What Happened to Campagnolo?
- Thread starter Canuk
- Start date
Rapparee87
Retro Guru
Ruin it even more!
georges1
Retro Guru
Fact is that Shimano is still the dominating brand on the road bike and mountain bike markets since the mid 80's . Campagnolo went to dominant once in the pro peloton to insignificant, and their market shares have become ridiculous. Let's not forget that Mollema had problem with SRAM, I don't trust SRAM as well Mollema issue with SRAM And Campagnolo over the long run reliability is quite anecdotic. Also price of Campy spare parts are hard to obtain and grossly overpriced.
georges1
Retro Guru
Campagnolo was something significant in the 60's70's80's early90's but not anymore. Maybe bankruptcy is the way to go if they are not selling their fancy equipment to many high end bike brands. A lot of shifting and braking technologies were introduced by Shimano with Dura Ace and Dura Ace lately has beaten Campy Record at its own game.
georges1
Retro Guru
The problem with campy shifting is that is not as glass smooth as shimano plus , the campy braking systems even back in the days of the dual pivot brakes were not really efficient, I am not talking about campy wheels which were inferior to Dura Ace, Mavic Cosmic Carbone, Zipp, Hed, Boyd or even Bontrager wheels and a nightmare to service and maintain. Shimano is brand in gravel, road, city and myb bike fields and the GRX outsells the EKAR by a wide margin.
bikeworkshop
Old School Grand Master
Hopefully they learned something asking around at the trade show - i'd hate them to become a luxury niche brand for wealth signaling like Paul or King...
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sjcprojects
Orange 🍊 Fan
Clearly Campagnolo are never, ever going to compete with Shimano (or SRAM) in terms of sales volumes (as mentioned earlier in this thread, I think), so they are a 'niche' brand, really, in comparison. But that's not necessarily a problem, if that's where they find themselves. Then of course the question is exactly what niche they are filling, and yes, I hope it's not that of a 'luxury' brand.
I imagine that for every person saying 'you need a wider range of groupsets to appeal to different entry points' there's another person saying 'you need to focus on quality and the high-end market', and I sense they were caught between these two positions for a while, but are now going more towards the high-end only market.
I imagine that for every person saying 'you need a wider range of groupsets to appeal to different entry points' there's another person saying 'you need to focus on quality and the high-end market', and I sense they were caught between these two positions for a while, but are now going more towards the high-end only market.
georges1
Retro Guru
The problem is that they played the niche brand since the 2000's but their products don't offer the same bang for the buck nor the same quality than Shimano or Sram do. Most of the highend bikes from big brands are either fitted with Dura Ace or Sram Red, exception made of the small artisanal italian brands where having their bikes fitted with Campy is a mandatory. In the professional road bike circuit Campagnolo is sponsoring just 1 team where as most of the peloton pro teams are equipped with Shimano Dura Ace. The voume of the groupsets they sell and the number races they win is going to seal their fate.
Carbon fiber is a cheap manufacturing process compared to turning things out in metal by casting or machining. Some pimply-faced kid "engineer" who never did anything but watch YouTube and sit at a computer makes something with Autocad or a similar program, the computer controlled machinery can spit out a mold or 3d print a prototype and almost no human labor can start stamping out parts, the only humans could be assembly line workers each adding a bit before the stuff is throw into computer cut and printed boxes, humans may not even have to stack the warehouse or load the trucks, and now they have robot drones to drop things off at peoples homes and robot trucks being tried out on highways.
No thanks, my old bikes have been around from 40 to 85 years already and they will last another five or fifteen years until I am six feet under. If I can not buy a metal bicycle part that has some sort of human art or passion in it formed out of metal, then I am not buying it. The first carbon fiber parts had hand work in them, but they made sure to get rid of that as quickly as they can. I picked up an old Kestrel frame from the late 1980s for cheap and it takes all old standard metal parts that a steel frame would accept, and it was basically hand-made in a small factory in the USA. It does not have a crack in it, but I see all sorts of carbon frames and forks with crack failures now. Everything in Western society seems to get worse and more corrupted as time goes by. I really think the only hope for humanity is if Western society largely collapses and the old pre-industrial Eastern thinking can take over, where art and passion are as or more important than profit.
No thanks, my old bikes have been around from 40 to 85 years already and they will last another five or fifteen years until I am six feet under. If I can not buy a metal bicycle part that has some sort of human art or passion in it formed out of metal, then I am not buying it. The first carbon fiber parts had hand work in them, but they made sure to get rid of that as quickly as they can. I picked up an old Kestrel frame from the late 1980s for cheap and it takes all old standard metal parts that a steel frame would accept, and it was basically hand-made in a small factory in the USA. It does not have a crack in it, but I see all sorts of carbon frames and forks with crack failures now. Everything in Western society seems to get worse and more corrupted as time goes by. I really think the only hope for humanity is if Western society largely collapses and the old pre-industrial Eastern thinking can take over, where art and passion are as or more important than profit.
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