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By Andy Carr
Bike buyers no longer need to replace what they own, so the trade has gone looking for reasons to make them: new wheel sizes, new motor generations, new metrics to fret over. The claims behind those reasons are thin, and the old strategy of pushing novelty down the chain to shops and customers no longer works.
John Burke, Trek’s president, told his executives in March 2024 that the market was “in chaos” and that Trek hadn’t hit a monthly sales target in fifteen months. He gave them three options: hope for better days, keep cutting round the edges, or “right size” the business to the market as it is. Trek took the third, and Escape Collective has since reported about 15% of the workforce leaving in September 2025, with another round of layoffs in January.
They’re not the only brand managing difficulties, or worse. KKR paid $1.77bn for Accell in 2022. The group needed two rescue packages in twelve months and was declared bankrupt in August. Specialized is handing the CEO job back to its 76-year-old founder, the third change at the top in four years.
Some of this is down to currency and tariffs. Giant blamed the strong Taiwan dollar for much of its early-2025 revenue fall, and Shimano lost ¥19.6 billion on exchange rates. But those hit everyone, and the factories have largely cleared the pandemic hangover. Giant says its inventory is back to healthy pre-pandemic levels, although its revenue still fell 15.5% in 2025. The brands have been slower to follow, and Escape Collective reports that Trek is still carrying excess stock. Currency and tariffs explain some of the timing, but not the strategy, which hasn’t changed in decades and has now stopped working.
That strategy is easy to understand. Push new product and stock down the chain, and rely on the customer at the end wanting it.
The weakness predates Covid. I started getting into this around 2012, building custom bikes, at what felt like the best the British market had ever been. Wiggins had won the Tour, the Olympics followed, and one of the big Cycle to Work providers reported bike sales up more than 40% that year. Brands were buying up shop floor space, and independent shops were encouraged to do the same, tying up cash in inventory on pretty small margins.
At the time, much of the IBD network had been the same forever, starved of investment but still running thanks to enthusiast owners. In some corners, that was a pretty frosty experience for customers. IBDs, even the good ones that followed the ‘advice’ and got a barista in, were head-to-head with online discounters like Wiggle, which could post the same bike the next day for less, plus a free packet of Haribo. The battle left no margin for anyone on the distribution side, and Wiggle went into administration in 2023. Frasers took its brand and intellectual property for £3m and has since shut down the website.
Covid temporarily made the structural unease disappear, or at least made it seem like it had. Chains, cassettes and consumables went back up to RRP. As people pulled old bikes from the shed to help with the boredom of confinement, everything sold out. Even inventory forgotten shops had on the shelf for years sold out, and many assumed the industry would come out a fifth bigger than before the pandemic. Brands ordered for that future. By 2023, the Bicycle Association was calling the industry heavily overstocked, and people had stopped buying.
Bikes also kept getting more complicated during all this. The press takes its share of the blame, and I’ve done my bit by helping a new audience fret about FTP and all sorts of metrics that require ever more expensive kit, updated every new season, that often, genuinely, mean absolutely nothing to the actual enjoyment of riding your bike.
What’s missing is a reason to replace a bike. Since everyone bought one in 2021, the industry is looking for a new motivator to sell to existing customers while ignoring the structural conditions that put new customers off. Bikes cost more and demand more knowledge to own. The metrics culture tells newcomers they’re missing kit. Many shops still lack the margin and investment to make a first-timer feel welcome, which is where the frosty corners of 2012 have ended up.
Photo: Gato Joseph on Pexels
Non-electric MTB is struggling most with this new reality. The BA called 2023 the worst year for mechanical bike sales this century, even as enthusiast sales held up in 2024. Mountain bike suspension works brilliantly, and most bikes share the same tech and geometry: 12-speed drivetrains, tyres as wide as the frames will take, and 29 inches has been standard long enough to be boring. A rider with a good bike in the shed has nothing left to upgrade to.
A new wheel standard, it seems, is the only reason left to get people to trade in, and the bike trade, again, thinks it needs it.
That’s why I’ve been ultra-sceptical of the performance claims for 32-inch wheels since the prototypes appeared, and I’ve said so in print. So far, the evidence is a handful of race results with some of the world’s best riders on board. Andreas Seewald won the Marathon World Championships on a KTM running prototype Schwalbe tyres and a prototype Fox fork, and the best rider in the world, with a team of engineers behind him, will win on all sorts of things. That is a very low bar. At present, even with current science, it still feels like snake oil, even for MTB. On drop bars, the case is weaker still.
The only high-profile drop-bar win I’ve seen is Robin Gemperle’s at Unbound XL: 21 hours and 20 minutes over 350 miles of Kansas gravel, including 13 miles on foot after storms wrecked the roads. Who on earth is looking for that or seeing it as a benefit anywhere else?
There is data, of course, and it too looks good in a press release. But it’s uncontrolled field data, with findings so marginal that they sit too close to the noise floor to support any robust conclusions. Until someone shows otherwise, I’d call the performance claims for drop-bar bikes anecdotal. Yet here we are, again.
The same pattern shows up in the power struggle over e-bike motors, with speed as the problem. DJI, best known for drones and camera technology, launched its M1 motor in 2024, followed by the M2 and M2S about a year and a half later, and teased a prototype MG drive before this year’s Eurobike. Sixty brands have signed up. But bikes take far longer than that to get to shop floors. A frame designed around the M1 was barely on sale before its motor was practically a generation old. Working to a phone-tech development cycle means asking someone to buy your product when they know it’ll be obsolete before you get it to them.
Which brings me back to Burke’s three options. Right-sizing means accepting that the 2020 customer isn’t coming back. For how bikes get sold, it means making honest claims to the people already riding and fixing the experience for those who haven’t bought yet, instead of another wheel size or motor generation. An industry that keeps adding both is still waiting for the customer it had in 2021, and those customers just aren’t going to fall for it.
