To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but...
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
Always fascinating isn't it the set up of businesses. Could potentially hurt RM's main fabricator in the far east - Axman, I believe RM account for nearly 50% of their production. Data taken from an article by Jayu Yang taken from https://statementdog.com/
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but...
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got all Quebec has to offer about an hour away. Sentiers du Moulin, Empire 47, and of course St. Anne is just an hour and a half away. St. Georges itself has a small hill right next to town with decent trails.
Also losing 17.8 million in 2023 was not good and poor business operations. It seems to me that the head CEO Raymond wanted to step back burned out or retiring in 2022 and the new CEO Katy started in 2022 and then jumped ship in Sept of 2024 knowing that it was heading south. So either she ran it into the ground and or made poor CEO decision on managing the finances. I would think a company this size should have a CFO?
Question for the collective: How well-known are the frame manufacturing companies in Asia? Is it relatively easy to link a manufacturing company to a specific frame brand, or is the process more opaque? I’d love to map this out if possible.
Here’s an analogy from semiconductors to explain what I’m asking:
Nvidia designs, engineers, and sells GPUs
TSMC manufactures Nvidia’s chips
ASML provides the machinery TSMC uses to produce those chips
To be clear, I'm not concerned about who makes the tooling for bike frame manufacturers (e.g., the mill), but I’m curious if there are key suppliers to these frame manufacturing companies—like those providing CNC parts, molds, or similar components.
Also, thanks for the kind words, everyone! As always, if anything I say makes you think, "What on earth is Jeff talking about?" feel free to ask—I may have misstated something. And yes, I know I can get a bit long-winded. Sorry about that!
Also losing 17.8 million in 2023 was not good and poor business operations. It seems to me that the head CEO Raymond wanted to step back...
Also losing 17.8 million in 2023 was not good and poor business operations. It seems to me that the head CEO Raymond wanted to step back burned out or retiring in 2022 and the new CEO Katy started in 2022 and then jumped ship in Sept of 2024 knowing that it was heading south. So either she ran it into the ground and or made poor CEO decision on managing the finances. I would think a company this size should have a CFO?
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of Finance" filling those shoes.
To be fair to this person, they might be an amazing, pragmatic, disciplined, process oriented person who really did have the insights to guide the company appropriately during this time. The reality is, if the CEO (or board) doesn't want to listen, it doesn't matter how right this person is. The buck usually stops with the CEO (or if it goes to the board, Chairman/a vote).
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but...
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got...
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got all Quebec has to offer about an hour away. Sentiers du Moulin, Empire 47, and of course St. Anne is just an hour and a half away. St. Georges itself has a small hill right next to town with decent trails.
Companies are almost always headquartered where their owner wants to live in my experience. When an owner decides to move to Florida, the company usually "finds a competitive advantage in FL" really quickly afterwards. Have to imagine Sainte-George is where Raymond Dutil lives and grew up.
And agreed, it's close to amazing riding right now, especially with the recent rise of the Quebec trail centers. And MSE and the ski hills have been big mtb spots for a really long time. But the company is named "Rocky Mountain", and Saint-George on the other side of the river from the big deal riding and feels like a very different cultural environment than around Quebec city to me.
Good to know there are some trails local to St George, sure hope they would be with a +$100M revenue bike company hq there!
Question for the collective: How well-known are the frame manufacturing companies in Asia? Is it relatively easy to link a manufacturing company to a specific frame...
Question for the collective: How well-known are the frame manufacturing companies in Asia? Is it relatively easy to link a manufacturing company to a specific frame brand, or is the process more opaque? I’d love to map this out if possible.
Here’s an analogy from semiconductors to explain what I’m asking:
Nvidia designs, engineers, and sells GPUs
TSMC manufactures Nvidia’s chips
ASML provides the machinery TSMC uses to produce those chips
To be clear, I'm not concerned about who makes the tooling for bike frame manufacturers (e.g., the mill), but I’m curious if there are key suppliers to these frame manufacturing companies—like those providing CNC parts, molds, or similar components.
Also, thanks for the kind words, everyone! As always, if anything I say makes you think, "What on earth is Jeff talking about?" feel free to ask—I may have misstated something. And yes, I know I can get a bit long-winded. Sorry about that!
Question for the collective: How well-known are the frame manufacturing companies in Asia? Is it relatively easy to link a manufacturing company to a specific frame...
