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Specialized Mountain Bikes

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Specialized is a company that has been involved in mountain sports for more than thirty five years. Their primary area of interest is in mountain bikes.  They started out in 1974 as an importer of difficult to find foreign bicycle parts. While the import business gave the company its original name, they quickly found that imports alone weren’t a sufficiently robust business model, and that going on as they were was a good way to depredate their financial reserves.

So two years later, specialized mountain bikes began manufacturing its own brand of parts. Starting out, they primarily made racing parts, because in the seventies mountain biking was still an emerging sport that hadn’t settled into a niche in the cycling market. That marks a huge contrast from today, where mountain bikes comprise a huge segment of the bicycle industry.

Today specialized mountain bikes are the largest portion of the company’s sales. They still manufacture racing bicycles, bicycle parts, and have also taken up apparel and accessories.  If you’re looking for shocks to increase your front end travel; they will sell you some. If you need a new set of tires because you shredded yours, they have you covered. If you are looking for shoes, or a cycling outfit, they have those too.

Those are really supplementary forms of income for specialized, who diversified from importing to part making, and from that into putting out full bikes. The specialized mountain bikes are the bread and butter of the company’s portfolio. The company had a brief flirtation with a low-end line of specialized mountain bikes, but the experiment turned out to be a disaster.

The specialized brand had been sold exclusively from bike shops around the globe, small stores that specialize (note the irony there) in selling, repairing, and maintaining bicycles. The plan with the low end line of specialized mountain bikes was to offer bicycles for sale at wholesale outlets and larger retail stores. The plan backfired because of two things.

Firstly, the sales from stores like WalMart and Target did not take off as expected. But secondly, and more devastatingly to the company’s bottom line, the move offended the bike shops that carried the specialized brand. The owners felt slighted that their loyalty to the company was being repaid with specialized looking for other ways of making a buck. Coupled with an apparent lowering of standards, this perception was crippling to the sales of specialized mountain bikes overall.

The company’s brief foray into low end bikes lasted less than a year. At the end of it, the CEO pulled the plug on the line of bikes and wrote an apology to all of the dealers that carried his bikes for the fiasco.  The apology seems to have worked, the debacle happened over thirteen years ago and the brand has recovered nicely. Today specialized mountain bikes can be found in bike shops everywhere, and of course, out on the trail.

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