Thoughts on the new Witcomb pricing?

noooooooooooo....... the new designs

Bloody designers! ;P

I can only apologise...

oh dear... 1500 for a candy bar?

I know - I'll knick mercians house style barber poling, no-one will notice...

He is touting these on t'web as HIS new designs - fuck me mate, slapping someone elses paint motif on a frame is not bike design

it's ironic that joining with a 'designer' has IMHO resulted in a loss of identity for the witcomb brand. why turn 2 old men in a workshop who have been doing their thing for 50 odd years into an costly branding exercise that results in an overinflated price for the product?
i don't see how the customer benefits if they were thinking of ordering a witcomb?

think all of us can go down and convince barrie this is not heading the right way? that malone dude is going to ruin his reputation man, turning witcomb into a trainwreck!
what future of branding... appealing notion, atrocious consequences.

the city boys wont give a toss, it will be easier to go and pick it up just over the river than ordering a mercian.

Lol that is atrocious. Is this tony malone's doing?

no. it's a mac monkey flipping out with the channel mixer in photoshop

so it is then?

:-)

Really? How is this Tony Malone fellow famous? The witcomb site is absolutely abominable.

the site is just the tip of an iceberg of all the horrors that may cometh... god bless witcomb

An iceberg of HORROR crashing into the titanic of unwitting customers - except the lifeboats of common sense and decency have been cut loose by the scissors of greed and ineptitude (and Tony Malone)

"We are getting ready to implement exciting plans to renovate our shop and workshop in Deptford. In addition to providing a more welcoming show-room area, new office space, this will also increase our workshop space, allowing for an extension of team of frame-builders."

From the Witcomb blog.

This is seriously bad news. A team of frame builders.

I wonder if I'm waiting for the last real Witcomb?

I live just round the corner but bought a BJ because of the OLD pricing. Very sad, but well done anyone who has a Witcomb already.

wow.. pretty crazy.

oh and the lovely tony [whilst becoming the future of branding] was also

a semi-pro cyclist source:his personal wikipedia submission

how does he manage it all?

setting up a iconaclastic branding agency whilst earning his wage by racing for a cycle team[as a semi pro] and becoming a bike designer.

What is "semi" pro? You either earn your money off it or you don't yeah? Unless he had another job and raced for money, in which case I am a semi-pro cyclist! ha!

Also a Semi-Pro cyclist, and road saftey campaigner, he has been an advisor to Sustrans, the national body promoting sustainable transport and maintaining the National Cycle Network. He is a member of the Dulwich Paragon Cycling Club and competes regularly in road and long distance races with them. His other interests include astronomy and astro-imaging. He is a member of the Flamstead Society at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

http://dfd.constellationserver.com/about/people/tm.htm

feel like putting a bullet in his head, souf london stylee. we're talkin bout deptford innit?

I suppose this is good in as much as it reflects that there really is a popular cycling resurgence in this country. However to have that resurgence reflected by bicycles now becoming a designer must-have for materialistic fools to hang on their walls is a real shame. Bikes in all their shapes and forms are for a lot of us quite simply a means of going on rides of one sort or another, hence most of them still being in the realms of affordability, whilst maintaining their utilitarian desirability.
Turning the more-or-less everyday cycle into hugely expensive materialistic commodity is rather off putting and to me devalues the great thing that is the bicycle - I'm sure Witcomb's frames are lovely, but they don't need design-consultancy research and development, as after all they are steel pipes and lugs brazed together; carbon-ally mix frames for racing professionals may need constant r&d and the resultant prices, but maybe that's the market they're hoping to get into?
As someone who makes bespoke stuff for a living I can understand all too well the need/desire to increase profits and to have the occasional price and range rethink, but a hike of this size coupled with a load of website shitespeak seems not to reflect a mere wage increase for the Witcomb boys.
Errmm... don't really know what my point is though....

If there are the great marketing consultants they seem to suggest they are I'm sure they'll chip in here soon!

someone is pullin their wire...

as you say, price hike that outrageous ain't just fo the boys