Question for the collective: How well-known are the frame manufacturing companies in Asia? Is it relatively easy to link a manufacturing company to a specific frame brand, or is the process more opaque? I’d love to map this out if possible.
Here’s an analogy from semiconductors to explain what I’m asking:
Nvidia designs, engineers, and sells GPUs
TSMC manufactures Nvidia’s chips
ASML provides the machinery TSMC uses to produce those chips
To be clear, I'm not concerned about who makes the tooling for bike frame manufacturers (e.g., the mill), but I’m curious if there are key suppliers to these frame manufacturing companies—like those providing CNC parts, molds, or similar components.
Also, thanks for the kind words, everyone! As always, if anything I say makes you think, "What on earth is Jeff talking about?" feel free to ask—I may have misstated something. And yes, I know I can get a bit long-winded. Sorry about that!
Many, many moons ago, I actually saw the Taiwan Bicycle Guide in book form while working for Diamondback. It was fun flipping through it and seeing all these different frames that I was used to see branded by various companies..
Companies are almost always headquartered where their owner wants to live in my experience. When an owner decides to move to Florida, the company usually "finds...
Companies are almost always headquartered where their owner wants to live in my experience. When an owner decides to move to Florida, the company usually "finds a competitive advantage in FL" really quickly afterwards. Have to imagine Sainte-George is where Raymond Dutil lives and grew up.
And agreed, it's close to amazing riding right now, especially with the recent rise of the Quebec trail centers. And MSE and the ski hills have been big mtb spots for a really long time. But the company is named "Rocky Mountain", and Saint-George on the other side of the river from the big deal riding and feels like a very different cultural environment than around Quebec city to me.
Good to know there are some trails local to St George, sure hope they would be with a +$100M revenue bike company hq there!
I'm going to assume corporate locations are more about tax advantages. The owner can technically live and work from anywhere in the world.
Question for the collective: How well-known are the frame manufacturing companies in Asia? Is it relatively easy to link a manufacturing company to a specific frame...
Question for the collective: How well-known are the frame manufacturing companies in Asia? Is it relatively easy to link a manufacturing company to a specific frame brand, or is the process more opaque? I’d love to map this out if possible.
Here’s an analogy from semiconductors to explain what I’m asking:
Nvidia designs, engineers, and sells GPUs
TSMC manufactures Nvidia’s chips
ASML provides the machinery TSMC uses to produce those chips
To be clear, I'm not concerned about who makes the tooling for bike frame manufacturers (e.g., the mill), but I’m curious if there are key suppliers to these frame manufacturing companies—like those providing CNC parts, molds, or similar components.
Also, thanks for the kind words, everyone! As always, if anything I say makes you think, "What on earth is Jeff talking about?" feel free to ask—I may have misstated something. And yes, I know I can get a bit long-winded. Sorry about that!
It's certainly not widely publicized, but anyone who's spent a good amount of time in product management, engineering, or sales for bike or OE-specced component brands knows the big players, at least on the assembly side (there are frame factories then there's assembly factories, as well as factories that do both). Some times you'll see these names referenced in trade media and, for instance, when someone goes belly-up and you see who they owed money to. Also, if you know some of the names you can look at their websites and see what bikes are in their pictures.
Side note, I used to enjoy investigating vendor booths at trade shows and spotting castings or forgings I recognized – "oh, so that's who does the rocker links for so-and-so." Obviously a level down from frame and assembly there are factories that provide the other parts for bikes, from components all the way down to fasteners and cable covers.
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but...
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
I can assure you that both Rocky Mountain in Saint-Georges and Devinci have bilingual staff, there's no language barrier here.
It's almost impossible to run a business in Quebec without speaking English, lots of companies have their internal meeting held in English even if the majority of their employees are French native.
I can assure you that both Rocky Mountain in Saint-Georges and Devinci have bilingual staff, there's no language barrier here. It's almost impossible to run a business...
I can assure you that both Rocky Mountain in Saint-Georges and Devinci have bilingual staff, there's no language barrier here.
It's almost impossible to run a business in Quebec without speaking English, lots of companies have their internal meeting held in English even if the majority of their employees are French native.
