From now on, you won’t be able to buy a 2015 Avanti bicycle. Model years are being phased out over a range of brands that Sheppard Cycles directly owns including Avanti and Malvern Star. Stephen James, who is Product Manager for Avanti and Group Product Manager across all of Sheppard’s cycle brands, explained their thinking behind this bold decision. “We want to improve the landscape for our dealers by not having to discount old product all the time in their stores,” Stephen began. “Annually consumers are coming in expecting a sale at some time and it’s eroding margin out of the industry. We’re trying to stop that cycle by taking seasonality out of the equation, so we’re stopping model years. That will be across all Sheppard brands, so Avanti, Malvern Star and Raleigh bikes. Haro have also joined in and said that they’re going to start building it into their program for the future as well. We’re still working with Scott on this concept.” In addition to ending model years, Stephen said that Avanti have also made major changes to their model naming hierarchy. “In Avanti we are also taking a consumer view of our brand,” he said. “We’re trying to make it easier to understand our range, so we’re reducing the model names. Essentially at a high level we’re working towards a range of eight model names. So we have an ‘on road’ convention and an ‘off road’ convention. The ‘on road’ would have four names in future and ‘off road’ a similar number, then we have then sub categories of those names. “So for road as a performance bike we have Corsa, we have Giro as our recreation bike or endurance bike and then we have Metro for our urban bikes. Then we have sub categories of those. “For off road we have Discovery for entry so that’s like a trail or path bike, then we have Montari and then we would have Competitor for our performance bike and Torrent for our trail bikes. “Now the dealer can say to a consumer, ‘You’re a Giro customer, would you like a flat handlebar or a drop handlebar bike?’ We can direct them a lot easier in store. Sometimes when we have a whole lot of model names, the customer journey in the store gets quite difficult. When you start that sales process and you start talking to a consumer about each model and then they say ‘I want to change this’ and then you talk about another model name… you’ve got to reignite that whole thought process again because you’ve just shifted them too far.”
