Inside the Largest Cycling E-Commerce in the US: Lessons with Brett Sullivan of Backcountry & Competitive Cyclist

So we had spoken about, cause I, I, we had, we met when I was, when I was working with Santini years and years ago and, And, and then we reconnected about two years ago or a year or so ago and I was expecting to hear horror stories about the post COVID hangover, but that's not the case.

You told me that it sounds like you guys had have been able to navigate that pretty well.

Can you tell me about that.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'll start by saying it was by no means easy times.

I think that the COVID boom caught us all by surprise and was really an exciting time to be in the cycling industry.

Business was in a really great spot.

I would say though that the post-COVID boom definitely was a struggle.

But one of the things that we have within the e-commerce side is we're getting real customer demand.

We're getting daily demand and you could start to see demand waning over time.

And I'll never forget a moment in time.

It was the week after 4th of July and probably 2021.

All of a sudden, our run rates that were comping the 2020 boom that really sort of kicked off in April of 2021.

Those run rates dropped about 30%.

What

does that mean, your sales?

Our sales, yeah.

So our 4th of July sales were really good, but then after that, you just saw a really large step down.

Now, the business volume was still at somewhat historic highs, but you just saw that year-over-year debill, and...

It got you thinking, is the party over? And I think that's when we started to reach out to our top suppliers and try to get ahead of it, saying, hey, we're getting these early demand signals.

I think we should be prepared to maybe walk back some of our orders as we look into 2022.

How much inventory do you guys have to keep, if you can discuss that at all? Are you able to stay pretty lean?

We are able to stay pretty

mean,

but I'd also say the breadth of our assortment.