Just don’t tell Supreme Leader Legault that or he will lose his sh!t
Several MTB brands have had this issue, they had to lock orders in and they still got made regardless.Pivot, Specialized, trek(Ebikes not selling either), bold, commencal...
Several MTB brands have had this issue, they had to lock orders in and they still got made regardless.
Pivot, Specialized, trek(Ebikes not selling either), bold, commencal and rocky(apparently) all got smashed, Giant Have a sh1t ton of Ebikes to sell before Giant & yamaha can launch their new ebike.
Giant, YT, Marin/polygon did really well managing most of their models by looks of stocks levels
Canyon? who knows, they are hard to track due to how they can 'assemble to order' -I'd love to know how many Frames canyon sends out for warranty. I've had 3 of their bikes and Each of them atleast had 1 full frame swap, My torque AL had 4. AND they will get smashed from their battery drama. thats expensive but does anyone know if business insurance covers a design flaw?
Marin use a much smaller factory in Asia, it's lower production capacity and shorter production run's actually give Marin an edge as more flexible in changing...
Marin use a much smaller factory in Asia, it's lower production capacity and shorter production run's actually give Marin an edge as more flexible in changing the orders. The down side is this also causes Marin's occasional "We've run out.... SORRY!" and more limited availability of hot stock lines for the international distributors.
Given that Polygon owns Marin, surely they'd use Polygon's factory/ies?
Yes, they are owned and made by Insera Sena, They have recently updated one of their production lines that recently made the new marin bikes(alpine xr) etc They've massively increased quality of welding etc.
the Alpine XR's quality is some of the best on the market now.
Also losing 17.8 million in 2023 was not good and poor business operations. It seems to me that the head CEO Raymond wanted to step back...
Also losing 17.8 million in 2023 was not good and poor business operations. It seems to me that the head CEO Raymond wanted to step back burned out or retiring in 2022 and the new CEO Katy started in 2022 and then jumped ship in Sept of 2024 knowing that it was heading south. So either she ran it into the ground and or made poor CEO decision on managing the finances. I would think a company this size should have a CFO?
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of...
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of Finance" filling those shoes.
To be fair to this person, they might be an amazing, pragmatic, disciplined, process oriented person who really did have the insights to guide the company appropriately during this time. The reality is, if the CEO (or board) doesn't want to listen, it doesn't matter how right this person is. The buck usually stops with the CEO (or if it goes to the board, Chairman/a vote).
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but...
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got...
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got all Quebec has to offer about an hour away. Sentiers du Moulin, Empire 47, and of course St. Anne is just an hour and a half away. St. Georges itself has a small hill right next to town with decent trails.
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but...
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got...
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got all Quebec has to offer about an hour away. Sentiers du Moulin, Empire 47, and of course St. Anne is just an hour and a half away. St. Georges itself has a small hill right next to town with decent trails.
I think it's an indication of the size of the country you inhabit. My sister lives in the US and thinks nothing of driving 7-8 hours and I have a Dutch friend who thinks driving somewhere over an hour away is a major mission.
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but...
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got...
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got all Quebec has to offer about an hour away. Sentiers du Moulin, Empire 47, and of course St. Anne is just an hour and a half away. St. Georges itself has a small hill right next to town with decent trails.
Obviously it's huge. I mean I do still remember @TEAMROBOT explaining how it took him almost an hour to get to the first trail before he moved. To us that's incomprehensible, I don't want to move half an hour away from where u live because I would have less starting-from-home riding than I do here 😂
If anyone wants to connect the dots on who makes what and where this is a good site to waste some time in. Funny thing at least some of the POC helmets and TLD helmets are made by the same place.
Also losing 17.8 million in 2023 was not good and poor business operations. It seems to me that the head CEO Raymond wanted to step back...
Also losing 17.8 million in 2023 was not good and poor business operations. It seems to me that the head CEO Raymond wanted to step back burned out or retiring in 2022 and the new CEO Katy started in 2022 and then jumped ship in Sept of 2024 knowing that it was heading south. So either she ran it into the ground and or made poor CEO decision on managing the finances. I would think a company this size should have a CFO?
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of...
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of Finance" filling those shoes.
To be fair to this person, they might be an amazing, pragmatic, disciplined, process oriented person who really did have the insights to guide the company appropriately during this time. The reality is, if the CEO (or board) doesn't want to listen, it doesn't matter how right this person is. The buck usually stops with the CEO (or if it goes to the board, Chairman/a vote).
