Brain Vomit #23 A promise
The bicycle industry is a terrible way to make a living. It’s a labor of love and passion. It is not uncommon to see someone leave a good paying job in a prosperous industry to open up a bike shop, start a brand, do something with bikes. The bicycle industry is a very saturated market and in order to thrive you have to differentiate your brand from the rest. You have to reinvent something, think outside the box, like coming up with a new color.
When I started my second brand “Agaromba” I knew very well that the industry didn’t need another brand. Unless you are some sassy cheeky marketer who will lie to peoples faces about your ground-breaking revolutionary proprietary innovation that your product uses. You don’t have much to offer other than what the competition does. Trying to be the cheapest is not sustainable and will run you out of business. Luxury? Sure, but you have to deliver. The luxury market is small and not dumb. You might fool them once but if your product does not match the expectations you’ll probably won’t get them back for more. And somewhere in the middle is where all the brands are so what makes you think they’ll pick your brand? The world does not need another bike brand, but I started one.
The promise behind Agaromba is not one of elevated Status or an advantage in performance or direct savings. The promise behind Agaromba is a promise of labor. Bikes brake and we want you to use your bike for as long as possible so we will fix it. This makes Agaromba the only brand that offers carbon repairs on the frames. For free, one time the rest are at standard rate. Once we consider that your bike is not safe to ride any more, then we would offer you a crash replacement. We are not telling you to buy another bike just because we are cool. We are saying that if you are gonna buy a bike no matter what, we’d like you to consider ours. We can’t stop the destruction of our environment yet, but we can slow it down. Buy us time to find a solution.
I really hope this business model gets adopted throughout the cycling industry and every industry. Mindless consumerism is going to end Humanity.