I’m sorry to see some folks having issues with the new H3s. Mine was fire-and-forget. It just worked right out of the box and I do like the feel of it better than my Kickr so far. Hopefully you guys get sorted!
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Same here.
My only complaint is that I wish level 0 in standard mode was less resistance. 220 watts doesn’t even make it to the middle of the cassette in the big ring.
Also, I’ve noticed the issue with too much resistance during the spindown on the TR pc app.
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Ok glad it’s not just me. I just finished my second ride on my new H3 and tried a couple of short sections in resistance mode and dang, even like 3/7 is pretty heavy.
Welp…now we know why they were blowing out the H3’s…
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This paragraph…yikes.
“We have almost four times as much inventory as a year ago, primarily on our training product,” Fortune told BRAIN on Wednesday. “Business was amazing in '20 and '21, then inventory filled up in all the channels everywhere, domestically and internationally on indoor training products.”
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Sadly, I am not entirely surprised by this. I had a look at inventory levels on a couple of our dealer sites last weekend and the numbers (excessive stock on hand) sure looked bad.
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“We are like a twin-engine plane when one engine dies … it’s all connected corporately, we can’t separate out the trainer business,” he said.
That’s funny when you consider they deliberately consolidated to a tighter level at the time the sold off PowerTap and pulled everything under the Saris umbrella. Maybe that was more symbolic than concrete, but it seems they made their bed with that intention.
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I don’t wanna kick a company when they are down…but 4x the amount of inventory than the previous year, when they were having record or near-record sales???
That is bordering on gross negligence, IMO…
Just…wow.
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Indeed. Smells a LOT like the little I picked up from the Peloton side. Rose colored glasses and dollar signs took over for common business sense.
And at the risk of overstepping and slightly off topic, I will also mention now that Kinetic was sold and purchased by Magene. I saw some funny stuff from them via a couple of channels and some background research shows the trainer side of Kinetic changed hands not long ago. I’ve been waiting for more “official” statements from various sources, but I figure this Saris news is at least as good a time to state it.
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This is bad, however I think we will be seeing and hearing about this in other industries as well. Demand in some areas spiked so much, and inventory was low which leads to over-ordering and channels ‘hoarding’ inventory. Target and Walmart are both in the news for having way too much of certain types of stuff that was in high demand, but no longer is. They can dump this stuff a lot less publicly, and they will have a bad quarter or two instead of going bankrupt.
Saris is small enough that getting this wrong for one (or maybe a few) products can doom the business.
I think we will see some of this in semiconductors (the industry I work in), but on longer timescales. Lead times for many chips are 12+ months. This is absolutely leading to purchasers ordering more than ‘normal’ in some cases. When this all unwinds and lead times get back to a few months, and inventory will be a weight on a lot of balance sheets. Some industries (I’m looking at you, auto industry) will likely keep larger inventories of essential chips for a longer time, so the whiplash may not be as dramatic.
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Maybe Zwift can buy them to get their own smart trainer! Complete with great stocking levels for immediate delivery!
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Ha, seemingly unlikely. Unless all the cash they saved from layoffs and such is available to reinvest (funny, not funny).
Crazy times ahead with the CV drop, and the general direction of the economy. I have been seeing “sales” in a number of areas including cycling stuff… and it seems this might be the sign of things to come, unfortunately.
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The bubble had to pop at some point in the cycling world. I’ve been sitting around waiting for the time when people got back to some semblance of normal and the used bike stuff market would normalize (or even correct in the opposite direction). Simple fact is, COVID likely got us a few new enthusiasts, but I doubt it’s an industry-changing stick in the US market at least. I, for one, would love to see bike manufacturers inventory skyrocket so they’re forced to back off their COVID pricing spike.
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18 months ago I was thinking, “A year from now will be a great time to get a deal on a used smart trainer and a dog.” My timing was off and I was half-wrong. The discount market for used trainers and 1-year old dogs didn’t pan out, but the liquidation deal on an H3 was an unexpected surprise.
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That certainly seems like a common thing that happens. People want to get while the gettins good. Reminds me of a neighbor who was a plumber then started flipping houses before the housing crash. He bought up a ton of houses then the market collapsed and he was stuck with mortgages he could pay so straight to bankruptcy
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I’m sure there was just some general ‘irrational exuberance’ going on here. I do think that the longer the supply chain is the harder it is to determine what the true demand is. Peleton had it ‘easy’ here, as they are direct to consumer.
For places like Saris that sell mostly through other retailers and distributors, those can further obscure what the true demand is.
Say a large retailer sees large demand of smart trainers, and is out of stock and has trouble getting them. It may think demand for the year is X, but then place orders for X from each of 4 Mfgs for smart trainers, as it has little confidence that any of them can actually supply what they claim. The manufactures now see 4x what what the retailer estimates the demand to be. In many cases orders can be cancelled, so the retailer can limit its risk here. (I’ve heard that some suppliers were requiring deposits up front for orders many months out, which helps protect against this.) Add multiple layers of this, with a distributor in between, and the distortion gets worse. It can be very hard to quantify what the ‘real’ demand is. It’s one thing to say there is a bubble, it’s another to reasonably accurately determine how big it is and when it will pop. If you are off by a factor of 2 or 3 on how big the bubble is, you could well be accounting for the bubble, as well as demand distortions, and still be left in a bad place.
My guess is that Saris has been in marginal shape for a while, but they had less margin for error than Wahoo for instance.
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Interesting. Throw Kinetic into the mix with what appears to be them switching exclusively to rebranded Magene equipment… and things aren’t good.
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Unless they’re not… or not making them any more.
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That would be a damn shame.
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