of the activities they were enjoying pre-2020. That said, in all of this, there are going to be a number of those new-found cyclists that will carry on being cyclists – it’s just a question of how many. In addition to what I would call the ‘Covid cycling legacy’, the changes in lifestyle and urban transport options that promote cycling (including e-bikes) will continue to have a positive (and sustainable) effect. For example, I can see continued growth in the emerging ‘etility’ bikes sector from Benno.
To what extent are you supporting IBDs, and how has this evolved throughout 2021? We tried hard to second guess the demand as the Covid effect struck and as a consequence, we made some significant commitments in the summer of 2020 for product to be put into the supply pipes. In amongst all of the relative chaos, I’d like to say we got everything right, but frankly, we didn’t. There are still some products we regrettably are simply going to struggle to supply for quite a while yet. That said, there are several key lines that are arriving into us, and our shelves are starting to gradually become restocked. As a quick snapshot, we are currently back up to around 75% of our typical pre-pandemic stock holding level on a given day. I expect folks will understand that things are still tricky for several items, but we have been, and continue, to pull lots of stops out to try and best serve our dealers. We are also trying to allocate items that are in short supply so that dealers that have supported our brands over the years can continue to have a reasonable chance of receiving products. Many of our well-established customers place backorders with us for items well before they arrive. This scenario enables us to allocate stock for them in good faith, particularly whilst some items remain in short supply. To put our backorder levels into some kind of context, we have always operated a backorder system for our
14 | December 2021
dealers as a default for temporarily sold-out items. Our current backorder entries are now running at over 20-times the typical levels. It also became clear last year especially that dealers needed as much information as we can offer to manage their own stock flow. We initiated a proactive ‘Backorder Advice’ that goes out every two weeks by email. This provides dealers with our most up-to-date information on each product line that a dealer has on backorder with us, including the ETA of all items on backorder for their particular POs.
What are your plans for 2022 and beyond? For me, we’ve effectively seen a record ‘harvest’ in 2020/21. It’s now going to be mostly about investing back into the future to enable us to better serve our customers and suppliers: investment in a new back office and systems, increased stock holding, investments in our sales and marketing activities, investing in supporting our staff. As we see real life physical events start to come back into being viable, we are looking forwards to once again meeting our customers, suppliers and the media. 2020 saw us notch up our 125th year in the bicycle industry, as we started with my great grandfather’s brand of The Light Blue bikes but, of course, it was not easy to celebrate 2020. However, 2022 will be our 30th year as ‘Ison Distribution’ – so I’m hoping we will be able to celebrate this milestone. I recognise that all of our customers and suppliers have a lot of choices, and I remain grateful to those who choose to continue to support Ison Distribution. n
www.bikebiz.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
