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<title><%site_title%>: Survey of Bike and Tri Retailers, June, 2013</title>
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<center><h1>Survey of Retailers:  June 2013</h1></center>
<center><h2>Authored by Dan Empfield</h2></center>

<font = "verdana"><font size = "2">Below are selected results of our mid-June survey taken of specialty bike retail stores.  We asked 700 specialty stores to participate, 164 stores responded and took this survey.  Below are results I felt most applicable and timely.  There are a LOT of charts below, so, the read is a little weighty.  I hope you'll find it helpful in your business.<p>

I think it’s fairest to begin by discussing who took this survey.  Of the 700 stores I asked to participate a large number of them are, no doubt, tri-leaning, because the very stores I invited to participate meet at least one of the following criteria.  They are:  1) the larger overall higher-end stores in the United States and Canada; 2) those stores heavily invested in high-end sales; 3) stores heavily invested in bike fit.  In order just to be circumscribed inside the Slowtwitch universe there is probably some degree of tri-interest if not specificity.  To wit:

<div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/tri_important_unfiltered.jpg"></div>

<p><p>This first chart, immediately above, is the way the 164 respondents answered, when asked what triathlon represents in importance, as a market (a vertical) in their stores.  So, as you see, tri is an important market to the respondents.  But then, this survey is a snapshot of how tri and higher-end road are selling this season in retail stores.

In the chart below we see how these stores are doing, store-wide, all markets, all verticals:<p>

<div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/ytd_overall_unfiltered.jpg"></div>

<p><p>Let’s see how tri bike sales doing in these stores, and just below that how road bike sales are doing in these stores, for comparison:<p>

<div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/ytd_tri_sales_unfiltered.jpg"></div>

<p>

<div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/ytd_road.jpg"></div>

<p><p>In the stores we surveyed, both tri and road sales are up more than they’re down, however, let’s filter out those respondents who say they don’t sell a particular type of product (in other words, let us only count stores that sell road when we calculate whether they're up or down YTD in road sales).  When we do so, tri sales are up in 37 percent of the stores who sell this product.  They’re down in 35 percent of the stores who sell the product.  So, really, tri sales are flat, year-over-year, in North America so far season-to-date.  I think that’s what we can say based on this survey.

Road sales are, in general, up in 45 percent of the stores surveyed, so, road as a market is doing slightly better than tri alone.  MTB is about even with road, that is, if you consider only those stores that sell MTB (119 of the 164 respondents), about 45 percent report that MTB sales are up. 

What about other triathlon-related products?<p>

<div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/ytd_accessory.jpg"></div>

<p><p>Accessories, tri-related, seem to be doing okay.  A little bit better than bike sales.  About 40 percent of those who sell accessories report that their sales are up YTD, while about 23 percent report that sales are down.  But we’re counting wetsuits separately, and here’s how wetsuits fared:

<p><div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/ytd_wetsuit.jpg"></div>

<p><p>Here’s where the market struggles.  Slightly more report more down than up, and my guess is that this can be laid at the feet of three causes:  the ability to easily buy a wetsuit mail order; the explosion of wetsuit brands without a corresponding, scaled, explosion in wetsuit sales; and the preponderance of race directors acting as conduits enabling the sale of XTERRA Wetsuits, that is, race registration engines, triathlon’s national governing body (USA Triathlon), and race directors all pushing the XTERRA brand directly to the consumer.  <p>

I am not making a judgment or statement about this sales channel, rather just the observation that this seems to best explain why tri accessories (saddles, hydration systems, aero helmets, aero wheels, etc.) are up, but wetsuits sales are not.

Still, for all this, wetsuit sales remain strong in many retail stores, that is, they are either flat or up in 6 out of 10 stores surveyed who carry this product, assuming same sales year-over-year mean same <i>strong</i> sales versus year-over-year weak sales.

<p>I’d like to change themes for a moment, and talk about fitting.  Here’s how our 164 stores characterized bike fitting:

<p><div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/fit_results.jpg"></div>

<p><p>Notable here, I think, is that almost 6 out of 10 stores say that fitting is a major part of their businesses, and that the number of those indicating it’s a small part of their business, and those who have no fit philosophy, are pretty small.  Again, that might just be the nature of the respondents.  Maybe those stores for whom fit is not on the radar are also not on my radar, so, very few of these stores took this survey, or were never asked to take it, and that's why stores of this nature are underreported here (if they are underreported). <p>

Of those who took the survey 43 percent say F.I.S.T. Is their go-to fit philosophy, and I’m surprised Retul is not more highly chosen.  Maybe it’s just a case of who chose to respond to the survey.  However, I think it’s more than that.  I think Retul is well respected as a first class maker of fit tools, but I think its protocol is less well acknowledged.  I don’t think that’s bad.  Retul began as a protocol-agnostic maker of tools, and subsequently acquired and taught its own protocol.