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of...
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of Finance" filling those shoes.
To be fair to this person, they might be an amazing, pragmatic, disciplined, process oriented person who really did have the insights to guide the company appropriately during this time. The reality is, if the CEO (or board) doesn't want to listen, it doesn't matter how right this person is. The buck usually stops with the CEO (or if it goes to the board, Chairman/a vote).
Obviously it's huge. I mean I do still remember @TEAMROBOT explaining how it took him almost an hour to get to the first trail before he...
Obviously it's huge. I mean I do still remember @TEAMROBOT explaining how it took him almost an hour to get to the first trail before he moved. To us that's incomprehensible, I don't want to move half an hour away from where u live because I would have less starting-from-home riding than I do here 😂
Oh not everyone needs to drive an hour to ride...just that due to the size of this place driving an hour is the norm for lots of stuff.
I roll out my garage and it's 5 minutes of riding urbran paths and I am at base of Fromme. Or 15 minutes gets me to the western side of Seymour. Having two of the three North Shore mountains a small pedal away is pretty sweet and I can't really fathom where I'd think of moving to that has it any better.
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of...
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of Finance" filling those shoes.
To be fair to this person, they might be an amazing, pragmatic, disciplined, process oriented person who really did have the insights to guide the company appropriately during this time. The reality is, if the CEO (or board) doesn't want to listen, it doesn't matter how right this person is. The buck usually stops with the CEO (or if it goes to the board, Chairman/a vote).
Well I guess they had someone for finance. Not blaming this person.
I felt like quoting this in the super small chance this person finds this thread. I've been in C-Suite roles, said the "right" things, and nobody wanted to listen. It can be very abrasive to raise your hand and say "no", especially if you are a bit younger than the others around you. I imagine its doubly hard as a woman. Its really not fair to blame someone without knowing all the details, as implied earlier. If I did so, I apologize.
This is a bit of a thread derail, but learning how to communicate things to leaders that they may not want to hear is a bit of an art, especially at a younger age...
I felt like quoting this in the super small chance this person finds this thread. I've been in C-Suite roles, said the "right" things, and nobody...
I felt like quoting this in the super small chance this person finds this thread. I've been in C-Suite roles, said the "right" things, and nobody wanted to listen. It can be very abrasive to raise your hand and say "no", especially if you are a bit younger than the others around you. I imagine its doubly hard as a woman. Its really not fair to blame someone without knowing all the details, as implied earlier. If I did so, I apologize.
This is a bit of a thread derail, but learning how to communicate things to leaders that they may not want to hear is a bit of an art, especially at a younger age...
This is 10X the case in a closely held company if the controlling person/family is hellbent on going in some particular direction despite the financial warming signs. RAD/Rocky certainly has the structure where this could have happened.
Their ebike drive units sound like they work well, but for a $100m company to develop something this complicated seems fraught. How the heck to do you scale enough to amortize the R&D in any reasonable way? Quick mental math is just a hell naw. I figure they bet the farm on deals such as the partnership for city bikes that fell through, and that is what doomed the company. Maybe they planned on growing RM organically to cover the ebike investment, but this seems crazy looking from the outside.
I'd like to think the IP for their ebike drive units has substantial value, but there's already too many players in that bubbled-out space, so that's dubious. This proprietary tech may be a lead weight that makes coming out of bankruptcy with Rocky intact more difficult. Then again, if you can just write off all the R&D, maybe it's a good buy for some company that wants to/can afford to chase bubbles. SRAM? Though who knows what kind of financial shape they're in at the moment. No one in bikes is doing great right now.
Merry Christmas y'all, especially Rocky employees. Whatever happens, we're pulling for you.
This is 10X the case in a closely held company if the controlling person/family is hellbent on going in some particular direction despite the financial warming...
This is 10X the case in a closely held company if the controlling person/family is hellbent on going in some particular direction despite the financial warming signs. RAD/Rocky certainly has the structure where this could have happened.
Their ebike drive units sound like they work well, but for a $100m company to develop something this complicated seems fraught. How the heck to do you scale enough to amortize the R&D in any reasonable way? Quick mental math is just a hell naw. I figure they bet the farm on deals such as the partnership for city bikes that fell through, and that is what doomed the company. Maybe they planned on growing RM organically to cover the ebike investment, but this seems crazy looking from the outside.
