View Single Post
Old 04-24-12, 01:34 PM
  #28  
Hermes
Version 7.0
 
Hermes's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: SoCal
Posts: 13,127

Bikes: Too Many

Mentioned: 297 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 1340 Post(s)
Liked 2,482 Times in 1,457 Posts
When I lived in Los Angeles, I was friends with the owner of a west LA Porshce Audi dealership. He was number one in sales in North America. Porshce decided to open retail stores in select markets and brand certain non car retail items with the Porsche brand. In theory, a brand, and one as renown as Porsche, will return a premium price for products branded with Porsche.

Porshce did a private label full suspension mountain bike and put their brand on it and priced it at $6000. In reality, it was priced several thousand dollars over a comparable mountain bike from a reputable manufacturer with similar features. They did not sell. Porsche offered my friend more car inventory if he would take a lot of unsold bicycles off their hands. He took the deal, got more cars and sold the bikes at discount.

Porsche just did not get it. My friend knew what Porsche branded items sold along with cars and it was not bicycles. But he had enough traffic through his showroom that at the right price, the bicycles sold.

IMO, Porsche is looking to green up its image with the bicycle offering. I doubt that they have added any value over what is available from other suppliers. Once again, the Porsche brand will only go so far.
Hermes is offline