It’s always tricky when a conversation that keeps happening, but really doesn’t make any sort of solid ground happens over and over again. It’s tricky because you quickly realize that that subject is one of those that has a fence in the middle that puts most on one side or the other with a small group waiting to see where things go hanging out on the fence. If you pick a side, you piss of the other side and vice versa. When the Let’s Talk BMX Shops and the Direct To Consumer War post dropped a month or so back, it immediately stirred up a lot of debate, and some people felt it was left pretty open ended and could be explored deeper. We actually tried to get a number of brands to comment on their perspective on the topic of why brands have chosen or not chosen to sell products direct from their website. We quickly realized we hit a soft spot that everyone would be into talking about, but not publicly. Why? Well, some didn’t want to give more attention to brands utilizing Amazon, others felt they might burn some sort of bridges with shops or distributors or generate some negative feedback from the general BMX community and others simply were just waiting it out to see how things panned out to see where the future of the business of BMX goes. Quite honestly, the subject has been crossing my mind pretty much every single day, weighing pros and cons, looking into what opportunities that can be created or how it could destroy certain aspects of the traditional business model the BMX industry uses. Instead of trying to get conversations going through interviews, I decided I’ll just put my personal perspective out there and see if we can spark some discussion… So, here we go… Let’s see who I can piss off the most.
