BRANDS
minds on sustainability.” Wattbike traditionally has two core customers for its static training bikes - performance road cyclists and commercial gyms, where its bikes are often used in spin classes or on the gym floor as cardio machines. Baker said that between 45- 50% of its customers first come into contact with the Wattbike brand via commercial gyms. He said: “[Gyms] almost become your shop face in a way, but it is a slightly different side of the business.”
The product The first Wattbike, the Pro/Trainer was launched in 2008, and was used by elite sports teams from across cycling, football and other sports. In 2012 the brand was adopted by a number of major gym providers, including Virgin Active and David Lloyd. Following the explosion of cycling as a result of the London 2012 Olympics, Wattbike began to focus on the core market of typically male, 35-55-year-old road cyclists. This resulted in the development of the Wattbike Atom,
a revolutionary home trainer catered to the performance cyclist, with built in power meter and connectivity with training apps like Zwift, which retails for £2,399 directly from Wattbike.
Wattbike, based in Nottingham, employs around 60 people
While Wattbike has been tracking ahead of 2019, other cycling tech brands have not been so fortunate, with brands like Strava and Wahoo having to lay off staff in late 2022. Baker said: “Even before the pandemic we were struggling to keep up with the sales that we had, then you add the pandemic on top of that. Then you try to catch up and scale up, then you’ve got this whiplash effect when it comes back down and you’re trying to slow inventory to the right amount of sales. “We’ve definitely felt it. More stock soaks up cash, so you’ve got to be careful. We were lucky in the sense that we weren’t too big, because the bigger you get, the swings are much bigger.
“The whiplash is probably longer lasting than we realise,
and there’s less support around for businesses. And it’s not just indoor cycling and tech, many sports apparel brands are in a similar place.”
What next?
So what next for the cycle tech industry? Baker believes data and community will become an increasingly important commodity in the cycling market: “I think people will want to get deeper into the data. I think that’s a quandary, with people quantifying what the data is, and what to do with that data that people are using.
“I think it’s clear the other thing is community. Zwift does a brilliant job of that, but there’s still plenty of people that don’t use it. People want to be part of a wider community, so I think there could be some opportunity for outside tech to come in, which could lead into a sort of metaverse [an immersive virtual reality world].” ●
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