“The assumption was Wiggle Chain Reaction wasn’t going anywhere”:
Ex-employee talks “shock” at retail giant’s demise, plus THAT Visma Giro
helmet discussed on the road.cc Podcast

In episode 72 of the road.cc Podcast, we go behind the scenes at Wiggle CRC
to find out what really went on at the beleaguered retailer over the last
few gloomy months, while Jamie and Ryan dissect pro cycling’s latest
controversy: ugly time trial helmets

by RYAN MALLON. FRI, MAR 08, 2024 18:59

While the two topics discussed on a bumper episode 72 of the road.cc
Podcast are both high on the cycling world’s list of talking points this
week, they notably sit at opposite ends of the seriousness spectrum (unless
you take your time trial helmet debates very seriously, of course).

In part one, George and Ryan are joined by a former Wiggle Chain Reaction
Cycles employee, one of the 450-odd staff members laid off as part of the
online retailer’s demise and recent rumoured purchase by Mike Ashley’s
Frasers Group, who discussed what life was like behind the scenes at the
beleaguered brand as Wiggle CRC lurched from crisis to crisis in recent
months following the collapse of its parent company.

The ex-employee also chats about the contrast between Wiggle’s grand
expansion plans and the struggling state of the bike industry, the “shock”
of the company’s collapse (amid hopes that it could continue on), the
abrupt, “hard and fast goodbye” dished out to its staff, and the future for
Wiggle’s house brands such as Vitus and dhb.

After a rough few months (and years) for the bike industry, and one giant
retailer in particular, last weekend we were greeted with the not very
surprising and rather inevitable news that Wiggle Chain Reaction Cycles –
or at least its brand and intellectual property – had been purchased by
Frasers Group, the retail empire founded by Mike Ashley and now run by his
son-in-law Michael Murray, in a deal believed to be worth less than £10m.

The news, which adds Wiggle CRC to Frasers’ growing list of purchases in
recent years of struggling cycling brands such as Evans and ProBikeKit,
brings an apparent end to the months of gloom and uncertainty surrounding
the company, which followed the collapse of Wiggle CRC’s parent company
Signa Sports United into insolvency.

Unfortunately, the purchase – like many of those engineered by Frasers in
the past – also means that Wiggle Chain Reaction’s remaining staff, all 450
of them, have lost their jobs.

And it was in those unfortunate circumstances that we sat down with one of
those staff members laid off over the past few weeks, to discuss the
circumstances behind the recent sale, and its effect on Wiggle CRC’s staff,
as well as the turmoil surrounding the company, and the bike industry in
general, in recent months.

“Everyone was convinced, this is it, we are one of the biggest bike
retailers about. We’re about to go massive in America, then it was like
‘Oh, this might not be plain sailing, this is not good’. But I don’t think
anyone thought this was going to close the company,” the ex-employee, who
worked for one of Wiggle CRC’s house brands, tells us of his response to
the revelation that SSU’s funding commitment of £150m had been withdrawn
from its own parent company last autumn, plunging Wiggle CRC into crisis
and administration.

However, the employee – who wished to remain anonymous – also believes that
it was a combination of that abrupt funding withdrawal and the broader,
more long-term external factors affecting the entire bike industry that
ultimately facilitated the company’s collapse.

He argues that continued internal ambition within Wiggle, such as the
desire to ‘break’ America, contrasted with those external industry
pressures and the effects of the pandemic bubble bursting, long before the
“shock” of SSU’s combustion – but that there was an insistent belief that
the brand could weather those industry storms thanks to its “agility”.

“Suddenly the bubble burst, and you’ve got a train you’ve geared up to full
speed, and you’re driving it flat out, then suddenly someone tells you
you’ve run out of track,” he says.

“It was chaos, and you saw everyone hitting that. And I think the £150m
combined with that – even with the £150m, there’s no guarantee we would
have survived. Maybe it got too big.”

In a wide-ranging chat, he also discusses the abruptness and “detached”
nature of the company’s descent leading to Frasers’ purchase – which saw
staff laid off without warning and US-based employees turning up to work to
find the office locked – despite the assumption among many staff that the
company could survive as a going concern amid the multiple waves of job
cuts carried out by the administrators.

“You’ve got a camaraderie-based company, and then things change,” he says
of the “brutally handled” and “random” job cuts.

“And goodbye is hard and fast. One day, before the end, friends got an
email, telling them there was a meeting. They got up, halfway through work,
went to the meeting and it was like ‘I’m sorry, this is the end of the
road, goodbye’.

“And since we were in administration, all the contracts for minimum notice
were gone. So they went from ‘I have to get this report in by one o’clock’
to ‘sorry’. And fifteen minutes later they’re sitting in a car in the
carpark going ‘what has just happened?’”

The ex-staff member even tells us that they were constantly being assured
that the initial redundancies were a “good thing” for the company and its
remaining staff, and would help facilitate a quick sale.

“Everybody believed this was going to work,” he says. “We were too
successful, we make too much money, we were too good at this. It’s not like
there was another competitor in the same market in the UK. You might be one
of the unlucky ones who got cut, but the assumption was: Wiggle Chain
Reaction wasn’t going anywhere.”

He also claimed that staff were told that the company was likely to be sold
to a private equity firm, and that management even told staff “Don’t worry,
Mike Ashley is not buying us”.

“Even when we closed, there was no talk about Frasers Group, about Mike
Ashley,” he says. “We found out through media outlets, which is wild.”

Frasers’ purchase, the ex-employee says, also means that Wiggle CRC’s
in-house brands, such as the manufacturer of our bike of the year, Vitus,
are now “gone”.

“Right until the very end, there was the assumption someone was going to
buy us. Because you can run a brand with ten people. And the idea that
someone would surely love Vitus, NukeProof, dhb, one of these, surely
someone would want to keep a few humans and those brands. But the fact
everyone was let go means that those brands are gone.”

Meanwhile, in an altogether more frivolous part two, Ryan and Jamie sit
down to discuss the topic that’s dominated the agenda at Paris-Nice and
Tirreno-Adriatico this week: Visma-Lease a Bike’s bonkers new Giro Aerohead
time trial helmets (oh, and Bahrain-Victorious’ fire service-style helmets,
too).

We ask the important questions: Has helmet design finally jumped the shark?
Do these increasingly extravagant air-cheating shapes actually make a
difference to a rider’s time trial results? Will the UCI ban Giro’s bold
new look, after promising to review its design rules? And, finally, was it
designed by a five-year-old?

<https://road.cc/content/news/wiggles-demise-and-vismas-mad-giro-helmets-discussed-307185>

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Spike

Spike <aero.spike@mail.com> wrote:

Apologies…wrong group…:-(

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Spike