JNugent <jnugent97@mail.com> wrote:
> On 09/03/2024 12:09 pm, Spike wrote:
>>
>> “The assumption was Wiggle Chain Reaction wasn’t going anywhere”:
>> Ex-employee talks “shock” at retail giant’s demise, plus THAT Visma Giro
>> helmet discussed on the road.cc Podcast
>>
>> In episode 72 of the road.cc Podcast, we go behind the scenes at Wiggle CRC
>> to find out what really went on at the beleaguered retailer over the last
>> few gloomy months, while Jamie and Ryan dissect pro cycling’s latest
>> controversy: ugly time trial helmets
>
> ???
>
> Chav-cyclists becoming conscious of how they *look* to others?
>
> Heavens be praised!
>
> Next, they might start taking stock of how their behaviours look to and
> affect others.
>
>> by RYAN MALLON. FRI, MAR 08, 2024 18:59
>>
>> While the two topics discussed on a bumper episode 72 of the road.cc
>> Podcast are both high on the cycling world’s list of talking points this
>> week, they notably sit at opposite ends of the seriousness spectrum (unless
>> you take your time trial helmet debates very seriously, of course).
>>
>> In part one, George and Ryan are joined by a former Wiggle Chain Reaction
>> Cycles employee, one of the 450-odd staff members laid off as part of the
>> online retailer’s demise and recent rumoured purchase by Mike Ashley’s
>> Frasers Group, who discussed what life was like behind the scenes at the
>> beleaguered brand as Wiggle CRC lurched from crisis to crisis in recent
>> months following the collapse of its parent company.
>>
>> The ex-employee also chats about the contrast between Wiggle’s grand
>> expansion plans and the struggling state of the bike industry, the “shock”
>> of the company’s collapse (amid hopes that it could continue on), the
>> abrupt, “hard and fast goodbye” dished out to its staff, and the future for
>> Wiggle’s house brands such as Vitus and dhb.
>>
>> After a rough few months (and years) for the bike industry, and one giant
>> retailer in particular, last weekend we were greeted with the not very
>> surprising and rather inevitable news that Wiggle Chain Reaction Cycles –
>> or at least its brand and intellectual property – had been purchased by
>> Frasers Group, the retail empire founded by Mike Ashley and now run by his
>> son-in-law Michael Murray, in a deal believed to be worth less than £10m.
>>
>> The news, which adds Wiggle CRC to Frasers’ growing list of purchases in
>> recent years of struggling cycling brands such as Evans and ProBikeKit,
>> brings an apparent end to the months of gloom and uncertainty surrounding
>> the company, which followed the collapse of Wiggle CRC’s parent company
>> Signa Sports United into insolvency.
>>
>> Unfortunately, the purchase – like many of those engineered by Frasers in
>> the past – also means that Wiggle Chain Reaction’s remaining staff, all 450
>> of them, have lost their jobs.
>>
>> And it was in those unfortunate circumstances that we sat down with one of
>> those staff members laid off over the past few weeks, to discuss the
>> circumstances behind the recent sale, and its effect on Wiggle CRC’s staff,
>> as well as the turmoil surrounding the company, and the bike industry in
>> general, in recent months.
>>
>> “Everyone was convinced, this is it, we are one of the biggest bike
>> retailers about. We’re about to go massive in America, then it was like
>> ‘Oh, this might not be plain sailing, this is not good’. But I don’t think
>> anyone thought this was going to close the company,” the ex-employee, who
>> worked for one of Wiggle CRC’s house brands, tells us of his response to
>> the revelation that SSU’s funding commitment of £150m had been withdrawn
>> from its own parent company last autumn, plunging Wiggle CRC into crisis
>> and administration.
>>
>> However, the employee – who wished to remain anonymous – also believes that
>> it was a combination of that abrupt funding withdrawal and the broader,
>> more long-term external factors affecting the entire bike industry that
>> ultimately facilitated the company’s collapse.
>>
>> He argues that continued internal ambition within Wiggle, such as the
>> desire to ‘break’ America, contrasted with those external industry
>> pressures and the effects of the pandemic bubble bursting, long before the
>> “shock” of SSU’s combustion – but that there was an insistent belief that
>> the brand could weather those industry storms thanks to its “agility”.
>>
>> “Suddenly the bubble burst, and you’ve got a train you’ve geared up to full
