I was at this event!
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Money laundering or trying to pry more money out of dentists?
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Grass track racing is cool. I think. I used to be cool.
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It turned into another racing discipline and killed the joy
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Just go bike camping…they can’t turn camping into a race.
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Mostly was thinking of how it’s portrayed in the media that I see (instagram). In the ultraromance days I’d see actual casual bike camping, but that’s not EPICK enough so now it’s always some aero bar goofball trying to get somewhere far away without sleeping enough
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I know there’s a certain appeal to the whole “you’re competing against yourself to finish this 800km epic gravel ride” but yeah the bike industry ruins everything
Riding bikes is fun, it doesn’t have to be a discipline
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It’s hard to play on the weight weenie sales strategy without a competitive aspect.
It’s not hard to introduce competition into camping though. I have organized several trips with a Camp Challenge competition. There were events like rock-skipping, log sawing, match splitting, slingshotting, and finding the longest stick. Winners were rewarded handsomely
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but chasing fastest times has always been a mode for ultra long distance offroad riding. None of this is new!
I’m not persuaded that the intensive sales and marketing work around ultra racing is more developed than the upselling of coffee outside kits and hammocks for non-racing.
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I suppose there’s an equally long and established marketing strategy for both performance and lifestyle products. The cycling world seems to lean toward the performance side of things, even though the margins are higher in the lifestyle goods.
Maybe the difference is that the lifestyle goods aren’t as consumable as bike parts?
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yeah, at a high level of abstraction “this carbon aerobar is ten grams lighter” and “this coffee press makes slightly tastier coffee” are probably similar.
I wonder if bike companies will get more into making lifestyle goods that tend to get used with their bikes? I honestly don’t know if it would make sense for Specialized to sell an own-branded camping kit along with a Diverge.
You definitely won’t win with that attitude.
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Whaaaa??? I ride bikes because I hate fun and it’s a convenient way to torture myself.
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I know several people who sure as hell turn setting up and taking down their tents into a race.
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I don’t have any solid examples, but I feel like things like this have been attempted many times over the years. I feel like VW wanted to sell VW branded roof racks and cruiser bikes. Or maybe that was Subaru.
Anyway, I think it either usually fails, or if the spin-off accessories succeed, they end up getting purchased on their own, separate from whatever they were originally paired with.
Not that many folks want a diverge and only a fraction of them want to buy camping equipment at about the same time.
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I’m thinking about Specialized here because they’ve been pretty successful in marketing a ton of accessories - you can wear their helmet and shoes and drink from their bottles while riding their bikes*. They had that whole cargo container in the downtube thing, I think some of them came with tool kits?
Generally though I’d agree that people buy all these things separately.
*with a lot of own-branded components
Good point. Hadn’t thought about how few companies have been successful at marketing the whole outfit. Maybe only rivaled by trek/bontrager?
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yeah, I think so. Trek did it through acquisitions, Specialized seems to have done most of it in-house (though I don’t know where they hire from).
My sense is that bikes are already a niche product, so category experts have deep but narrow expertise, where a product designer coming from a more mainstream activity might not have the same fine grained knoweldge it takes to make a good range of associated products.
Hence why car company branded bikes are always astoundingly bad.
I kind of agree. Except that if GMC actually wanted to make a decent bike, they certainly have the money to hire the right engineer. I think that’s more an issue of someone in business x realizing that their customer doesn’t know shit about sport y so they can make a really shitty crossover attempt and most of their customers won’t realize/care how shitty/cheap it actually is.
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