4 ms·
Shipping will eat labor savings alive for these. Their frames are rigid so you'd have to either ship them in huge boxes the slow way (terrible for a custom prod
by rtkwe 2y ago
Shipping will eat labor savings alive for these. Their frames are rigid so you'd have to either ship them in huge boxes the slow way (terrible for a custom product like this [0]), air freight them (probably upwards of 300 dollars for the size? That's just a wild guess though) or ship them disassembled and take the durability hit that would require. If they were less customized to fit the user you could but it's not the product we're looking at so you can't make them in mass quantity and ship them to a warehouse in the US like you can with a lot of less custom products.
It's also far less like bikes than you're thinking. They have 5 major adjustments for a total of about 25k different configurations. And those don't seem to be majorly exclusive to each other either.
[0] Check out the number of tweaks available in their configurator: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
- maxglute 2y agoLooking the configurator (very cool btw) the bespoke part is a few bends in the front fork, rest of it is modular parts that are fastened together. Looks like you can stuff hundreds of these in a container to bring piece cost down. I do think the big selling point is speed since they talk about months of lead time from other vendors. Regardless, looks like much cheaper than competition - I admire what they're trying to do.
- rtkwe 2y agoStocking when you have 25k different variations is a whole different nightmare and massive cost that probably rivals the cost of just making them to order with the right equipment here in the US. Maybe there are common enough configs that people take you could prestock a subset and make to order the rest but it's still a huge amount of work and cost to manage and stock that vs the option they took of making the frames to order.