YT Industries has announced this morning that Sam Nicols, 45, has been appointed as CEO, replacing the founder of the brand, Markus Flossmann.
Flossmann is stepping aside as CEO 12 years after first introducing YT Industries to the world with a batch of 150 steel dirt jump frames. He will remain a crucial part of his brand and is now becoming Chief Visionary Officer (CVO), in charge of brand and product identity. Flossmann has decided to bring in Nicols to help, "further accelerate YT’s growth trajectory, already turbocharged by this year’s demand, while navigating the increased business complexity and customer expectations."
Following his master’s in engineering, Nicols started his career in R&D in Sweden before completing an MBA at Columbia Business School and moving into management consulting for three years. Nicols joined Amazon in Munich in 2010 where, among other things, he led the Prime team in Germany for five years, and later led Amazon’s Turkish business as country manager where he launched the website in 2018.
Nicols will oversee all business operations and, alongside Flossmann, will be spearheading the future strategic and operational development of YT.
| When I founded YT in 2008, I never expected the company to be as successful as we have become. Within 12 years, we have been able to make our mark within the mountain bike industry and created a global community. For YT to reach the next level of its evolution, we welcome Sam Nicols as the new CEO. We are convinced that his experience will propel us into a new era. I really look forward to shaping the future of YT together with Sam and the rest of our team.—Markus Flossmann, Founder & CVO YT Industries |
| This is a dream come true for me –from mountain biking in the forests of Oregon as a teenager, I never would have imagined I would one day get the opportunity to join a brand like YT. Markus and the team have already started making the necessary changes needed to enable YT to scale and continue to redefine how customers around the world buy and experience gravity mountain bikes.
I feel strongly that my background in operational excellence and e-commerce, my data-driven decision making, and the customer centricity that was honed during my nine years at Amazon will complement the brand, product and design expertise that Markus brings as Founder and CVO.—Sam Nicols, CEO YT Industries |
If you live in Canada or the US and want to save money, get used and save a lot. Maybe not in covid times but usually yes. If you have a budget of 4+ then buy local, shop a sale, honestly it is worth saving the headache.
I dropped 4400 on an alu frame and it cracked, 4 months latter YT is still ghosting. I am kicking myself for not going with any brand around Vancouver. If something broke in that case I could go into the shop and at least talk to a real person and not just send emails into the void.
It seems you only ever hear mostly doom and gloom on forums, so this is just for balance.
YT should have been able to come through with that response almost instantly. But for those of you with mail order bikes, this is how the industry works: 2nd or 3rd party manufactured parts that come on your complete bike must be warrantied through the specific manufacturer of that part. If your bike brand isn't stamped on the part, start the process with the brand that is.
I've tried this with bos. After a year, they still have my fork with them.
For good customer service - Banshee. Never had problems with my frames but I was one of the crazy peeps who preordered a Banshee Legend in 2010 and I waited for it 6 months (if not more) but the contact with the company has been amazing and I knew no one was trying to just ignore me
But I will say my experience with Transition's warranty process is phenomenal. I cracked my front triangle and submitted a warranty claim through their website. They reviewed it and had a replacement shipped out that same day. I was riding the new frame the following weekend.
Remember when they cornholed Gwin and told him the Mob was being dissolved just so they could get rid of him, but then the Mob lived on....that was super cool.
YT is a garbage company to boot. As they say, actions speak louder than words.
As much as I appreciate Aaron Gwin (which I really do), he did the same thing to Trek when switching to Specialized back in the day... I'd even go as far as to say that situation was quite a lot uglier.
Gwin had a great team with Trek, everything went perfectly for both him and the brand with a record winning-streak, but he flipped on ultra short notice solely for the bigger paycheck at Specialized. Thus, in all fairness, trusting Gwins loyalty was absolutely off the table from the very beginning.
I think it's also safe to say YT, again, upped that check by a pretty significant margin in order to get the best chances of putting the brand on the map in the US with the most popular American athletes Zinc and Gwin. After a successful expansion, and - on a side note - Gwins performance visibly diminishing, there was no reason to keep paying an exorbitantly outrageous price for his "dream program".
After all, the guy built an absolute Mega-Mansion on top of his own personal hill shortly after just turning 30 and he's driving a brand new Porsche 911 alongside some sponsored cars. He's certainly not living the bad life.
YT, on the other hand, is still a very young company compared to most if not all of the big names and it still has to invest a lot into its own growth and a clearly overstrained global service infrastructure. Keeping Gwin on the team was simply not affordable. I'm quite certain that YT has upped its prices per bike easily by $1000 just in order to make signing Gwin even possible.
