekers will continue their project to enslave, pilfer, and crucify the first group.
This industry is already odd, and it’s about to get really weird, really quick.
Part III - Your Passion Is A Liability To Them
But They Will Pilfer Your Authenticity Because They Have None Themselves
How can a periodical called Bicycle Retailer And Industry News (BRAIN), make so many attempts to understand the entity it reports on, but never actually figure us out? This week, longtime contributor and marketer Rick Vosper, suddenly begins to think about authenticity in the cycling industry. Let me take you on a journey in which Outside Magazine comes to acquire BRAIN, and thus one of the last vestiges of authenticity in the bicycle industry fully succumbs to, and in fact becomes, the very thing that devoured it.
As a youth in the 1990’s, I loved active outdoor activities and grew up exploring the trails around my home in the East Bay Area on foot and atop my mountain bike, so I subscribed to Outside magazine (among many others) for a time. More recently, I picked up a copy of that periodical at an airport, and came across a two-page article by outdoorist Laird Hamilton. Only, it was not an authentic article, but rather, a marketing advertisement designed and disguised as an article.
Brands can neither be authentic, nor inauthentic. Only individuals can be authentic.
By the mid-1990’s the bicycle industry had an identity crisis. There were too many authentic personalities among the various shops, machinists, bike companies, and even the racing scene. You see, passion was getting in the way of profit. Zeal for riding and getting others on a bicycle was getting in the way of business. This was an awakening for many great shop owners, who had attended the school of passion, rather than the school of business. More than a few of them took this seriously, and added to their excitement for cycling, a genuine effort and education to grow their business in order to align with their personal mission to equip, train, model, and build community around bicycle riding. But it was too late, as the corporate plan to push passionate riders out of the industry of their own making was already underway in earnest.
Don’t believe me? Look at nearly any Trek bicycle from that era. You will find a “made in the USA” sticker (usually accompanied by a sticker that the shop who built and tuned the bicycle added to the seattube). Bicycle shops, called specialty retailers by the industry aggregators, once also featured stickers on their front windows that represented the proud partnerships they were happily committed to (buy-in is what I remember them calling it), but now the brands whose stickers emblazoned shop doors sell their wares direct-to-consumers, or have opened up their own “branded” stores. Both tactics designed to compete directly with and undermine the very “independent dealers” who once developed local markets, stocked, and actively sold their products. And that is what cyclists are, in the eyes of many of these companies heads, widget purchasers who they need to sell more product to. Another of the fistfuls of examples I can give, is to look at who currently owns Outside magazine? Or even more to my point, who owns Santa Cruz Bicycles, or even Cannondale? Storied USA companies who were piloted by “way too passionate to make it” personalities.
“We don’t want you anymore, we’ve changed the locks and reprogrammed the alarm keypad, but we will gladly take your authenticity, oh and your last paycheck is in the mail, so don’t bother coming back in.”
It amazes me, no actually, it astounds me, that industry insiders, CEO’s, and marketing departments are peering into historical data and trend analysis’ crystal balls to try and “understand the consumer market”. They went all the way down to picking off some of us to become influencers. Do you know what an influencer is? Someone who peddles authenticity for a corporate board of executives. Someone who knows how to fake authenticity really, really well, in order to trick others into consuming global industrial products at scale. But now that the scheme is no longer working in mass, and economic forces are constraining individuals expendable incomes, corporations are bringing their contrived authenticity campaigns back in-house.
Don’t believe me? Look up the corporations called Revelyst, Vista Outdoor, Amer Sports. Look at the job positions these corporations have designed over the last year. I know, because I have pursued and interviewed for those soulless jobs for that length of time. For that matter, look up the holding company called PON, or the venture capital financiers who keep injecting money into dying outdoor brands based on new CEO’s with executive growth charts and promises to turn the ship of unprofitability around next quarter. Outside Inc. owns BRAIN, with which venture capital moneys did the Goliath purchase it, and to what end?
“Drink your Ovaltine? It’s a crummy commercial?!
Do not mistake market share or monopoly for brand authenticity. Any organization (especially one calling itself Authenticity.co) who indiscriminately surveys buying habit opinions from “consumers”, and scores the likes of Vans, Nike, or I shudder to even say, Apple, as being top authentic companies, just goes to show what marketers have turned this globalized world into. I mean, there was an entire Netflix series called “Mad Men” for fucks sake. And the men who were mad, were neither authentic, nor trustworthy.