I'd like to think the IP for their ebike drive units has substantial value, but there's already too many players in that bubbled-out space, so that's dubious. This proprietary tech may be a lead weight that makes coming out of bankruptcy with Rocky intact more difficult. Then again, if you can just write off all the R&D, maybe it's a good buy for some company that wants to/can afford to chase bubbles. SRAM? Though who knows what kind of financial shape they're in at the moment. No one in bikes is doing great right now.
Merry Christmas y'all, especially Rocky employees. Whatever happens, we're pulling for you.
100% agree on the difficulty of getting small company owners to change course if they don't want to.
Interestingly Davinci (the other big Quebec mtb bike company & they must know a lot about what each other are doing because of cultural proximity) has a city bike line that claims to have produced 90,000 regular and e-bikes since 2007 & an also an e-cargo bike: https://www.devinci.com/en/urban_mobility_solutions/
RM must have been watching for a long time and hoping to get into that market also, but had really bad timing
To Rocky's credit, it's hard for a lowly CFO to manage up with CEO's of firms large and small. I'm catching up on this thread after being off for a while, and my jaw is on the floor reading that KTM has 265,000 motorcycles sitting in inventory!!!
"It was revealed during the company’s current insolvency hearings that it is sitting on a whole year’s worth of inventory... almost all of this turmoil can be pinned on billionaire company CEO and corporate holdings company namesake Stefan Pierer. Management pushed KTM into overproduction for several months, despite plummeting sales."
Obviously KTM's management liked looking at the graphs that went up more than they liked looking at the graphs that went down.
Sorry to beat the dead horse, but the "an hour is close?" comment was meant along the lines of how much of a handicap is it if you have to lose 2 hours of your time every time you want to test some things. Sure it's a different perception for us Europeans, in a little over an hour we Slovenians can cover most of the country and with that a lot of really diverse terrain, can ride in warm weather in the middle of the winter (down by the seaside), etc.
Maybe that's why there's hardly any products coming out from our neck of the woods then 😂
Sorry to beat the dead horse, but the "an hour is close?" comment was meant along the lines of how much of a handicap is it...
Sorry to beat the dead horse, but the "an hour is close?" comment was meant along the lines of how much of a handicap is it if you have to lose 2 hours of your time every time you want to test some things. Sure it's a different perception for us Europeans, in a little over an hour we Slovenians can cover most of the country and with that a lot of really diverse terrain, can ride in warm weather in the middle of the winter (down by the seaside), etc.
Maybe that's why there's hardly any products coming out from our neck of the woods then 😂
Except nobody was testing things in Ontario. Both their marketing and development departments were in bc. It seems only the corporate office and some distribution was Ontario based. (One would imagine product was received in B.C. and then warehoused either in B.C. or Ontario depending on intended delivery.
personally I’d say rocky did not invest enough in marketing and made some questionable design choices in recent years. As well as consolidating the model line. One of Rocky’s strengths thru the 2010s was having a diverse model line that often was outside what other big brands offered. (Thunderbolt, Sherpa, “B.C.” variants of models, being early in producing kid friendly models). Beyond their management mistakes I don’t think Canadian Santa Cruz was a winning formula.
To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in bike world.
And the owner guy also owns an industrial hardware company https://www.faucher.ca/en/ that isn’t losing money like Rocky, but seems to be also being taken down by Rocky’s mis-management.
Personally I can’t imagine maintaining a nimble company where your owner and main distribution is in another language and isolated that much from your marketing and design team, but they’ve done it somehow for decades. Sounds so hard to react to trends, forecast where to invest, and decide if a bike-share ebike is really what the company should focus on without close contact? Davinci is also in a really small isolated town in ne Quebec, but they seem to be all integrated into one entity w one language, and it’s in a major aluminum producing town that must have a ton of technical expertise in metal at least.
That was one of the strange details that jumped out at me
Always fascinating isn't it the set up of businesses. Could potentially hurt RM's main fabricator in the far east - Axman, I believe RM account for nearly 50% of their production. Data taken from an article by Jayu Yang taken from https://statementdog.com/
I'm not sure why they specifically chose St. Georges in the farmland outside Quebec City. But it is not that far from great riding. You've got all Quebec has to offer about an hour away. Sentiers du Moulin, Empire 47, and of course St. Anne is just an hour and a half away. St. Georges itself has a small hill right next to town with decent trails.
