: Outside the box

By: g | No Comments » |

This week the reality of what I do on a day to day basis filled up my living room. 10 boxes of 2011 year samples fresh off the plane from Taiwan. All new 10 speed drive-trains from Shimano, wheels from Easton, and DTSwiss and more stuff than I can poke a large stick at. And no, you can’t have any of it, because 1. it’s not mine and 2. it probably is the only representation of these parts in the country. Ultimately though, for anyone into bikes, this is really like a bit of a fantasy follow up from being at the Taipei Cycle Show back in March and I know just how lucky I am to be in this position.

But there is more to this that a bike porno on my living room floor. A big part of my role at Mountain Cycle is ‘product manager’, in other words, the dude who makes to call as to what parts go on the coming year’s bikes. At first it sounds like a trip in the candy store but after you get into it, pour over spreadsheets and try to determine what will make someone buy your bike over the other (or not), it becomes a lot more serious. After all it’s all about the end number and speccing what would be your ideal bike when it’s your own cash and you are building one, in fact is something very different when you are speccing for 1000 bikes.

As I mentioned in by post about the Taiwan Cycle Show, there is a dearth of stuff available, more than you can ever know what to do with. Some of it defies imagination some of it is total crap and some of it is really cool. Interestingly when you look at what bikes come build with, one has to wonder why some of this cool kit never sees the light of day on bike shop floors. For all intents and purposes, what we see year after year is pretty much the same stuff, different graphic, different colour.

I don’t have an answer as to why this is the case. I have my suspicions, especially after working within the machine of the bike industry but I’ll leave them as that. What I do know though is that the ‘omni branded bike’ as I am calling it, is limiting some of lesser known, yet rather cool stuff that actually will make your riding better.

In my 10 boxes of stuff that I have been sifting through are several small packs of grips. I remember the meeting with the company, where we saw pretty much every style, type and form of grip you could ever think of. We also saw grips you could never think of, some really ‘whack shit’. Our search was supposed to be simple, find some lock on grips, like everyone else does. I mean, that’s what everyone else does, right?

In the line up though several grips took my eye. The first was a pair of lock on ‘foamies’. If you do a lot of XC, you’ll know that your hands get sore and the majority of lock on grips do nothing to help that. Oury have always been the choice of the astute but foam grips are the next step. The pair I was playing with felt really good but not being on a bar, you can never really tell. The second pair was a real blast, lock on grips they were but wrapped in bar tape. Yes road bike bar tape. Any bar tape, put it on the grip and off you go. The idea was novel but had a lot of merit. The wood grain tape was just trippy!

At the end of the meeting we organise samples of the boring, what everyone does grips, you’ll what they are as they are probably on your bike now, and I organise samples of the foamies and the taped versions.

Today I pulled them out of the box and put them on a couple of Easton bars to see if they still felt as good as they did sitting around a meeting table. To my surprise (and relief) they actually felt better. Lockon grips that are actually soft, that’s a novel thing and something I am sure many riders will love. I am so impressed with these grips that I have selected them for the 2011 bikes. And there’s the thing. I know I’ll get some flack for it from sales, not because they suck, which they don’t but because they are not like everything else on the market and different is, different. As we all know, different is scary.

So what’s the moral of this tale? None as such, other than different is good and I feel many product managers out there should try it on rather than take the easy road of the ‘omni branded bike’. It’s one thing to say spec only what people want to buy, but how do they know if you only offer them the same thing year in year out?

 

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