>> speed, and you’re driving it flat out, then suddenly someone tells you
>> you’ve run out of track,” he says.
>>
>> “It was chaos, and you saw everyone hitting that. And I think the £150m
>> combined with that – even with the £150m, there’s no guarantee we would
>> have survived. Maybe it got too big.”
>>
>> In a wide-ranging chat, he also discusses the abruptness and “detached”
>> nature of the company’s descent leading to Frasers’ purchase – which saw
>> staff laid off without warning and US-based employees turning up to work to
>> find the office locked – despite the assumption among many staff that the
>> company could survive as a going concern amid the multiple waves of job
>> cuts carried out by the administrators.
>>
>> “You’ve got a camaraderie-based company, and then things change,” he says
>> of the “brutally handled” and “random” job cuts.
>>
>> “And goodbye is hard and fast. One day, before the end, friends got an
>> email, telling them there was a meeting. They got up, halfway through work,
>> went to the meeting and it was like ‘I’m sorry, this is the end of the
>> road, goodbye’.
>>
>> “And since we were in administration, all the contracts for minimum notice
>> were gone. So they went from ‘I have to get this report in by one o’clock’
>> to ‘sorry’. And fifteen minutes later they’re sitting in a car in the
>> carpark going ‘what has just happened?’”
>>
>> The ex-staff member even tells us that they were constantly being assured
>> that the initial redundancies were a “good thing” for the company and its
>> remaining staff, and would help facilitate a quick sale.
>>
>> “Everybody believed this was going to work,” he says. “We were too
>> successful, we make too much money, we were too good at this. It’s not like
>> there was another competitor in the same market in the UK. You might be one
>> of the unlucky ones who got cut, but the assumption was: Wiggle Chain
>> Reaction wasn’t going anywhere.”
>>
>> He also claimed that staff were told that the company was likely to be sold
>> to a private equity firm, and that management even told staff “Don’t worry,
>> Mike Ashley is not buying us”.
>>
>> “Even when we closed, there was no talk about Frasers Group, about Mike
>> Ashley,” he says. “We found out through media outlets, which is wild.”
>>
>> Frasers’ purchase, the ex-employee says, also means that Wiggle CRC’s
>> in-house brands, such as the manufacturer of our bike of the year, Vitus,
>> are now “gone”.
>>
>> “Right until the very end, there was the assumption someone was going to
>> buy us. Because you can run a brand with ten people. And the idea that
>> someone would surely love Vitus, NukeProof, dhb, one of these, surely
>> someone would want to keep a few humans and those brands. But the fact
>> everyone was let go means that those brands are gone.”
>
> One wonders how and why any of the above is of real moment.
>
> After all, whatever happened to Austin and Morris? Or DeLorean? Or even
> Reliant or Bond?
>
> Why should a chav-bike retailer be regarded as anywhere near as
> important to the economy and the transport system as any of those?
>>
>> Meanwhile, in an altogether more frivolous part two, Ryan and Jamie sit
>> down to discuss the topic that’s dominated the agenda at Paris-Nice and
>> Tirreno-Adriatico this week: Visma-Lease a Bike’s bonkers new Giro Aerohead
>> time trial helmets (oh, and Bahrain-Victorious’ fire service-style helmets,
>> too).
>
> Chav-cyclists being frivolous?
>
> They are not noted for a sensayuma after all.
>
> Witness the hysterical reactions to any jocular suggestion by an
> offended celebrity to the effect that a wire stretched across the road
> in the dark might be an idea. Always taken entirely out of context and
> in a totally humourless way - pretending that it is meant seriously and
> that we are all going to see decapitated chavs all over the network.
>>
>> We ask the important questions: Has helmet design finally jumped the shark?
>> Do these increasingly extravagant air-cheating shapes actually make a
>> difference to a rider’s time trial results? Will the UCI ban Giro’s bold
>> new look, after promising to review its design rules? And, finally, was it
>> designed by a five-year-old?
>
> Ah yes... chav-cyclists doing what chav-cyclists do - decrying all
> safety measures, but in particular, those that:

> (a) cost them money,

> (b) cost them time, or

> (c) make them look like tits.

>> <https://road.cc/content/news/wiggles-demise-and-vismas-mad-giro-helmets-discussed-307185>

LOL…very perceptive!

--
Spike