The pandemic bike boom didn't just create a supply crisis. It ran a stress test on every manufacturer in the industry, and the results are still coming in.
BikeRadar's recent industry analysis lays out the wreckage plainly: Kona nearly folded before being bought back by its original founders. The Accell Group — owner of Raleigh, Lapierre, and Ghost — absorbed losses exceeding €390 million. Canyon saw a 6% revenue drop in 2025. Even Giant's profits are down 15.5%. These aren't fringe players. These are the brands that defined the modern bike industry, and they got caught in the same trap: they read the pandemic surge as a new baseline, over-ordered, and are now sitting on inventory that costs money to hold while margins compress.
The assigned topic here — Rocky Mountain Bikes' specific supply chain pivot — isn't something the available sources confirm in detail. What the sources do confirm is the broader structural problem that every Cascadia manufacturer is navigating right now, and that story is worth telling on its own terms.
The Boom-Bust Trap and Who Fell Into It
The mechanics of what happened are worth understanding clearly, because they're not complicated — they're just brutal. The pandemic created a perfect collision: production in Asia shut down while consumer demand spiked. Brands sold through everything at full retail. They concluded, incorrectly, that this was the new normal. They ramped production. Then 2023 arrived, and everyone who wanted a bike already had one. BikeRadar describes the result directly: massive overstock, forced discounting, and a cash crunch that hit smaller brands hardest because they had less margin to absorb it.
This is the environment Rocky Mountain, Norco, and every other BC manufacturer has been operating in for the past two-plus years. The supply chain problem wasn't just about getting parts — it was about the downstream consequences of getting too many parts at the wrong time, then being stuck with them. The mountain bike market is projected to grow through 2030, with North America accounting for roughly a third of that expansion — but capturing that growth requires a fundamentally different posture than the one that created the current inventory hangover.
The Proprietary Parts Problem Isn't Going Away
There's a second layer to this that the retail side makes visible. Bicycle Retailer's State of Retail panel — shop owners across North America talking about their actual sourcing reality — surfaces something that matters for how Cascadia brands build bikes: manufacturers are increasingly relying on proprietary components, and that's creating service and sourcing headaches that ripple through the whole ecosystem.
Marc Cianfrone, owner of Pops Bike Shop, put it plainly in that same panel: "It is obnoxious that the industry is just taking the position of planned obsolescence and not supporting products with basic service parts after four or five years." That's a shop owner talking about his customers, but it's also a signal to any manufacturer paying attention. Proprietary parts that go unsupported erode brand loyalty faster than a bad review.
For a brand like Rocky Mountain — whose riders are the kind of people who rebuild their own shocks and know what a headset cap should cost — this matters. The move toward proprietary integration might make sense on a product spec sheet, but it creates real friction in the field. The brands that figure out how to build distinctive, performance-forward bikes without locking customers into dead-end parts ecosystems will have a genuine advantage in the next cycle.
What Sustainable Actually Looks Like
The BikeRadar piece holds up Belgian Cycling Factory — home of Ridley and Nukeproof, among others — as a counter-model: a manufacturer that didn't chase the boom, maintained tighter inventory discipline, and came out of the correction in better shape than the brands that scaled aggressively. The lesson isn't complicated. It's the same one that applies to trail building: slow, deliberate construction holds up better than fast work that has to be redone.
The Technavio market analysis flags the structural tension directly — "supply chain volatility for high-performance components and the rising cost of raw materials" as ongoing challenges that "directly impact production timelines and pricing strategies." That's not a post-pandemic hangover. That's the operating environment going forward. The brands building supply chain resilience now aren't just cleaning up a mess; they're positioning for the next product cycle.
Whether Rocky Mountain has made specific structural moves in that direction, I can't tell you from what's in front of me. What I can tell you is that the brands in this region that come out of this cycle strongest won't be the ones that moved fastest during the boom. They'll be the ones that used the correction to build something more durable — supply chains included.
The 2026 tech picture is full of genuinely exciting hardware: new drivetrains, new motor platforms, 32-inch wheel development moving faster than anyone expected. The component innovation is real. The question is whether the business infrastructure behind it is catching up. Watch for how Cascadia brands talk about inventory and parts support at Crankworx Whistler this summer — that's where the gap between marketing and operational reality tends to show.