The bicycle industry was hacked years ago, by profiteers, speculators, and imitative corporate greed machines. It then used every lever of force possible, even social stigma, to remove the passionate individuals who built the very foundations of this endeavor they call the bicycle industry. Their most hated obstacle, the independent bicycle shop. Our passion was a liability to them. Our zeal threatened their bottom line. They have no understanding of our authenticity. They have no eyes with which to see, no ears with which to hear. They actively hate your authenticity… but now they are coming like thieves to take it from you, repackage it as their own, and then sell it back to you at a hefty margin.
There Rick Vosper, this is the article you should have written. I fixed it for you.
Part II - We were running a MINISTRY disguised as a BUSINESS, while they were disguising their business as our ministry
The truth is, most of us did not come to work in what they call “the bicycle industry” in order to make large sums of money. We were instead drawn to our local bicycle shops by the wonderful mechanical machines displayed in their windows. The distinct scent, and you all know it, sorta felt like a second home to us. Magazines we saved up and subscribed to, lead us to seek out the objects of our desire inside of some dingy chaotic oddly houred time capsule of a building with glass display cases, awkwardly stocked pegboard walls, and rows of bicycles to the ceiling and beyond. The often grouchy, but begrudgingly helpful ones who were on the payroll, wearily looked up in fraught anticipation from whatever metal monstrous beast they were fighting whenever the loose mass of bells on the door clanked against each other, and they tolerated us. As we matured and began pestering the staff more often, they one day relented, and offered to let us build a bike in some forgotten corner work stand with the worst of worn out and missing tools hanging off loose pegboard hooks.
You may have heard phrases coming out of mountain bike culture like, “dirt church”, or “disciples of dirt”. Likewise, cyclists sometimes talk of zen, or finding their happy place while on the bike.
“Jordan Crider a mechanic at Cal Bicycles in Livermore tunes a children’s bicycle Wednesday.”
-The Valley Times Friday, May 11, 2007
This whole procedure of how most of us came to work in the bicycle industry, was more like discipleship than employment recruiting. The financials of many of these shops were abysmal, wages the same, and passion often lead over business acumen. You see, we were running a ministry, disguised as a business. Those who found themselves selling comfort bikes by the pair, cruisers destined to live upside-down most of their crusty lives, and every once in a while, a machine worthy of the lavish parts hung on it, most definitely did not stay for the money. We loved riding, enjoyed tinkering, made friends we still keep, and continually cataloged future parts purchases in our head. Before we realized it, this was apparently our career, and we began making disciples in our own image. Young kids coming up reminded us of ourselves at that age, and we fed their excitement, showed them the ropes, and passed on the secrets of the trade.
“Put that coffee down! Coffee is for closers only. You think I’m f***ing with you?!
Handing out refreshments
and encouragement
-Bike to Work day West Seattle 2010
While we were faithfully tending to the flock, there were corporate dispassionate packs of wolves who noticed a lucrative opportunity and donned suits of white wool. They hired marketing teams from slick car magazines who deciphered our code, rewrote our story in their own cheap words, and then sold it back to us at a heavy markup. They disguised their business as our ministry. Don’t believe me? Joe Breeze meticulously and thoughtfully hand-brazed some of the earliest dedicated mountain bike frames, as did Tom Ritchey, but it was the Gary Fisher’s and Mike Sinyard’s that ditched their saddles for marketing departments the minute they saw the red glow reflected in the welding goggles of those forefathers. Throughout the 1980’s, a gap widened between riders who beget riders, and patent office clerks who figured out how to work the system. By the 1990’s we all knew the handful of asian manufacturers who made every brand name tire; it was common knowledge which few asian hub makers laser etched other companies logos on hub shells. Everyone understood what was coming out of Taiwan was generally good, but we only settled for it. What we really wanted, were bike parts made in the USA by other riders themselves, or even parts made in Japan, U.K., Switzerland, or Italy.
When in doubt, trademark your way out.
