Couldn't agree more.

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Trent Nix
Owned and operated Tri Shop
F.I.S.T. Advanced Certified Fitter | Retul Master Certified Fitter (back when those were things)

I bet it is a volume thing with Shimano.

If a manufacturer agrees to sell 10k units of 105 from Shimano, they pay $100 per unit. If they only sell 5k-9,999 they have to pay $120 per unit. So if the manufacturer sold a bunch of framesets, they full bike cost would go up as the component cost went up.. hurting profit margins (more than the extra frameset only sales would give them).

If that's the case, Shimano is screwing them in the end. You can't begin to imagine the danger that Shimano's inability to control it's supply chain and dealer network poses to the entire bike industry. But that's a different topic that nobody in the bike industry really wants to take on because they will be shouted down by all of the entitled folks addicted to their K1LL3r d3alz.

Customer service once meant a fair exchange of goods and services. Then it meant "the customer is always right". Then it became "the customer is always right, damnit!" And then, the Veruca Salts of the world turned it into, "if you doubt the customer, you must be destroyed!"

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Trent Nix
Owned and operated Tri Shop
F.I.S.T. Advanced Certified Fitter | Retul Master Certified Fitter (back when those were things)

Glad I could help. When you are ready for an IA, I'm here.

-SD

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https://www.kickstarter.com/...bike-for-the-new-era

Rants are good, and everything you say about Trek and Carl is absolutely true. I recommend frames for all my athletes and Waterloo and Toronto make this very easy for me to play with coordinates. I have _never_ recommended a Scott to anyone based on fit (have for 1 based on the killer deal available - if it didn't work out $$$ was to be gained on the switch).

I know that in the past Switzerland has _really_ hamstrung Ketchum's efforts and Adrian made the problem worse in the marketing department. "hmmm, i'll sponsor my friends and pretty girls." Rather than market with science, he just perpetuated the euro "looks" marketing culture. This was at a time where cervelo was already making a killing (i.e. publicly published case study for selling bikes) by selling to science and fit. Mr Montgomery has been gone for awhile now and yet I see no change in the marketing team's approach from ketchum. Now is this just another up high directive from Switz that's driving that, i don't know, but it certainly is still showing that they don't really care.

When I first saw the bike in Frankfurt last year my reaction was "super cool, but I hate tall/short bikes". I'll have to have another look based on this article... but that would sorta require them to fulfill that request of yours.

And personally, at R:615 and S:615, i'm not sure i'll be on any other bike but an old P3 anytime soon.

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36 kona qualifiers 2006-'23 - 3 Kona Podiums - 4 OA IM AG wins - 5 IM AG wins - 18 70.3 AG wins
I ka nana no a 'ike -- by observing, one learns | Kulia i ka nu'u -- strive for excellence
Garmin Glycogen Use App | Garmin Fat Use App

I agree that there's something odd going on with how scott trains it's sops and reps.

I ride for a team sponsored by the local scott dealer, so I could get a friend a good deal on a scott plasma 20. on getting to the store we found that they had a premium 3 size small that was going for a price that was really good, so we decided to see if he'd fit. I ran some quick numbers based on what my friend gave me and I was pretty sure it would work pending a cut of the seatpost, but the shop were adamant it wouldn't work.now it's not everyday you sell a premium 3, and they were abit reluctant to recommend the bike even. Even when he hopped on the bike it looked good and luckily my friend trusted me enough to pull the trigger. a couple of weeks later he comes back from a fit session and says that the bike did fit.

I'm a fan of the plasma series, I just don't get how the people selling them can fail so miserably.

Dan, speaking of Scott in local terms here in Houston is their distribution channels absolutely suck. Up to very recently Scott bikes were only sold in the Houston area by Sun & Ski Sports, which as the name suggests is a place that primarily sells water and ski stuff (the ski part always makes me laugh because Houston is such a ski town). They had a handful of cheaper Scott road and MTBs but you could order the Plasma line. I'm not going to buy a $10,000 bike from a place that doesn't sell a bike above $1000 because they're going to be completely useless. Apparently Scott is now being sold by one of the larger bike shops in Houston but until I typed this I wasn't aware of that. My guess is Scott is probably that shops worst selling brand as well. They pretty much don't even list Scott on their website.

