Power13 wrote:
Jim@EROsports wrote:
devashish_paul wrote:
Nick B wrote:
Dev, most ppl dont have injuries keeping them from obtaining a faster position.
The problem lies with inappropriate fitters and use of words like "comfort" and "aggressive"
Come back when you are 55 or even 45. Most of those athletes have a variety of limitations.
I rarely find that to be true. We have 70 yr old clients who would put most people's positions on this forum to shame.
Gotta agree with Jim here....I am 48 and ride in pretty low / long position w/ no issues, as do most of my training buddies. But we all also have a lot of years in the saddle, which I think goes a long way towards being able to ideal position on your own.
That said, to dev's points above re: the market, I largely agree, but disagree in a few important areas. Back when I was doing product development in the industry, all the product guys seemed to have a built-in bias towards making bikes that *we* wanted to ride. Sure, for a mountain bike, we would shorten the TT up a bit and put a shorter / higher rise stem on, or maybe even *gasp* use a rise bar....but in general, they were mostly bikes that were built around a racers' mentality.
And what our dealers kept telling us (and what we were slow to respond to) was that our customers weren't interested in riding bikes like that. So they were coming in, buying a mountain bike and swapping out for smoother tires, higher rise stems / bars and big fat cushy saddles. In short, we weren't listening to the voice of the consumer. The company I was working for at the time finally took notice and we developed the first "comfort" bike that not only included all the points noted, but we designed a frame around the idea of "comfort"....which from a frame design POV meant a more upright position. I also then used a similar concept to design one of the first "disease ride" bikes.....a style that eventually emerged as the Gran Fondo bikes today.
But the difference was that we didn't abandon the other bike designs.....we augmented our bike lines with the new models, but kept selling the other ones as well. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening as it pertains to tri bikes. The trend right now is undoubtedly towards the bikes with higher stacks and shorter reach, but it is now to the detriment of the long / low bikes. And the reality is that there is still a market for those bikes, and many, many people were able to successfully fit on them. There is the possibility for both designs to co-exist in the market.....but the bike industry is very much one that follows trends hard. And when Specialized had great success with the Shiv Tri geometry, everyone else started running in that direction.....which left a lot of us abandoned.
So while the move to shorter and taller bikes is absolutely correct (gotta listen to the Voice of the Consumer, right?), it does not mean you need to abandon Long & Low. My guess is that as the people who can ride those bikes start to cycle out of their current rides, there is going to be a circling back to bikes that will fit their needs.
I think the problem is R&D associated with each bike variant and incremental market for a product spin to target a slightly different segment outside the main market. The main market is the back 97% of the triathlon field in 49-59. If you can sell one product to them (different size molds but the same bike), then you're done. Outside that, you have to decide if you want another product to address the slices of the market outside of the fat part of the market (I am talking about TAM, not size the the athletes).
Sure there is a market of riders like Nick B, but you can sell the same P3 you sell to me with no spacers and sell it to guys like him with a negative rise stem...and get gets better...I am the "no spacer guy" on the new P3, so you can sell it to all the guys above me who need 1, 2, 3, 4 spacers. If you make a bike for Nick and make me use 8 spacers, (and I am in the 10 percentile group who don't need spacers) then you can't sell really well to the additional 90% above me who need 1-4 spacers. So why bother making a bike optimized around Nick's needs, when you can address much larger TAM (sorry, you know the acronym....Total Available Market) if it is built around a different 'zero spacer athlete' who is closer to the bulk of the market.
If I was a VP in a bike company I'd tell the tri/TT bike product manager guy, "I am going to give you as small a R&D budget to minimize my R&D spend on this small market and with which you need to address 80-90% of the market...spec out a product that does that, or I am putting that money into Hybrid bike that I can sell to every fitness rec athlete. I want to win the entire latter market because I think we can make more revenue there...all this tri stuff is niche...I'll put money into because it is cool and a nice market to have flagship products in....but only so many $$$.... so come up with something that gets me the biggest bang for my R&D....don't try to worry about niche usages in the market, we'll leave that to small bike companies who can make money servicing those market segments...they are not interesting enough to put incremental R&D into...I'll put my R&D elsewhere....we can only spend so much R&D on the tri market and I really don't want to add another sets of molds to address only 5% or less of the market when I can service that incremental segment with the same investment in the main line product and get maybe half of that anyway".
That's really the main reason why Nick is not getting the bike he wants. I appreciate his frustration because I was exactly like him, mucking around with ergo stems, low stack padding etc etc. Back in the day, if I got an extra small bike and jacked my saddle forward, I'd literally fly over the front, and so I needed to go with a larger frame with decent front center, then jack the saddle forward and take an ergo stem to get low. The problem back in the day with going long and low was there were no long and low bikes...we had to use road bikes that were small to get low, but then there was not enough bike in front of you....so you had to go with a decent size frame and then get the saddle forward with a forward seat post and then low with an ergo stem.
Fortunately long and low tri bikes started coming soon enough later, but athletes who need to do this have generally been the pointy end of the field. Guys who just want to do their first Ironman for the FINISH are 1/3 of every WTC IM. They are not the guys going to Jim at Ero sport for fit and they don't need what Nick B wants (or what I used to want).
Think about this for a second. If every IM has 800 newbie IM's that likely means there are 800 certain sales at each IM. Then there are 1600 more who have bikes and will upgrade. Out of 2400, there are maybe 200 who seriously will get close to Kona of which maybe only 100 need to slam the stem as low as you can go on a new P3 or a Shiv. If you can get low enough for Ben Hoffman or a Craig Alexander or Frodo on a Shiv, then imagine the discussion inside the company, "OK, so I can sell the same bike to the 16 hour finisher as Frodo and they can both do what they need to do in an IM? Sounds like we don't need to invest in another complimentary frame for the guys who need to get even lower."
What would you do if you were the CFO and just looks at R&D spend and ROI and had to look at the NPV on a variety of investments today?
Dev
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