No sale! Pay full price!

If you’ve been conscious over the last month you’ll have undoubtedly been exposed to dozens of hyped-up Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales campaigns selling (supposedly) heavily-discounted cycling gear.

Like pretty much everything else in our capitalist world, the premise of these sales is that companies haven’t sold as much as they planned, so are selling it cheaper to release inventory and get some cash. Win-win, right?

We all know that often isn’t the case. Pre-sale prices can be inflated, and big sales events factored into business plans and finances well in advance. But misleading marketing isn’t new so there’s no need to revisit old arguments ad infinitum. We’ll leave that to the rim-brake stalwarts (guilty as charged).

But who wins really? The cycling industry is in well-documented strife already, with many sad closures and others struggling to stay afloat. Training customers to only buy during sales is not a good long-term strategy, and while some brands have seen the light and changed their approach, it’s hard to take the higher ground when the competition down the road claims to have 50% off every other week.

So every year when we are asked “has Soigneur got any Black Friday discounts?” we answer the same way: “No we don’t, all our jerseys are made to order, so we don’t have excess stock to sell cheaply”.

This means we’re actually profitable, a rare commodity in cycling. And we’d like to stay that way. So, no big discount sales from us.

It means our customers appreciate the finer things in life and are prepared to pay accordingly. It means you can have your jerseys customised. It means you can buy a Soigneur jersey today without fear of seeing it half-price tomorrow.

In marketing science it also means our jerseys retain their value for longer and will have a higher resale value. But that’s just mad – who would sell their Soigneur jersey?