So it would be a giant pain in the ass to get a Scott. Whereas I can get a Cervelo, Trek, Spec, Felt, BMC, or whatever in 30 minutes if so inclined.

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Favorite Gear: Dimond | Cadex | Desoto Sport | Hoka One One

This is where Canyon (another engineer's bike company) will respectfully disagree. The integrated Speedmax CF has a detailed, 10-page PDF detailing exactly what stack and reach you get for any possible combination of stems, spacers and pedestals.

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ZONE3 - We Last Longer

I wouldn't have thought it's the design team's responsibility to sell the bikes - it sounds more like a corporate structure issue, in that the sales force doesn't get its end market, and there isn't a feedback loop between design and sales to focus them on the saleable design aspects of the product. There is another issue, though, which might render the designers a bit more culpable, which is that they were presumably responsible for generating the stack and reach data. The fact that they came up with numbers that, while possibly correct on some technical level, don't actually describe how the bike fits, possibly indicates that the designers don't really understand stack and reach conceptually?

The scott plasma was on my consideration for a new bike next year but looking at the new specalized venge... one has to wonder what is coming up with the new shiv.. wow...

"I see no change in the marketing team's approach from ketchum"

i'm going to give you just my opinion, and it's not based on any fact. i think ketchum's budget is mighty thin for tri. i don't think scott has been selling well in tri in the U.S. for awhile, and i think the tri budget given scott (if i'm right) reflects that. when i think about the athletes they sponsor, i think of kienle, clavel, luxford, mckenzie, swallow, a few others, and i doubt there's very much of that, if any, that comes out of the ketchum budget. plus, nic sims is now running this for scott, and he's got a long pedigree of doing things pretty well over at specialized. for nic, in tri, it's gone from feast to famine, budget-wise.

"When I first saw the bike in Frankfurt last year my reaction was "super cool, but I hate tall/short bikes"."

me too, brother. if you look at the two largest sizes of the plasma 5, they have wheelbases of 1,009mm 1,029mm respectively. the two largest sizes of the speed concept are at 1010mm and 1037mm. so, the large is close to dead on the same, the SC in size XL is slightly longer. yes, the plasma has 3mm more chain stay, which means that comes out of the front-center, and that shortens the plasmas slightly. but they're pretty close. each bike is slightly short in the front-center, but not overwhelmingly so.

but what about the plasma's height? is it too tall in these sizes? i don't think so. but you have to be willing to employ that flat stem, and i've got a finely-tuned ear for dog whistle politics when it comes to the posture bike makers strike toward triathletes. almost every one of them has a varsity set up for pro cyclists and a junior high school set up for triathletes. this goes back to the 1980s. same thinking, different technology, different generation. if we still can't stamp out racism 150 years after slavery has been abolished, we're not going to get rid of triathlism in 20 or 30 years.

it's not that we all need those flat stems. but some of us do. and, the roadies don't need the flat stems any more than we do. they want them, because they suspect pedestaling the armrests on a low bike is faster. so we need to at least have the flat stems available at the retail stores.

sorry for the circular route, but the plasma is low and long enough, just you *might* need the flat stem, and if that's the case you've got to ditch the hydration system. there's nothing wrong with that. that just puts you on a par with the rest of the world's tri bikes. the problem with scott is the lack of a system demonstrating how these bikes will look and work underneath YOUR fit coordinates. but i'll eat my hat if they don't have one up and running in a month. this is where i think ketchum says enough is enough and makes sure it gets done.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

"The scott plasma was on my consideration for a new bike next year but looking at the new specalized venge... one has to wonder what is coming up with the new shiv.. wow."

maybe. but if you step back, the question has been for some time i think: why are there no road superbikes? okay, look has made something like that for road, a couple of other companies, but mostly not. now we're all thinking cervelo S5, giant propel, etc., and aero wheels made their way into road. so this was coming. but they're just catching up to where tri already has been. the big push - look at trek's new road bike - is aero road. gives us all an excuse to buy a new road bike. so THAT's why i've been riding so slow! i'm not on an aero road bike!

