Hong Kong dealer meeting

Andy Kessler 12. Feb ’12 General
Our second dealer meeting took place in Hong Kong from the past three days. Not really the place you would think would be ideal for a dealer meeting but for the countries attending its quiet handy to get there. We had our partners from Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan attending.

As the first meeting in Amsterdam was really a kick-off meeting where we still changed quiet a bit on our concept and strategy, we hoped that this one would be a little bit less game-changing.  For the first time we had also a meeting taking place outside Gerard’s or my private home which made it a little more formal than the ones before. 

We gathered a lot of valuable feedback from the people attending and of course we did change again to our lineup and business concept. We worked out how we can combine sales directly to the customer and sales via our retailers. Since we choose to have so few dealers, we know there will be some customers who will never have heard of any of them and they may prefer to talk directly to us.

Since the customer decides, not the company, that means that if the customer prefers to deal with us, we need to give them that opportunity.But of course, if there are tons and tons of customers contacting us, we also have a problem because then there’s no time left to do the rest of the work that needs to be done.

This is not super-important at the start, since we will need to spend so much time on set-up that we simply won’t have any time for direct sales. But later on, we really want to make sure we can combine retailer and direct sales, not just for the above reasons but also because we like to stay in direct contact with our customers – there’s a lot to learn from that which in turn can make the company better. The discussion on this topic is pretty lively, I enjoy it.

One area where we are still struggling is the brand name and the identity for our new venture. We just are not sure where to go. We had this unique idea but the problem is that people are often not ”open” for new ideas because you only like what you know. Especially with our existing graphic design, people tell us to be more mainstream, which of course is exactly what we did not want. We wanted to have our own identity and not just copy somebody else and make it a little better. We wanted to have something special that maybe not everybody likes but the ones who do like it go wow…  And of course it needed to be global as with our idea of simplicity and being a small company we wanted to have one design only.

Another thing that was special about the Hong Kong meeting was the riding part. Riding our bikes is an important part of each meeting that we do. Going for a ride for 15 minutes tells you more about a bike than a 5 hour presentation.  It validates all the engineering and marketing talk if you can experience something on your own. For me still the easiest way to convince somebody of a new product: go and try it out yourself!

The question is only where would you do that in Hong Kong? Our local partner Iron Ore found the right place for that. A little outside of the city there is this nice military shooting range for tanks. A perfect terrain with very nice single tracks, steep uphill- and downhill sections and also very technical parts. The only thing disturbing was that you felt like an easy target in there. Even though we were told that there is no shooting on that day, you could hear some gunfire from far away which did not exactly built confidence. In the end, we had a ride to remember with great people in a great terrain. Ah, ok maybe I should add that we had to pass through a grave yard to get access to the trails, just to get us in the mood.