The bike industry is full of brands with long, storied histories. Dig beneath the surface though, and you’ll find that few of them are run by their founders, offer designs from the people who put them on the map, are made in the factory in which they originated, or really have much at all to do with the people or products that made them known commodities. They’re wandering the land now like so many zombies, living on left over brand equity and investor capital.
Increasingly it’s hard to keep up with who owns what, who is responsible for the good stuff, and who is just jumping in with some “smart” money to try to align their market strategy via a consolidation of category verticals. If that sounded like word salad to you, then you haven’t read many corporate acquisition press releases.
Read for example the history of the Schwinn Bicycle Company. Is there a more iconic bike brand in the United States? You can still buy a Schwinn today, but the bike you get will have nothing to do with the Schwinn family or the group of people who conjured the Sting Ray or the Paramount.
None of that is to say that you wouldn’t like the Schwinn you got today. I haven’t ridden one, so I can’t tell you. What I can say is that the reputation built up by the Schwinn’s over more than a century still sells those bikes, whatever they are.
To be fair, a lot of small companies with visionary ideas aren’t well run. It’s one thing to distill your experience into a product that really is superior to all the rest. It’s another to make and deliver it over a period of years without making costly mistakes. A lot of these brands sail themselves into treacherous waters and then sink the ship out of inexperience or hubris or some heady cocktail of both.
But they’ve built a thing of value, and someone with money is almost always around to acquire a “distressed asset,” sure they can put it right for their own profit. Generally, but not always, that doesn’t go very well, for reasons that should mostly be clear. The value of a brand is in the people who create it, not in the name alone, or in the corporate decision making that goes on separate from the creative part of the endeavor.
I’ll repeat. None of that means the products are suddenly bad. I want to be clear about that. What I’m saying is that what you could get today is decidedly NOT what you would have gotten 15 or 20 years ago, though it might carry the same logo.
And as outside money acquires bike companies in distress, and there are plenty of them around, the nature of what they do changes, the way they do it changes, and often the products that ensue are NOT the products upon which the brand was built. For consumers, it can be so hard to understand what you’re actually buying.
Some probably don’t care. They just want the name, for whatever reason. That’s fine, I guess.
But for people who are spending their hard-earned money on something they came to believe in last year or five years ago, it can be increasingly difficult to be sure that the thing being offered is still the thing they want. Seeing this from inside the industry has cured me of most of my nostalgia. Bikes I once I coveted, I realize, are only shadows of their former selves, zombies maybe, and I’ve saved thousands of dollars by understanding the difference between what was then, and what is now.
Did leveraged buyouts hit the bike industry? It sealed the fate of a lot of other businesses that were suddenly loaded up with debt due to buyouts rather than their own bad decision making.
As an owner of multiple Lemond and Ritchey road bikes, this article speaks to me.