what will this mean to tri? i don't know. but the technology flow has been going in the other direction, from tri to road. it's low hanging fruit, making a road bike more aero.

specialized is my client. scott is not. so i have every reason to urge you on. wait for specialized! but what's compelling to me about scott, and why i kind of took them a little to the woodshed, is that they've got a great bike that's now a year in. prices are going to start to flow down. with a tweak here and a nudge there the plasma 5 could be a nice seller for scott and its dealers.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

"This is where Canyon (another engineer's bike company) will respectfully disagree. The integrated Speedmax CF has a detailed, 10-page PDF detailing exactly what stack and reach you get for any possible combination of stems, spacers and pedestals."

canyon was founded and is owned by roman arnold. my german distributor for QR, pretty much the entire time i was there, was a company called RTI sports, and it was owned by 3 gentleman: roman arnold, roman's brother franc, and jurgen zack. franc arnold is the founder/owner of ergon, and is the german distributor for topeak. topeak was, and i imagine still is, the canyon agent in the orient. topeak was our agent in the orient, tho they didn't have much agency business to do because we built our bikes in north america at the time i owned and ran QR.

roman arnold, first, is not your typical european in his thinking. but more than that, he came up as a manufacturer through the prism of tri, and the prism of north american tri. the reason he needed an agent in the orient at all was that we let him make a QR bike under license, and he also make softride bikes under license, each for the german market. the first ever bikes he manufactured were tri bikes.

but he came out of a retailing background. when i first met him he owned radsport arnold, a very successful retail store in koblenz. the one background he DIDN'T have was just coming up through the ranks of a european bike manufacturer. roman's view has always been to identify and solve a problem, rather than to do things as they always have been done. rather then look down at tri, tri is his rootstock, as a bike maker.

canyon is as successful as it is because european bike makers are exactly the way i describe them, and canyon shoves a crowbar into that crevice and wedges it wide open.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Great history lesson there. Thanks. Was super impressed with that pdf detailing every possible fit combination. "Now _thats_ what ahm talkin' about."

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36 kona qualifiers 2006-'23 - 3 Kona Podiums - 4 OA IM AG wins - 5 IM AG wins - 18 70.3 AG wins
I ka nana no a 'ike -- by observing, one learns | Kulia i ka nu'u -- strive for excellence
Garmin Glycogen Use App | Garmin Fat Use App

i'm going to give you just my opinion, and it's not based on any fact. i think ketchum's budget is mighty thin for tri. i don't think scott has been selling well in tri in the U.S. for awhile, and i think the tri budget given scott (if i'm right) reflects that. when i think about the athletes they sponsor, i think of kienle, clavel, luxford, mckenzie, swallow, a few others, and i doubt there's very much of that, if any, that comes out of the ketchum budget.

Dan,

How valuable is it to have those Pro's sponsored and riding the bike? What is the ROI on that? The bike "won" Kona last year - years ago that was worth something. These days the marketing world is VERY different. What sort of impact does it have now? After I read your article - I'm thinking it does not have the impact that it did years ago.

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

"How valuable is it to have those Pro's sponsored and riding the bike? What is the ROI on that?"

it depends entirely on who the pro is, and what his strong suit is. jurgen zack, normann stadler, these guys were beasts on the bike. consumers in our industry value that. or, they did. do they still value that? i don't know.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

I don't buy a bike based off who is riding it. I buy a bike based off the science, engineering, and data behind it.

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Make Inside Out Sports your next online tri shop! http://www.insideoutsports.com/

FWIW, having something under Kienle is of value at the moment. The guy is fast but it's also pretty well known that he is very careful with how he sets up every aspect of his bike. He might be THE most squared-away pro out there. So when I saw the Plasma Premium under him I said "I'm buying that bike" but the experience I had at my local Scott shop was so awful that there's no chance I'll buy one now.

I had no idea of their history. I think, and this relates to a separate thread, that so long as they keep doing what they're doing, and can sell me a Ultegra equipped bike for less than a 105 partially equipped bike delivered I see no reason at all to consider the alternatives.

