>>1874086This
There was a great article I read a few years ago, unfortunately I forget where as I'd love to reread it myself, which pretty much explained what happened in the late 70's and 80's in with an explosion of organic grass roots cycling trends like Mountain biking and BMX, and how the industry pretty much ignored the latter until small companies started springing up and began to threaten their stranglehold.
What followed was something of a revolution, huge companies that thought they had the whole thing locked down suddenly found themselves being completely out of touch with something that would prove to alter the trajectory of cycling for the next few decades. As they scrambled to catch up with events the new sport of MTB was dominated by these small upstarts, the fledgling sport's newly established competition circuit was populated with bikes stamped with names nobody outside the bubble would ever have heard of, Ritchey, Yeti, Fat Chance, Rocky Mountain, Brodie, Pace, Klein etc, and it was thee same with the parts, Paul, Ringle, Cook Bros, Middleburn, Bullseye et al, some of whom were already doing well in the BMX arena and managed to transition seamlessly to what they knew was the next big thing.
The long and the short of it is that for about 10-15 years the industry was thrown into a beautiful chaotic state where small craftsmen had the upper hand over the behemoths and the behemoths threw millions at trying to wrestle the game back under their control. the result was a golden age of creativity and experimentation as the frames and components were developed and perfected. The late 80s and early 90s was when the most amazing fruits ripened.
And look at the industry today, dominated by Trek, Specialized and Cannondale etc, all firms that emerged out of that chaos, they are the Raleighs and the Schwinns of today, and the industry has once again relaxed into comfortable soulless exploitation of a market dominated by a handful of mega corporations.