Conversely, F.I.S.T. is tool-agnostic, that is, F.I.S.T. works best with a fit bike (no newsflash there) and it works best-yet with specific X/Y adjustable fit bikes, however F.I.S.T. cares not whether that fit bike is a Guru Experience, a Purely Custom, an Exit Cycling or, indeed, a Retul Müve.  Therefore, perhaps a lot of Retul Müve and Retul motion capture customers prefer these are their tools of choice, yet prefer as their F.I.S.T. protocol of choice.  There may be some evidence of this inside the numbers of this survey.  Here is how the above question is answered among those who have one of these 4 fit bikes:

<p><div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/fitbike_fit_philosophy.jpg"></div>

<p><p>Staying on this theme, I think what’s notable in this survey is what happens once a shop does adopt the use of what I consider the leading “conforming” fit bikes: the 4 fit bikes that I think best facilitate the leading dynamic fit protocols.  So, let’s look at how these 164 shops answered the questions above when we filter for these 4 fit simulators:

<p><div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/fitbike_ytd-tri.jpg"></div>

<div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/ytd_tri_no-fit-bike.jpg"></div>

<p><p>If you do have one of these four fit bikes on your floor, your YTD tri bike sales are up 43 percent, rather than the overall average of 33 percent.  If you have no fit bike at all in your store, you see the results, as reported by the stores themselves.  One conclusion that one might draw is that <i>tri</i> customers are preferring to shop at stores that do have significant fit expertise.

<p>That established, shops that had no fit bike did not overly suffer.  Their numbers, storewide, YTD, were only slightly worse than the results of all shops.  Further, they’re MTB sales were even <i>better</i>.  I think this is partly due to a lack, as of today, of much attention paid to MTB fit.

<p>If you ascribe to a fit system that does not employ the use of a fit bike, you don’t need a fit bike.  I think the preponderant system in this category today is BG Fit, and I thought it illustrative to select those who employ BG Fit as their methodology of choice.  Here is what happens to bike sales when BG Fit is the protocol:

<p><div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/bg_tri_vertical_compare.jpg"></div>

<p>

<p><div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/bg_ytd_road.jpg"></div>

<p><p>
<p><div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/bg_ytd_mtb.jpg"></div>

<p><p><p>In the three charts just above, we see what bike sales look like in those stores that have indicated they rely on the BG Fit system.  If you only look at tri bike sales when BG Fit is the system employed (the first of the three charts just above) it's not a pretty sight.  However, just below that chart is how these stores fare in the road vertical. Just below that - the chart immediately above - is what we see when BG Fit is the system employed and it’s MTB we’re considering.  Things look much better in road and MTB sales.  Just below, here’s what BG Fit users report as to their overall shop performance YTD, year-over-year:

<p><div align="center"><img src="http://www.slowtwitch.com/images/surveys/retailers_0613/bg_ytd_overall.jpg"></div>

<p><p>What’s our take-away?  I think it’s that if you’re a Specialized retailer, BG Fit seems to be a suitable system for road bike sales and for MTB sales.  Where things begin to get tougher is when BG Fit is the system used for tri bike fit.  Partly, it’s because Specialized offers a variety of robust options for road and for MTB.  The bikes are just so good, and the options sufficiently varied (a Roubaix fits riders that a Tarmac won’t fit and vice versa, and the Ruby is a terrific women's bike), that customers and fitters have options.  BG Fit is designed to make Specialized bikes fit customers — to pair a customer with the right Specialized model.  The Shiv is, in a way, analogous to the Roubaix, in that it’s “tall and narrow” in its geometry.  There is no “Tarmac analog” made by Specialized.  Therefore, if the fit system is geared only to show how to fit a Shiv to a customer, that’s going to be a problem for those customers who need to ride the morphological analog to a Tarmac.<p>

To recap, and in conclusion, the tri market as a whole seems to me to be slightly up, but the trajectory is not steep, rather it's like riding up a 1 percent grade. I think those who do well in tri are those who have a specific interest in fitting.  I suspect it’s because triathletes both need more attention given to fit, and they know it.  And because they know it, it’s a self-fulfilling cycle:  because they need a shop with fit expertise they seek out shops with advanced knowledge and advanced tools.  Those shops get the sales.

I think the same thing is happening in high end road.  F.I.S.T. has both a road and a tri protocol, so does Retul, the Guru Experience project uses the F.I.S.T. protocol for both tri and road fitting, and increasingly the discriminating customers are migrating toward the use of one of these dynamic protocols with the use of a fit bike that supercharges these protocols.

<p>I have some other thoughts about the tri market, but they are suspicions and guesses and not a result of the survey answers.  So I’ll leave this for a future survey and analysis.  Any retailers who have questions or comments about this survey can either email me, or we have a <a href = http://forum.slowtwitch.com/gforum.cgi?forum=10;>Fitter's Forum</a> on Slowtwitch and while this survey isn't specific just to fitting some of us hang out there, and you may ask questions or make comments there as well.
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