This article is adapted from the business magazine Capital and is available here for ten days. Afterwards it will only be available to read at www.capital.de. Like stern, Capital belongs to RTL Deutschland.
Susanne Puello is one of the most famous figures in the German cycling world and comes from a two-wheeler dynasty. Her great-grandfather was the founder of the manufacturer Winora, which Puello ran for twenty years. In 2017 she left the family business, founded her own company with her husband – and later slipped under the umbrella of the Austrian Pierer Group. In the fall, the Puellos relaunched their own brand, R Raymon.
Capital: Ms. Puello, you have chosen a difficult time for the new beginning: after the boom years of the pandemic, the bicycle industry is in crisis. The warehouses are overcrowded, the prices are in the basement, and bankruptcies are increasing. Why do you dare to do it anyway? Because we believe in the industry, even if it is actually struggling at the moment. It was clear that my husband and I would leave the Pierer Group at the end of 2023. When the opportunity arose to buy out the brand that we had built over six years, we didn’t hesitate. Sometimes opportunities come along that cannot be postponed.
The Two-Wheeler Industry Association (ZIV) recently presented the figures for 2023 and tried to present a positive picture. However, the market has actually collapsed. How do you assess the situation? Times are difficult – to claim anything else would be wrong. But they are also so difficult because we were already experiencing extreme growth before the pandemic. Then Corona came and everyone suddenly wanted to be mobile on bicycles. At the same time, delivery times have increased dramatically. Even for manufacturers who produce in Europe, this only helped to a limited extent, as the parts suppliers are located in Asia. So one year almost nothing arrived – and then the following year an over-delivery with the accumulated residues.
So the companies suddenly found themselves with double the order quantity? Exactly, that was in the crisis year of 2023, in which several unfortunate circumstances came together. It is well known what a difficult economic situation we find ourselves in. The war in Ukraine, the high energy prices, the inflation. This has reduced consumption. Not to forget the staff shortage everywhere. The most important thing is that prices are now stabilizing again.
Customers are happy: There is currently a real sale on bicycles with strong discounts. This affects the entire market, including us, of course. We can’t even prevent it. We have thousands of dealers who are also under pressure and we cannot control it. Everyone is nervous and constantly checking prices online. Some of them are reduced by half. That is of course very difficult, everyone suffered in such a supply chain. Our bikes are currently on sale around 25 percent below normal prices.
Is there an imminent improvement in sight for the industry? I think we will be back in calmer waters in 2025. We will be through the worst and be able to get back to innovating as an entire industry. However, I just ignored the larger world situation. Of course we can’t influence that.
How much do you care?Very much. I’m actually a positive person and sometimes I don’t recognize myself at the moment. I am very worried about this country and Europe. Because of the political situation, the movement towards autocracy and away from democracy in the Western world, the war in Ukraine, the Middle East. I don’t think the economy is strong enough at the moment to absorb all of this. And in Germany we are losing our competitiveness due to too much bureaucracy and too high taxes. This is just my personal view of the larger world stage. I still retain my optimism for us as an industry.
Given this bleak picture, what is it based on? People want to keep cycling. Interest is not lost. I simply believe in the bicycle product, and from a purely objective point of view everything boils down to this: it’s about health aspects, about sustainability, about modern mobility in congested cities. The bike will probably expand its position even further. E-bikes are also affordable through leasing models.
Last year, more e-bikes were sold than normal bikes in Germany for the first time. You are considered a pioneer of e-mountain bikes and in 2010 you introduced the first off-road bike with an electric motor under the Haibike brand. Was the development predictable back then? I didn’t expect anything else. Nobody took the topic of e-mountain bikes seriously back then. Electric wheel stood for “grandma, cemetery, watering can”. Today this image is out of people’s minds; sporty e-bikes have become an integral part of the street scene. And when I see 16 and 17-year-old girls and men riding through the city on e-bikes with their chests swollen, I have to say: it makes me very happy.
You just talked about innovations. What’s to come? Weather protection has been my favorite topic for 30 years. I can’t answer what the solution will be, but it will be there. Something urgently needs to happen. First we force the helmet on and our hair is in the bucket. If we arrive dripping wet, that’s difficult. I believe that in the future there will be ways in which we can have weather protection over the head combined with an airbag. And we also need a lot of innovations when it comes to safety aspects of bicycles.