Volunteer mechanic for the Sunday Parkways masses
Portland, OR Sunday Parkways 2011
Most of us who worked in shops, for distributors, or even in the manufacturing sector, were taken along for the ride. We eventually got slightly larger paychecks as our hours increased, but many of us built businesses that were not our own. Some ventured to open up shops or companies themselves, with varying degrees of successes. The pie has always been notoriously small in the bicycle business world, and I genuinely admired those who cleaned up, learned how to run a business, took this shit seriously, and made a decent living out of it. I know that I did just that. I finally learned how to manage myself properly, learned the rules to the game, played nice, and adopted their language to communicate appropriately with them. I wound up turning down lesser dead-end job offers, just to land the one that I knew I had always wanted. I then stayed there over thirteen years, because I was allowed to flourish, challenged by new opportunities, the business was profitable, and the owner was genuinely generous.
This model year we have three new colorways, bluesign approved, and newly trademarked technology!
Volunteer mechanic for BDO games bicycle race
Ogden, UT 2014
These days, so many in the bicycle industry, don’t really know what all the fuss is about over bicycles. Some of them don’t even like bicycles. Others, sell and support widgets or units on a spreadsheet. And you & I are now a line item on column “B” of their Excel or google sheets. Their formalized terms that you or I would never have used with each other began reluctantly showing up in our vocabulary when we had to interact with their machine. “Specialty Retailer”, “Bicycle Goods Manufacturer”, “Independent Bicycle Dealer”, “Specialty Channel”, “Road Segment”, “New Colorway”, the list goes on and on. These people do not care about you. These people do not even like you. These people do not care about bikes, or parts, or tools, or routes, or trails, or independently owned small businesses. These people care about money, not bringing up the next generation of passionate riders. The objects that inspire you are just tradable commodities to them; hell, you are a commodity to them. Your assets are liquidity to them that they will leverage against you in a heartbeat. The special relationships they made with you, were no more special than the deals they made with others behind your back.
It turns out, the bicycle industry never existed. There is just one group of passionate, innovative, pioneering, infectious bicycle riders… and then another group of rent-seekers, who found ingenious ways of exploiting the passions and pocketbooks of the first group.
The “bicycle industry” never existed, and they no longer need your services.
Does the "bicycle industry" even exist? Is there a coherent collective unit of business and recreation that we can group together on one spreadsheet? After nearly 20 years of working in this mass they call the bicycle industry, I've left to look for employment elsewhere. Now, from the outside, I'm peering back into a passionate world shaken to pieces by corporate greed, financial missteps, debt incentive structures, and investor ignorance.
Part I - There Is No Such Thing As The Bicycle Industry
There is no such thing as “the bicycle industry” - no collective “we” to group together.
And Why You Should Re-join It
There is no such thing as “the bicycle industry” - no collective “we” to group together in order to glean information, data, or trends. It flat-out literally does not exist, even though, some of us actually really wanted it to, myself included. But many of us still use those terms to speak about, well, I’m going to make a strained attempt here:
“Things associated with individuals who tend to coalesce around a feeling, loosely held together by a set of objects similar in form to a bicycle.”
Go ahead, attempt to define the thing any further, I’ll wait. Yes, I understand the entomology of the term “bicycle”, but look up the definition, and it simply does not describe what we’re talking about. What sets of objects are we allowed to define as a “bicycle”? Are there rules on how to play? If you say it has wheels, how many wheels can it have? Must it necessarily have a seat, or foot cranks? Where is it allowed to take us, and can it be used while standing still? What number of individuals can experience it at the same time, and must they each have their own object? Do I even have to physically own one of these contraptions to participate?
What is a bicycle?
What is a cyclist?
What is a tandem?
What is a trike?
What is a trials bike?
What is a unicycle?
What is a ski-bike?
What is an e-bike?
What is a stationary bike?
What is an adaptive bike?
What is a hand-cycle?
What is a balance bike?
What is a chainless bike?
What is a trail-a-bike?
What is a cargo bike?
What is a folding bike?
What is a water bike?
You see where I’m going here.
Aligning dropouts when bicycles were made of metals, often called “cold setting”.
Furthermore, what do so many different types of organizations, purportedly within the cohesive bicycle industry we’re referring to, have to do with one another? A Sole Proprietorship, LLC, factory, manufacturer, aluminum extruder, licenser, framebuilder, wheelbuilder, clothing company, distributor, traveling mechanic, independent sales representative, trade show organizer, consumer show organizer, event organizer, social media influencer, training coach, co-op, 501(c)(3) non-profit, cycling association, interscholastic cycling team, race sanctioning body, promoter, trail builder, mountain resort, shuttle service, youth camp, bicycle school institute, helmet technology licensing company, holding company, department store, magazine printer, commentator, news aggregator, suspension design patenter, museum foundation, and an individual riding astride a wheeled mechanical machine. What do each of these have in common?