That being said, I'm not even riding a YT. I am riding a Specialized right now because I simply loved the Enduro... but in all seriousness, if there is any company that deserves being labeled a garbage company, it's them. There is no other company that has been more of a dick in terms of screwing and suing business partners and little people over absolute peanuts. Their price policy is shit, too.
I'd say the hate on YT is objectively overexaggerated in your comment.
As for this guy, I don't think that everyone who works for Amazon is necessarily as crappy as the company as a whole. Should be a good opportunity for YT
Me explaining how economics works isn't. I get that it's easier to just call someone an idiot than it is to be humble and admit that you don't understand something. It's okay to ask questions. If you want to learn about why supporting small business actually makes you richer even if it costs more to make an actual purchase, look up economics - multiplier effect.
Have a nice day
I dunno mate, I buy stuff from Amazon all the time for lower prices and fast delivery, so my personal wealth has actually increased. But Im sure you got some regurgitated facts from some leftist blog memorized that you can respond with, lacking even the basic understanding of economics.
The bigger thing about internet leftism is that its not even real. Its just a bunch of kids trying to feel woke about themselves by being contrarian. Not even worth arguing with.
Also do you get how ironic it is to complain about people being contrarian when your only comment is being against the popular discourse?
An in depth conversation might include discussing that calculating a marginal propensity to save of 10% and using 90% for your multiplier effect is a flawed example because the business only keeps the profit. So just vaguely from memory I think a 90% MPS results in a multiplier effect of about 4x so $500 spent turns into $2000 spent in the community. In reality most of the tertiary products we buy are made in other countries, so the multiplier effect would only be relevant to the gross profit portion of the purchase.
Still it has an affect on total wealth in the community. I am not an economist and that is a basic level understanding of why spending local actually benefits you. If someone with a more advanced understanding of economics had a view that using the multiplier effect to justify why purchasing with large corporations hurts you is a flawed way of looking at it I'm all ears.
The only problem is, a consumer spending multiplier doesn’t mean that you or I necessarily get wealthier, only that per capita GDP increases.
Amazon probably isn’t the best example because, among other things, it is a massive marketplace made up of many millions of business owners selling their wares. So while Amazon takes a cut, spending on Amazon still has a strong multiplier effect because those profits are distributed among so many entrepreneurs, creating an increase in real wages.
Of course the empirical work on multipliers is messy so people can disagree about how effective they actually are, but there’s generally consensus that there is some effect.
I’m a microeconomist so this isn’t really my wheelhouse either, but it’s fun to not have every conversation be about engineering.
Agreed it is absolute common sense, or should be at least, that the conglomeration of industry results in a handful of high paying jobs, and a greater number of low paying jobs. Therefor supporting large business makes the majority of people less well off.
Why I like referring to the multiplier effect is I think it is a more effective example of why shopping with large corporations makes you as an individual less well off. If a person was middle to upper middle class and worked at a company who manufacturers lets say airplane parts. It would be easy to say well Amazon doesn't make airplane parts so why should I care if they put other people out of business, I'll be fine. The multiplier explains (as you know) the also common sense principle that if I spend money with someone within the community, then they have money to buy things from me. In this example supporting local business means people can afford plane tickets which keeps airplane manufacturing in business. The extent to how effective the multiplier is only affects how much it benefits people on the whole, but it doesn't negate that it makes a difference.
As for the Amazon example, in my mind it would be interesting to think of Amazon as being the wholesaler and the people selling on it's platforms as the manufacturer. So you lose the multiplier on Amazon's profits but gain it on items that were produced within the same country they are being purchased. That gets kind of messy because a lot of the people selling on amazon are wholesaling products they are purchasing from overseas. In that case only the profit they make would be a multiplier.
By contrast you could look at walmart, so in theory you gain the multiplier on wholesalers but lose it on the manufactured products since the majority of the product is again overseas.
So in both examples someone within the country, is making some money off the process. What makes companies like amazon and walmart even worse is that they put so much pressure on suppliers to run razor thin margins that no one is making any money, including walmart and amazon. They only make money because of the scale they are able to operate on.
TL: DR for everyone else. If no one local is making money they don't have any money to buy stuff from you and that's bad for you even if you don't care about other people.
For starters someone has to be very privileged to say "you shouldn't shop at Amazon/Walmart, instead, spend more money locally", considering the number of low income people that rely on cheap goods from both places for their way of life. Nobody is going to give a shit about some multiplier effect or hypothetical money being injected into the local economy if the immediate effect is that they have less spendable money every month.
