Disc brakes are here, and even if you don’t want them many will, and the share of the wheel market is going to rapidly shift as the fundamental value add of high end wheel sets, the braking difference, is rendered a non issue.
I bought the HED Vanquish set on Black Friday super sale for $1500 that is the last name brand wheelset I will ever buy, because the fact is the Chinese are making perfectly sound, market leading MTB hoops for $240/rim and they are going to seize the road. For the plus bike I just built, I got industry nine hubs laced into premium Nextie rims by an American where builder, shipped to my door for $1100. That’s the top of the line option off road — the Zipp whale wheel with Chris King hubs. You go with lower end hubs and that’s $750.
Triathlon used to lead the market and now it’s the mountain bikers who are leading. They eulogized the front derailleur. They brought the modern driver body to work. And they are now going to un-douche the most unjustifiably expensive choice of consumerism by consumers and the crassest money grab by peddlers in triathlon and performance road.
But who is actually going to seize this opportunity on product and price value? So many people are asking about a wheel option for gravel and road disc, and while the HED Vanquish checks all the boxes, they are too damn expensive and I don’t like the wheels so will be returning them or selling them. Can anyone in China beat Nextie to the punch? What about Culprit, which was too early but Is now vindicated on this? Which bike company will be the first to see that the disc wheels that ship with new disc bikes need not have any labeling but a white labeling? What will you do to encourage the coming commoditization of the wheel market?
Disc brakes are here, and even if you don’t want them many will, and the share of the wheel market is going to rapidly shift as the fundamental value add of high end wheel sets, the braking difference, is rendered a non issue.
I bought the HED Vanquish set on Black Friday super sale for $1500 that is the last name brand wheelset I will ever buy, because the fact is the Chinese are making perfectly sound, market leading MTB hoops for $240/rim and they are going to seize the road. For the plus bike I just built, I got industry nine hubs laced into premium Nextie rims by an American where builder, shipped to my door for $1100. That’s the top of the line option off road — the Zipp whale wheel with Chris King hubs. You go with lower end hubs and that’s $750.
Triathlon used to lead the market and now it’s the mountain bikers who are leading. They eulogized the front derailleur. They brought the modern driver body to work. And they are now going to un-douche the most unjustifiably expensive choice of consumerism by consumers and the crassest money grab by peddlers in triathlon and performance road.
But who is actually going to seize this opportunity on product and price value? So many people are asking about a wheel option for gravel and road disc, and while the HED Vanquish checks all the boxes, they are too damn expensive and I don’t like the wheels so will be returning them or selling them. Can anyone in China beat Nextie to the punch? What about Culprit, which was too early but Is now vindicated on this? Which bike company will be the first to see that the disc wheels that ship with new disc bikes need not have any labeling but a white labeling? What will you do to encourage the coming commoditization of the wheel market?
That’s a rim not a wheel. Chinese wheels are still too expensive. Nextie are selling 55mm wheels for $370, Flo are $550. The shipping time from China to Australia (it may differ to the US?) for my light bicycle wheels was 4 weeks and coming from China they got held up in customs for a while. The wheels arrived damaged and had to be returned - 3 more weeks. 1 week until they sent me a new set, another 4 weeks of waiting. Almost 3 months. Quality wise, they were OK, but they cost $800 which is exactly the same amount I paid for a near new set of Zipp 2nd hand 808s. Most race wheels have had very little use, are in excellent condition and can generally be picked up for a song, especially if they are a few years old. Even if Chinese wheels were on a par, quality wise, with wheels from Zipp, Hed etc the shipping times and hassle with warranty returns plus cost vs 2nd market mean they are not going to be able to compete unless those issues are addressed. Additionally when you do go to sell your Chinese wheels, no-one will touch with them a barge pole because the ad has the word “Chinese” in it. My old Zipp 808s I sold in 2 days for what I paid for them 2nd hand.
I’m not anti-Chinese bike stuff, just think it’s over-priced considering the above factors.
Not sure I see this happening. Everything in your argument has also applied for several years already to frames. The Chinese can turn out perfectly sound, non-name brand frames. If you don’t want to go with a Chinese no-brand then there are also American and European shops and websites with their own in-house brands which are often re-stickered Chinese generic frames, selling at a lot less than the big brands and with little to no discernible difference in weight, performance or ride quality.
And yet I see next to zero no-brand Chinese bikes being ridden, not many in-house brands, and still lots of Cervelos, Treks, Cannondales, Specialized, etc. I guess a small part of that argument is that people still want to try a bike for sizing which isn’t an issue for wheels, but the number of Canyons on the road suggests that’s not a big deal.
