If it was any other brand, everyone would have done "over priced, but hardly anti-porn".
If it was any other brand, it would have been half the price.
The problem is that a Colnago C50 isn't actually better than a Trek Madone in any way which is meaningful to the majority of buyers, so the name is everything. If you kill the brand by attaching it to crap, you have to be damn sure the volume of crap you can ship will make up for the loss of top end business as snobs dessert you.
In the olden days, Colnago did what fashion houses did when they wanted to sell to paupers; they created a 'diffusion' line (Colnago Sport), so people with the real label could still look down on them, but paupers could buy into some of the brand cachet.
With a few careful, and not expensive, deviations from what the Chinese factory was trying to offload, Colnago could have made this a real Colnago. As price doesn't seem to have been a key driver of the specification process, it would surely have been better to have a made a proper Colnago for £1500 rather than a rebadged Plug for £1400.
If it was any other brand, it would have been half the price.
The problem is that a Colnago C50 isn't actually better than a Trek Madone in any way which is meaningful to the majority of buyers, so the name is everything. If you kill the brand by attaching it to crap, you have to be damn sure the volume of crap you can ship will make up for the loss of top end business as snobs dessert you.
In the olden days, Colnago did what fashion houses did when they wanted to sell to paupers; they created a 'diffusion' line (Colnago Sport), so people with the real label could still look down on them, but paupers could buy into some of the brand cachet.
With a few careful, and not expensive, deviations from what the Chinese factory was trying to offload, Colnago could have made this a real Colnago. As price doesn't seem to have been a key driver of the specification process, it would surely have been better to have a made a proper Colnago for £1500 rather than a rebadged Plug for £1400.