The only downside is the wait, the upside of that is their communication and transparency about waits means you know where you stand and can decide accordingly.

The one review of their production facility I've seen suggests that they have taken the best that manufacturing industry has to offer and applied it to their own assembly facility and they produce a good product.

Knock on wood, I've three of their bikes and they are great.

all this history is interesting. roman arnold "found" topeak because these guys were jo kleiber's agent in the orient, and roman needed a kick-ass agent when he started making my bikes under license. jo was the founder of syntace, and jo was extremely anal and demanding. topeak was jo's perfect agent. topeak is very westernized in how they approach QC and attention to detail, and to packaging, marketing, etc., but they are natives of taiwan and they absolutely understand asian manufacture. they have a foot in each hemisphere, and are experts at both. they came out of giant, maybe 25 or so years ago.

canyon didn't just show up. it was the result of a 20 or 25 year process. there is no reason why canyon's success can't be duplicated. just, you have to do all the right things canyon does. it's no secret what those right things are. it's just a case of doing it. sounds easy. have the right agent. have the right instincts. have the right processes in place. but you still have to do it.

so, you look over in that specialized venge thread, these guys are masters at process-driven transactions. you walk into a retail store selling specialized, you enter a process. you aren't shown the saddles on the slat wall. you get your ass measured, then you're shown the output of a process: the saddle perfect for you. how important is that for online? it's doubly important.

but you have to do it. competitive cyclist is owned by backcountry. there's a half-billion dollars in revenue there. yet, competitive cyclist, for everything it does right, has horrible fit calculators, and were i a monkey throwing darts at a wall on which were written lists of complete bike solutions i would get it right as often as competitive cyclist does when it comes to tri bike fit. so, you just have to do it. you just have to make the right moves. but, knowing that doesn't mean you will make the right moves. competitive cyclist has had years to make better online fit calculators, and they just haven't done it. if they just spent a little time and money and made good fit calculators the battle would be half-won. but you just have to do it. canyon does it. others don't.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

http://cyclingiq.com/...ustry-supply-chains/

this was an interesting series of articles for a non bike industry person - I cant speak to the accuracy

it would be interesting to have a series of front page articles about how different people fell in to their respective roles - QR, Cervelo, Felt, Desoto (did emilio pick up a singer one day and start banging out split side shorts - and what possessed him to do that to start with?), the Josh from Zipp / Silica story on the carbon wheels at Paris Roubaix was a great story

I am quite interested in how the various individuals decided they could make bikes - who decides one day they can make bikes / wheels / shorts?

i'll tell you exactly how emilio came to be doing what he's doing. he was working with the life's a beach guys, they had a thing called the bad boy club. sort of a sub-brand. emilio was working with them on that. then it kind of went away, i don't know the details. but it went away, i knew that much.

this was around 1989 or 1990. emilio seemed to me an extremely talented guy, he was a free agent, so i approached him, asked him if he wanted to start a clothing company. first 2 years it was headquartered at QR, in san marcos (san diego). we started with 5 owners. then it got whittled down to 2, emilio and a very good AGer named dan neyenhuis. then, a couple of years ago, dan decided to retire, emilio bought out dan and it's now emilio 100 percent.

to me, de soto is the heart of triathlon when it comes to apparel. there are other really good brands, newer brands, and i love roka, blueseventy and others. but it all kind of flows from emilio and before emilio there were other brands you never heard of, like gatti, edgewear and a really talented guy named victor de silva whose brand was called tri fit and this brand changed the entire running industry while it was around. nike, everybody, they all had to bend to what tri fit was doing. these were the antecedents to de soto, de soto is the one clothing brand that has been ongoing since that era, pumping out great stuff, without a break or a change in management.

so, there you go. any others? ;-)

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

This is why I love you, Dan, and this site. Thanks for the history lesson!

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ZONE3 - We Last Longer

Yes, but it's hard to ignore Sebastian's ride last year. It's one thing to ignore Alexander riding an Orbea in the middle of the pack.

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Brian

Sure, but I'm not Kienle. Kienle could have won Kona on any bike

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Make Inside Out Sports your next online tri shop! http://www.insideoutsports.com/