Also losing 17.8 million in 2023 was not good and poor business operations. It seems to me that the head CEO Raymond wanted to step back burned out or retiring in 2022 and the new CEO Katy started in 2022 and then jumped ship in Sept of 2024 knowing that it was heading south. So either she ran it into the ground and or made poor CEO decision on managing the finances. I would think a company this size should have a CFO?
Question for the collective: How well-known are the frame manufacturing companies in Asia? Is it relatively easy to link a manufacturing company to a specific frame brand, or is the process more opaque? I’d love to map this out if possible.
Here’s an analogy from semiconductors to explain what I’m asking:
Nvidia designs, engineers, and sells GPUs
TSMC manufactures Nvidia’s chips
ASML provides the machinery TSMC uses to produce those chips
To be clear, I'm not concerned about who makes the tooling for bike frame manufacturers (e.g., the mill), but I’m curious if there are key suppliers to these frame manufacturing companies—like those providing CNC parts, molds, or similar components.
Also, thanks for the kind words, everyone! As always, if anything I say makes you think, "What on earth is Jeff talking about?" feel free to ask—I may have misstated something. And yes, I know I can get a bit long-winded. Sorry about that!
They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of Finance" filling those shoes.
To be fair to this person, they might be an amazing, pragmatic, disciplined, process oriented person who really did have the insights to guide the company appropriately during this time. The reality is, if the CEO (or board) doesn't want to listen, it doesn't matter how right this person is. The buck usually stops with the CEO (or if it goes to the board, Chairman/a vote).
Companies are almost always headquartered where their owner wants to live in my experience. When an owner decides to move to Florida, the company usually "finds a competitive advantage in FL" really quickly afterwards. Have to imagine Sainte-George is where Raymond Dutil lives and grew up.
And agreed, it's close to amazing riding right now, especially with the recent rise of the Quebec trail centers. And MSE and the ski hills have been big mtb spots for a really long time. But the company is named "Rocky Mountain", and Saint-George on the other side of the river from the big deal riding and feels like a very different cultural environment than around Quebec city to me.
Good to know there are some trails local to St George, sure hope they would be with a +$100M revenue bike company hq there!
Search "Taiwan Bicycle Source catalogue"
Many, many moons ago, I actually saw the Taiwan Bicycle Guide in book form while working for Diamondback. It was fun flipping through it and seeing all these different frames that I was used to see branded by various companies..
I'm going to assume corporate locations are more about tax advantages. The owner can technically live and work from anywhere in the world.
It's certainly not widely publicized, but anyone who's spent a good amount of time in product management, engineering, or sales for bike or OE-specced component brands knows the big players, at least on the assembly side (there are frame factories then there's assembly factories, as well as factories that do both). Some times you'll see these names referenced in trade media and, for instance, when someone goes belly-up and you see who they owed money to. Also, if you know some of the names you can look at their websites and see what bikes are in their pictures.
Side note, I used to enjoy investigating vendor booths at trade shows and spotting castings or forgings I recognized – "oh, so that's who does the rocker links for so-and-so." Obviously a level down from frame and assembly there are factories that provide the other parts for bikes, from components all the way down to fasteners and cable covers.
Just don’t tell Supreme Leader Legault that or he will lose his sh!t
Yes, they are owned and made by Insera Sena, They have recently updated one of their production lines that recently made the new marin bikes(alpine xr) etc They've massively increased quality of welding etc.
the Alpine XR's quality is some of the best on the market now.
Turned this up: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caroline-baillargeon-6469864a/
An hour away is close??
I think it's an indication of the size of the country you inhabit. My sister lives in the US and thinks nothing of driving 7-8 hours and I have a Dutch friend who thinks driving somewhere over an hour away is a major mission.
LOL have you seen the size of Canada?
I don't think the average Euro can comprehend just how big Canada is unless they've been here and done some driving around.
Obviously it's huge. I mean I do still remember @TEAMROBOT explaining how it took him almost an hour to get to the first trail before he moved. To us that's incomprehensible, I don't want to move half an hour away from where u live because I would have less starting-from-home riding than I do here 😂
If anyone wants to connect the dots on who makes what and where this is a good site to waste some time in. Funny thing at least some of the POC helmets and TLD helmets are made by the same place.
https://www.importyeti.com/
Well I guess they had someone for finance. Not blaming this person.