Maybe the market to be in is selling high-end counterfeit decals and paint jobs to rebrand generic Chinese frames and wheels as Cervelos, Zipps, etc
I have no fear riding chinese carbon wheels, I plan on use chinese tubulars for cross next year. I can have my main set and a spare set in the pits for half the price of one set of zipps
What will you do to encourage the coming commoditization of the wheel market?
I had to check the date to make sure this wasn’t a post from like 5 years ago.
Isn’t the wheel market already commoditized with about 50 wheel brands all with the approximate HED/Zipp rim shape and about 48 of them manufactured in Taiwan or China? Some direct-sale from overseas, some with a branding or assembly process that takes place in “the West” (like Flo).
Case in point. I’m on a podunk masters cycling team. They just handed our team carbon clincher race wheels for the year (to keep). Really nice wheels. Options for disc, tubbie, etc. These are one of those mid-market brands - you might recognize the brand name, or you might not. So I guess I’ll be unloading my HED Jets. We are not a rich team, so I assume this entire wheel sponsorship probably involved a few thousands dollars changing hands for the ~10 wheelsets. I bet less than the retail cost of one pair of Zipp whale-things.
indifferent quality control, little to no service, hostile at best warranty responses that pretty much has been the story for too many chinese wheel/rim buyers. Google is your friend on this. If you are going to buy something without an effective warranty, just buy a 1-2 year old used wheelset from the Classifieds here for the same price with much higher quality.
I can only 1/2 way agree with you. I think the Nextie et al wheels will put some serious price preassure on companies like Zipp. Let’s face it the NSW wheels are ridiculously expensive and their lower end stuff is not as appealing because of the built in design limitations (e.g., 17 mm internal rim width on the FCs make them turds with a 25mm tire).
Can Nextie take over the middle market? That is kinda like shopping for vitamins on Alibbaba. You can get a good deal, but not many people want to risk the quality (perceived or otherwise) or spend the time searching out and researching the brand they choose. My prediction is that some companies will rebrand wheels from Nextie, but I don’t think Nextie can penetrate the US market on price alone. Marketing, distribution, warranty. Your theory also assumes there is any sense to the margin a major manufacturer can demend. Look at Apple. Essentially just a design/software firm that gets a huge margin on everything they sell. Compare this to FoxConn, who makes the iPhones for Apple. Their margin is like 2%. Maybe the better analogy is Nextie is the Cricket Wireless of bike wheels.
indifferent quality control, little to no service, hostile at best warranty responses that pretty much has been the story for too many chinese wheel/rim buyers. Google is your friend on this. If you are going to buy something without an effective warranty, just buy a 1-2 year old used wheelset from the Classifieds here for the same price with much higher quality.
I’ve broken two forks, a frame, a few wheels excluding popping spokes/repairable tacoing, a shifter, etc. etc.
…and NEVER gotten anything in terms of warranty support. “Oh, you used it? Sorry we don’t cover that.”
"I am confident in TREK’s engineering and QC department. I am confident in CERVELO’s, SPECIALIZED, etc. They’ve earned that trust. So when I see a bolt on their bikes/products, I trust that it’s the right one.
Has TriRig earned that trust from its customers? No, it simply has not. "
I agree with you 100% that a lot of the draw of the ‘name brands’ is the QC and, frankly, the legal recourse should something go really sideways with a product. Good luck with a lawsuit against a manufacturer of Chinese off-brand parts. So, I’m trying to square your position there with your seeming complete willingness to accept generic Chinese-made carbon rims of completely unknown origin, QC, corporate backing, etc. Is there something about wheels that would make their catastrophic failure less impactful to my face than a carbon aerobar failure?
In this case where Kiley has specifically mentioned Nextie, I have to agree.
I just finished building a bike and it was specced with DT carbon wheels.
Disc, 45mm, nothing special but the hubs looked nice and they are $2500.
I could have built the same or better using Nextie rims and nice DT hubs with CXray spokes for far less than $1000.
The Nextie rims come with a 3 year warranty, a crash replacement and a local distributor.
They have gained a huge reputation in the MTB world and I have built many sets and had zero problems with them.
The original and most important all encompassing HED/Zipp patents have expired.
Aero research has gone very little past Firecrest and is only eeking out minor returns apart from Zipp with the direction being better crosswind handling.
Disc wheels free us from the brake track burdon.
My next road bike will be disc and it will have my own built Nextie rim based wheels.
I’m not familiar with Nextie specifically or the quality of their products. My question was aimed more at his closing question around the commoditization of the wheel industry by white label, presumably Chinese-made generic wheels.
In regards to the general cheap rubbish chinese wheels that get bought and sold in a couple of weeks due to crap hubs, poor wheelbuilding and pulsing brake tracks, that will never change, it is cheap crap and you get what you pay for.
But use use good hubs and spokes and handbuild a wheel using Nextie rims is a whole other thing.
