I do feel like agility is a massive thing niche brands can offer, and practically doing anything to shorten the cycle of demo to customer base should be a win - yet here we are something like 5 years into the 'modern geometry revolution' and we're still seeing incremental rollouts on that front come out every two years from big brands.
Admittedly I'm super spoiled, because for one way or another every job I've had involved access to an aerospace machining capability and dudes who can weld amazingly, so I've never been that overawed by any of the process of prototyping a bike - I mean if you're doing custom steel that should be the norm from the outset, and 6061AL just needs some minor changes to the welding process until you need specifically hydroformed tubes.
So, from the standpoint of what small brands need to do to compete, it's going to be both harder, and easier to stand out. The big brands will just keep amoeba-ing their way into every niche that gets created, but the smaller brands should be able to stay about a year ahead of trends, figure out clever spec options that win the $/performance battle, and also take advantage of the fact that people want to run unique bikes. I think the customization options are criminally underutilized from some of the smaller brands, but what do I know?
Nov. 23, 2020, 7:47 p.m. - Tehllama42
I do feel like agility is a massive thing niche brands can offer, and practically doing anything to shorten the cycle of demo to customer base should be a win - yet here we are something like 5 years into the 'modern geometry revolution' and we're still seeing incremental rollouts on that front come out every two years from big brands. Admittedly I'm super spoiled, because for one way or another every job I've had involved access to an aerospace machining capability and dudes who can weld amazingly, so I've never been that overawed by any of the process of prototyping a bike - I mean if you're doing custom steel that should be the norm from the outset, and 6061AL just needs some minor changes to the welding process until you need specifically hydroformed tubes. So, from the standpoint of what small brands need to do to compete, it's going to be both harder, and easier to stand out. The big brands will just keep amoeba-ing their way into every niche that gets created, but the smaller brands should be able to stay about a year ahead of trends, figure out clever spec options that win the $/performance battle, and also take advantage of the fact that people want to run unique bikes. I think the customization options are criminally underutilized from some of the smaller brands, but what do I know?