Organisational failure is rarely one persons fault. But those at the top bear the responsibility of organisations that fail.
Oh not everyone needs to drive an hour to ride...just that due to the size of this place driving an hour is the norm for lots of stuff.
I roll out my garage and it's 5 minutes of riding urbran paths and I am at base of Fromme. Or 15 minutes gets me to the western side of Seymour. Having two of the three North Shore mountains a small pedal away is pretty sweet and I can't really fathom where I'd think of moving to that has it any better.
I felt like quoting this in the super small chance this person finds this thread. I've been in C-Suite roles, said the "right" things, and nobody wanted to listen. It can be very abrasive to raise your hand and say "no", especially if you are a bit younger than the others around you. I imagine its doubly hard as a woman. Its really not fair to blame someone without knowing all the details, as implied earlier. If I did so, I apologize.
This is a bit of a thread derail, but learning how to communicate things to leaders that they may not want to hear is a bit of an art, especially at a younger age...
This is 10X the case in a closely held company if the controlling person/family is hellbent on going in some particular direction despite the financial warming signs. RAD/Rocky certainly has the structure where this could have happened.
Their ebike drive units sound like they work well, but for a $100m company to develop something this complicated seems fraught. How the heck to do you scale enough to amortize the R&D in any reasonable way? Quick mental math is just a hell naw. I figure they bet the farm on deals such as the partnership for city bikes that fell through, and that is what doomed the company. Maybe they planned on growing RM organically to cover the ebike investment, but this seems crazy looking from the outside.
I'd like to think the IP for their ebike drive units has substantial value, but there's already too many players in that bubbled-out space, so that's dubious. This proprietary tech may be a lead weight that makes coming out of bankruptcy with Rocky intact more difficult. Then again, if you can just write off all the R&D, maybe it's a good buy for some company that wants to/can afford to chase bubbles. SRAM? Though who knows what kind of financial shape they're in at the moment. No one in bikes is doing great right now.
Merry Christmas y'all, especially Rocky employees. Whatever happens, we're pulling for you.
100% agree on the difficulty of getting small company owners to change course if they don't want to.
Interestingly Davinci (the other big Quebec mtb bike company & they must know a lot about what each other are doing because of cultural proximity) has a city bike line that claims to have produced 90,000 regular and e-bikes since 2007 & an also an e-cargo bike: https://www.devinci.com/en/urban_mobility_solutions/
RM must have been watching for a long time and hoping to get into that market also, but had really bad timing
To Rocky's credit, it's hard for a lowly CFO to manage up with CEO's of firms large and small. I'm catching up on this thread after being off for a while, and my jaw is on the floor reading that KTM has 265,000 motorcycles sitting in inventory!!!
"It was revealed during the company’s current insolvency hearings that it is sitting on a whole year’s worth of inventory... almost all of this turmoil can be pinned on billionaire company CEO and corporate holdings company namesake Stefan Pierer. Management pushed KTM into overproduction for several months, despite plummeting sales."
Obviously KTM's management liked looking at the graphs that went up more than they liked looking at the graphs that went down.
Sorry to beat the dead horse, but the "an hour is close?" comment was meant along the lines of how much of a handicap is it if you have to lose 2 hours of your time every time you want to test some things. Sure it's a different perception for us Europeans, in a little over an hour we Slovenians can cover most of the country and with that a lot of really diverse terrain, can ride in warm weather in the middle of the winter (down by the seaside), etc.
Maybe that's why there's hardly any products coming out from our neck of the woods then 😂
Except nobody was testing things in Ontario. Both their marketing and development departments were in bc. It seems only the corporate office and some distribution was Ontario based. (One would imagine product was received in B.C. and then warehoused either in B.C. or Ontario depending on intended delivery.
personally I’d say rocky did not invest enough in marketing and made some questionable design choices in recent years. As well as consolidating the model line. One of Rocky’s strengths thru the 2010s was having a diverse model line that often was outside what other big brands offered. (Thunderbolt, Sherpa, “B.C.” variants of models, being early in producing kid friendly models). Beyond their management mistakes I don’t think Canadian Santa Cruz was a winning formula.
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