This piece first appeared in the July edition of BikeBiz magazine – not subscribed? Get a free subscription.
by Dominic Loh and Adam Townsend
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In part one of their secret sauce conundrum, Funn’s Dominic Loh and owner of Bike Matrix, Adam Townsend, explore the issues with too many standards, what this means for the industry. Part one considers why now is the time to work together to streamline and make things less confusing for all involved.
We’ve all heard the phrase, especially in the culinary world, about a dish’s “secret sauce” being the key to its irresistible flavour. A signature dish made with that secret sauce is what brings people back, gets them talking and builds a reputation for the ‘chef’. Of course, the secret wouldn’t be a secret if it was easy to figure out, and the signature dish would have no reputation if the recipe was the same as everyone else’s. So the chef guards the recipe and the secret to the sauce to protect their reputation and keep the devotees coming back to them. But what happens when that secret recipe is lost, or the right ingredients become impossible to find, or the Chef stops making the signature dish? The magic is gone, and the ability to consistently recreate that special something is lost.
Dominic & Adam
In the bicycle industry, we face a similar “secret sauce” conundrum, though ours isn’t about flavour; it’s about new ‘standards’. These innovations are meant to push the boundaries of design and performance, and are intended to corner a small piece of the market for the brand, but they often arrive without a clear path for the future and the availability of replacement parts. A lack of foresight and standardisation can leave everyone from eager consumers to busy mechanics, retailers and manufacturers in a tangled mess of confusion. What happens when a new standard of component is introduced and then disappears a few short years later, with little support from the aftermarket? The customer is left with a worn-out or broken component with no reliable way to find a replacement. It’s a frustrating scenario, and it’s one we see all too often. Let’s see if we can break it down…
The desire to create something different is a product designer’s prerogative. There are many reasons a designer might entertain the idea of building something ‘new’ – performance gains, weight savings, aesthetics, functionality improvements – and these are all valid. There are other reasons too, like the desire to stamp their name on something iconic, to create a shift away from what’s always been done, to build products that keep buyers coming back to their brand, or to give a proverbial middle finger to the license fees and restrictions of using another brand’s designs. These are admirable, but generally self-serving, short-sighted, and not often in the best interest of the long-term end user. When product designers in the bike industry introduce something ‘new’, it usually results in stepping away from an established industry standard and is equal parts likely to succeed wildly, or fail spectacularly, neither of which will be known for a number of years. This is where the ‘Secret Sauce Conundrum’ enters the bike industry.
Brands have a desire to keep customers returning to them. Their product designers, whether willing to admit it or not, have a role to play in acquiring market share and keeping it. In the same way that building a product that outperforms other products is desirable to a brand, to build a product that requires a customer to return to that brand to buy spares or upgrades is looked upon favourably too. This is where the desire to build something ‘new’ comes from; a desire to acquire customers and keep them coming back. But can you just change the way a component mounts or interacts with other components on a bike?
The components on bikes of all types have been built around decades of interconnection and the understanding of widely accepted ‘standards’. It’s the reason we all still run 9/16” pedals, 22.2mm grips and 23.8mm bar clamps on our drop-bar shifters. To be successful in creating something new, it needs to have a certain amount of mass adoption, which helps it to become popular enough that OEM and Aftermarket manufacturers will take notice and produce supporting products, which then helps to gain popularity and allow your ‘new’ standard to become widely enough adopted to succeed. It’s a vicious circle.
But how does this help brands acquire customers and keep them coming back? It doesn’t. This kind of ‘new’ standard is reserved for a handful of the biggest and most influential names in the industry. Most brands are left stamping their names on ‘iconic’ seatpost shapes, ‘industry-changing’ headset sizes, ‘proprietary’ suspension pivot bolts and ‘ground-breaking’ chainring mounts.
Those seatpost shapes, headset sizes, pivot bolts and chainring mounts become the ‘Secret Sauce’ that is a brand’s recipe for keeping customers coming back. The ‘Conundrum’ comes when mass-adoption enters the equation. Do you share your recipe with others to gain adoption? Can you make money from licensing your designs to gain adoption? Or do you retain your ‘Secret Sauce’ and your customer by keeping it a proprietary standard? Is there even enough money in selling proprietary minor components to make it worthwhile, or is it more about not letting someone else sell to them? Are you missing an opportunity to sell standard parts to more riders?
The end result of the ‘Secret Sauce Conundrum’ in the bike industry, is that there are a whole bunch of ‘standards’ being created by brands in the hope they will keep end users coming back to them. The reality is that every one of these new standards actually dilutes their market, limits their opportunity to sell their products to new customers, adds to the existing confusion and leaves staff and riders frustrated. To make things worse, the added confusion around standards is what’s making it harder for any of them to stand out and succeed. Add to this the Marketing-Speak that is introduced with every new standard, and it’s no wonder people are confused. Often, the way we communicate our ‘standards’ is responsible for more confusion than the standards themselves. And chances are, in a few years time, they’ll be gone….
Unfortunately, the burden of these new proprietary standards is mostly on bike shops. They are the ones that provide ongoing support to these passing standards and deal with the frustration of researching and finding the right parts to keep riders riding.
In the automotive industry, where parts are meticulously indexed by vehicle, replacement parts are just a cross-reference away. The bicycle world, on the other hand, has traditionally relied on fitment attributes and a more informal system of physical inspections and expert knowledge to figure out what fits where. This is both a saviour and a curse to the industry in that it gives the aftermarket free rein to produce components that are compatible with others, but also gives the aftermarket free rein to produce components that are hauntingly similar to others. While this approach of standard fitments worked in simpler times, the rapid pace of innovation and the explosion of new fitment standards have made this unsustainable. The consequences are clear: confused, hesitant buyers, costly returns, barriers to entry for staff and a lot of wasted resources pumped into marketing and training everyone on the workarounds.
The best thing we could do, as an industry, would be to focus on the experience of the owner and the long-term serviceability of bikes and bike components. To focus on a few proven standards of fitment for each component interface and build products that are serviceable, repairable and replaceable. We should look to bring clarity back to our technical standards and think carefully about how we define the physical attributes of our products and how we publish them. We need to focus on providing users with the information they need to properly service and repair our products for years to come, creating libraries and archives that are publicly visible and searchable.
As people who have been immersed in this industry for a while now, we’ve reached a point where we believe there has to be a better way. We need a collaborative system that can connect the dots, a comprehensive method that helps consumers, product managers, online store operators, and everyone else involved to navigate the compatibility puzzle with greater ease and efficiency. The best time for a more streamlined solution was 20 years ago, the second-best time is now.