I have many friends who have never worked for any company having anything to do with bicycles, but they ride a lot - like, a whole lot. It always struck me how little they knew about the industry that fed their love for all things bicycle. Additionally, so many friends who used to work in one of the entities mentioned above, have now undergone the classic “career change”.
The thing of it is, the only “we” that truly exists, are those of us who were magically given something that we cannot coherently explain. Something that appears to me material, but becomes indescribable when pressed. Something relational, but impossible to put to words. Something experiential, but somehow more spiritual than documentable. Something that was, in part, carefully passed down to us by, well, an independently owned bicycle shop. We came up, not through a program, but through a tradition. We were not simply managed, we were mentored. And then once a year, all of the greater collective “we’s” came together just after the cyclical good hard season, to talk shop, bond, interface with our debtors, and make agreements to spend money we hoped to eventually have for objects that did not yet exist.
All of the great endeavors of our self-described tribe are inexplicably, intensively, amazing, until they can no longer indefinitely hemorrhage money, volunteer time, or unpaid man-hours. Whether it was the original un-official Repack races, a Bay Area magazine called 180 Magazine, the National Offroad Bicycling Association (NORBA), the Professional Bicycle Mechanics Association (PBMA), the Interbike trade show, bicycle blogs, bicycle forums, or your friend-group’s local midnight moon ride - each of the best things in our concentric circles only last for a season, and then the sun sets on them all.
The business of buying and selling these bicycle shaped forms - or the dream of living off of a culturally shared feeling - is a tricky thing, there is often no margin in it. Relationships between all of the entity types listed above, are fraught with all the drama of a political election cycle - and life just goes on. We go off to school, start families, raise kids, move away, nurse injuries, and, well, get old.
Performing triage repairs on participants bicycles during Sunday Parkways in Portland, OR
Why did we let someone else group us into a line-item category? Why did we allow ourselves to become a column on someone else’s spreadsheet? Why did we adopt and use their terminology and agree to their terms?
We were not living on a model of business from the 1970’s, or even the 1950’s, but a model actually much older, like, 1800’s older. A time in which you “purchased” goods that did not yet exist, for manufacture or resale, with money you did not yet have. To see what I’m on about, go back and look at the inventor of Pepsi, Caleb Bradham. He created a concoction that his customers first called “Brads drink” building an empire of a business, when suddenly, one single ingredient bankrupted him. He lost everything and got out of the cola industry altogether and went back to being a plain ol’ pharmacist. They were and still are, called “futures”. Only now, the future risky bet is not on price, but on both supply and demand, two things very much out of our control. Vertical integration was also a product of big industrialization.
They called us IBD’s for craps sake. You all obviously know that that stands for Independent Bicycle Dealers, but that is their terminology, not ours. We always just called ourselves “the shop”, and both customers as well as employees all knew everything that that encapsulated. It was all at once a physical space, a meeting area, a hangout, a workplace, a place with tools to build and fix bikes, an information hub, a sales floor. We weren’t buying widgets for re-sale. We were selling a feeling and experience, embodied by the objects stocked in cases and on the floor. We did not initially say, “assemble” bikes, we said “build” bikes. We did not say, “service” bikes, we said “fix bikes”. They weren’t “associates”, or “team members”, they were “shop guys” or “staff”. We were not a “dealer”, we were “the shop”. Then someone else decided to change the very definition of what a bicycle is, once again. But we had to play nice with the corporations, holding companies, and financiers, because, well, we’re in business after all. Yet it wasn’t just a business was it? It was a ministry.
And someone else is now “using artificial intelligence to sell our own ideas back to us in synthetic soulless form.
“We” are still here. The ones who remember the “before times”. The ones who came into shops as a kid, green and shapeable. The ones who learned in real-time, on-the-fly, and by those who had gone the same route ahead of and before us. Many of us either left to make a living elsewhere, retired, or we’re still grinding in someone else’s definitions of the industry we inherited and enjoyed building. Let’s re-connect. Let’s build something durable together. Let’s properly pass on the torch of understanding and wisdom. Let’s bring up and mentor, as we were brought up and mentored. Let’s go for a ride together. Two more, skip the last, and then wind up at the taqueria and brewery swapping stories and memories. Let’s ride again.
Getting a lay of the land while mountain biking with friends. Antelope Island State Park, UT