FEATURE Staff:
The whole of the Ison staff and especially the ops teams have performed at an exceptional level under difficult conditions. The management are grateful to every member of the team for their outstanding efforts in this strangest of times for us. It seems often driven by reassessments of lifestyles through the past 18 months, there have been an unusual amount of staff changes. We are continuing to make several new appointments with the primary objective of better serving our dealers (and suppliers) as we emerge back to some form of market stability from what has to be one of the strangest series of market conditions we have ever known to try and navigate this business through.
Price pressure: In this past year, we have experienced a period of record demand, difficulties with production and huge complications and delays on shipping. As a company, we try to avoid price changes, as we know the disruption that they can cause to dealers is often painful. Nevertheless, although we have absorbed the majority of extra costs in the past nine months, the combination of supplier price increases, huge shipping cost increases and some raw material increases are causing an untenable pressure on our prices. We are therefore regrettably having to pass on some of the increases.
lock brand in the UK. Otherwise, several ‘in-house’ new product developments that were put onto the slow burner in 2020/21 are now heading back onto the development griddle for 2022/23.
What business developments have you made this year?
Operations: We have been running at pretty much ‘flat-out’ levels since April 2020. We had planned to change our back-end stock system for 2020/21, but a combination of Covid and Brexit related complications have delayed that change being actioned. Naturally, changing the back office would be likely to cause some disruption, and I think when you are running at full speed, it’s perhaps not the best idea to loosen your shoelaces and to try pulling on some new shoes. However, we did make some tweaks to our established systems – especially so in regard to the proactive information flow relating to stock availability and backorders.
www.bikebiz.com
What are your expectations for the bike industry post- Covid? Post-Covid, I am expecting to see a small overall lift in cycling generally compared to pre-Covid levels. This should be driven by a legacy carry over of some of those who either found or rediscovered cycling during Covid. That said, naturally, I recognise that the high Covid demand levels seen during the past 18 months are not sustainable. For example, I am sure we all know of a friend (or two) that desperately wanted a new bike in the summer of 2020, but that bike that you sourced is now barely being used now that they can go back to doing many
Ison took on innovative component brand Redshift prior to the pandemic December 2021 | 13
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