Has anyone had any experience establishing group buys for unicycles? I noticed that someone recently established a poll for street unicycles on Massdrop.com. Since I’m interested in purchasing a 36" sometime soon, I setup a poll for commuter unicycles in which I might have an interest. I’ve used Massdrop in the past for audio purchases; however, given the limited interest in unicycling, I would assume that the options might be more limited here.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the process? Has anyone successfully initiated a group buy for unicycle products in the past?
Never heard of MassDrop but it is nice if it works well.
The unicycling world is small enough for the manufacturer being at the same time the seller (like UDC) and I think they are already selling at the price necessary to cover the cost of manufacturing and keeping the company working.
Maybe an order of thousands of units that would grant a dedicated production batch that may lower the manufacturing cost and be then sold at lower price (how much lower?) but that’s were we loop back to the small unicycling world.
I kind of figured as much. Well, I guess it’s up to those of us who enjoy the sport to continue changing the world one unicyclist at a time (one more of us, one less of them and all that)! If nothing else, maybe it will help a couple of people who might be on the fence about learning to unicycle commit to trying.
UDC apparently sells bulk orders at a discount to Hayneedle and other resellers, and routinely offers discount coupons to us retail customers (like the 15% off for January 2015) so I don’t see why it couldn’t work.
I got curious about this and joined a few days back to have a look around the site. Btw, you have to join to see anything, but you might not even need to give them a valid email. I didn’t have to wait for activation or confirmation or any of that. It let me right in.
Anotherjohn, was that you who created the poll for a 36" unicycle drop? If so I’d guess it’s no longer a priority for you. Apparently it takes 200 votes in a poll before they contact the vendor. That’s a lot for us! And it looks like you need a URL for a product listing page to add it as a poll item, so I guess it wouldn’t be a way to get anything custom-made or nonstandard.
Still I wonder if that might work for something like fat tires or wide rims, where bike riders could get in too and boost the number. Surly seems to have a tight grip on pricing for their products, and possibly Massdrop could do well with companies like that. Their gimmick seems to be that it’s a club, not advertised to the general public, so they can get around price restrictions. Or maybe there’s something, some certain size of rim or tire maybe, that shows up on a manufacturer’s website but isn’t stocked by any retailers.
Brainstorming here really… It seems like something that might be useful and fun. Or I could just go ride what I have, and maybe I should.