Of course. However, sometimes cheap crap is evident through the ‘little’ things that you mentioned while other times a rim is not revealed to be cheap crap until you’re in the emergency room.
I guess, to be more specific with my point, Kiley closed with this:
"Which bike company will be the first to see that the disc wheels that ship with new disc bikes need not have any labeling but a white labeling? What will you do to encourage the coming commoditization of the wheel market? "
I would argue that, at least in the case of Specialized and Trek, they already have. The vast majority of their bikes ship with Roval (specialized) or Bontrager (Trek) wheels. You could make the argument that these are effectively already white label, or at least house-brand, wheels. Specialized and Trek would agree 100% that margins on Zipp or Hed wheels are obnoxious. They’d just rather pocket that margin themselves by putting their house-brand wheels on their bikes. There’s zero reason to believe that any bike manufacturer would move from name brand wheels to no-name our house-brand wheels and pass that margin on to the consumer. After all, if they remove the brand name from the wheel the liability for that wheel passes on to them.
The wheel market will simply return to what it was in the past.
Select a rim and other components and build it yourself or pay your local guru to do it.
It has now been well proven that system wheels gain nothing in quality or performance.
In fact, most system wheels have shocking reliability and problematic parts supply.
The only difference in the coming years is that good aero carbon rims will become the commodity wheel.
I just replaced a broken rim on my MTB and did both wheels while I was at it.
This was the original supplied DT rim.
I would have liked to put a Nextie on there but that would have required new spokes, so I put a good quality Stans Arch on there and reused the original spokes as the ERD was the same.
So in this case, the price of getting carbon rims on there was swayed not by the cost of the rims themselves but by the addition of having to buy spokes.
Bring it on, I liked the old wheel days where you built what you wanted and didn’t just buy an expensive complete wheel brand.
"I am confident in TREK’s engineering and QC department. I am confident in CERVELO’s, SPECIALIZED, etc. They’ve earned that trust. So when I see a bolt on their bikes/products, I trust that it’s the right one.
Has TriRig earned that trust from its customers? No, it simply has not. "
I agree with you 100% that a lot of the draw of the ‘name brands’ is the QC and, frankly, the legal recourse should something go really sideways with a product. Good luck with a lawsuit against a manufacturer of Chinese off-brand parts. So, I’m trying to square your position there with your seeming complete willingness to accept generic Chinese-made carbon rims of completely unknown origin, QC, corporate backing, etc. Is there something about wheels that would make their catastrophic failure less impactful to my face than a carbon aerobar failure?
i don’t think you got that quote right, because that sounds like something i said.
For the DIY crowd, I agree. However, if I understand the spirit of the original post, Kiley isn’t talking about the small minority of folks that are willing to piece together wheels. He’s talking about a paradigm shift in the bike sales market, where bikes are sold with generic white label wheels and the savings are passed along to you and me. I’d argue that this will never happen. Why? Partly because triathletes are vain and brand cache matters. As someone else already pointed out, there have been perfectly good generic open mold frames available for quite some time now. Folks like you that are comfortable buying a frame and speccing out all the components and assembling it themselves see this as a huge boon. The average bike buyer… not so much. They either care about what bike this year’s Kona winner was riding, or how the latest aero data stacks their bike against the others, or how the bike looks. Then there’s the crowd that could care less about any of that and just walks into a bike shop and buys whatever the sales person recommends. These two groups represent the vast majority of bike (and wheel) buyers. Neither of them is going to go with generic off-brand bike frames or wheels.
One could make the argument that Timex is a much better watch than a Rolex, and yet people continue to buy Rolex watches. Triathletes are, by and large, the Rolex-buying crowd of the bike world.
There’s zero reason to believe that any bike manufacturer would move from name brand wheels to no-name our house-brand wheels and pass that margin on to the consumer. After all, if they remove the brand name from the wheel the liability for that wheel passes on to them.
He’s probably around here to correct me, but I believe that’s what Dan is doing with the Premier Tactical. He came to one of our meetings to show it off and said something along the lines of “Why should I mark it up if I didn’t design it?” He went into tons of details about visiting factories, testing, etc. and made it clear he was just as comfortable with those wheels as anything on the planet. It’s reasonable to believe we’re close to peak aero for rim brake wheels, so if he can have a great design sell the bike for less, that’s great.
Having a bit of experience on the off-road side of things, Nexties and DT 350’s (among several other hubs as well) laced/built by somebody somewhat local are a compelling argument. Nextie has better products, distribution, warranty and customer service than what we tend to think of as generic Asian rims. I’m more the type to buy somebody’s Flow, Arch or Crest set off of them when they upgrade to to carbon fiber wheels, but I wouldn’t hesitate to ride Nextie rims.