Secondly, you are completely failing to address the benefit of using mass retailers for things like exchanges, returns, as well as membership services that pay for themselves, like Amazon Prime with shipping. Or things like when a pandemic hits and you are in a high risk group, but you are able to get essentialls delivered to your door. Local buisnesses don't have this value.
Also, plenty of suppliers make plenty of money with Amazon and their distribution. Doesn't matter if the margins per item are thin, the scale of sales very well make up in profits. If this wasn't the case, the suppliers would not chose Amazon to distribute their product.
Like I said, get off leftism. Its very addictive because it sounds super fantastical and nice, but its so, so very stupid. Capitalism works, whether you like it to or not, and you can't do anything about it.
Also @Phops: "considering the number of low income people that rely on cheap goods from both places for their way of life. Nobody is going to give a shit about some multiplier effect or hypothetical money being injected into the local economy if the immediate effect is that they have less spendable money every month."
Also your last argument is wrong because you basically assume since amazon has some advantages over local businesses that it means it's better. What matters is a total cost/benefit analisis and as FriendlyFoe mentioned - in the long run people lose more even if in the short term they save by using amazon. What you view as evil leftism is just viewing the economy in the long term
BTW. The local vs Global Businesses creates another problem - Tax avoidance. Given that in many Euro countries many local bike spots get some extra govt funding supporting tax-paying companies has extra benefits.
It's also an insane talking point on the right that the left wants socialism. It's not socialism unless the workers own the factories. No one is trying to get rid of capitalism. Unregulated capitalism leads to oligarchy, not dissimilar to the wealthy land owners all over Europe around the end of the 19th century.
But you just enjoy your bunker
The reality of all of these positions is highly nuanced and lies somewhere in the middle, but that doesn't make for very catchy news. Don't let tribal politics get in the way of what should be an interesting, thoughtful discussion.
30 years ago it was relatively common for anyone with a middle class job to be able to purchase a house. Now given the incredible housing boom (which isn't based in economics so much as an influx or foreign cash) many would say their personal standard of living has decreased, despite overall improvements in technology and healthcare.
Much in the same way I feel that using comparative advantage only addresses total productivity much in the same way GDP does, and does nothing to address the widening gap of wealth inequality. It seems to me that saying companies like Amazon and Walmart are beneficial because of the comparative advantage only addresses short run improvements and doesn't address the long term damage done.
Using Walmart as an example, I don't think I need to explain the process of how them coming into a town puts other small enterprise out of business resulting in an overall decrease in wages. Saying that there is a comparative advantage because of cheaper goods does nothing to address the problems it creates.
And I agree the middle ground is definitely where reality lies. As soon as you've picked a side, the tendency is to defend it regardless of the facts because your ego is now attached to that ideology. Most of us are moderates and it's group think that is polarizing people to the point where we can't even discuss non-political ideas.
I've owned two of their bikes and, all in all, i was quite happy. It's not that i bought them just because they were the cheapest. I test rode bikes from local shops too as i wanted to support LBS. Sadly, some of them were not available (Norco) and others just didn't fit me (Trek). I found YT to make some really good bikes, not without exception (but show me a company getting everything right). For me, customer service has worked well too. Maybe i was lucky, maybe i'm part of a more silent majority.
I shall however be having an eye out for what will happen now. If it goes the 'Amazon' way, exploiting employees and business partners for squeezing every penny out of shit products, then they can go bust for all i care. And they might well be facing that if they sell out, seeing as the brand has already been watered down and the general opinion on them it seems has taken a swing for the worse. We'll see.
If you're curious how this new CEO might emphasize in his management of YT. Take a look at Amazon's leadership principles:
www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
Did I want their bikes to actually be in stock and deliverable before the end of a riding season? Nope. Did I want an aluminum model with better than SX spec? Nope. Did I want affordable models be in stock rather than continually rolling out ultra high end spec special editions? Nope.
What I really wanted was someone poached from a tech company and a reshuffle involving vague and meaningless job titles
myspace.com/sam_nicols
Boycott Amazon, support your local bike shops and dedicated online retailers that give a damn.
i personally have never cared for bikes that cant fit a water bottle, but i dont see them as sellouts
YT is far, far below from that level. Does your LBS sell Forbidden or Commencal?
The bike stores that deserve to survive are doing just fine, but I don't run to a Toyota stealership evey time I need help. I do my research, buy a part and install it myself. If I don't have the tools or expertise, then I go to an independent shop or LBS.
We can argue about whether YT is a premium brand compared to G or S some other time... as you were haha!