Trey Richardson, a self-proclaimed ‘Industry Rat’ is a familiar face to many on the retail, supply, media, and non-profit sides of the Bicycle Industry. Anyone who has spent more than a minute with him has probably heard an opinion or two about the Bicycle Industry sandwiched between laughs and stories that may or may not be true. After spending most of the last 35 years throughout the Bicycle Industry, Trey decided he wanted to do something that counted.
Like that sticky can of assembly grease on every shop’s workbench, Industry Grease is designed to bring each part of the Bicycle Industry together so it can work more smoothly for the long term.
After working in each segment of the Bicycle Industry & witnessing first-hand the perspectives each had of the other, Trey realized the largest missing element that’s held the industry back is the lack of formal & organized communication, on a broad scale. While there are several other things at play, one of the more up-front issues revolves around the retailer segment of the Bicycle Industry needing a way to collaborate internally in order to provide a more uniform voice that suppliers can rely on. He feels there simply needs to be more decisions based on feedback that is organized & communicated in a more timely fashion. When feedback from a broad population of retailers becomes more uniform & timely presented, suppliers’ decisions become more reasonable so that a larger percentage of retailers can prepare & adapt accordingly.
Industry Grease is a private discussion & communication platform designed exclusively for members of the Bicycle Industry. It’s purpose-built to formally organize discussions revolving around the countless challenges our industry faces to adjust to them in real time while retaining the values our consumers have always valued.
One of the observations being considered when designing Industry Grease centered on the fact that the Bicycle Industry is unique to others because it’s made up of passionate people who simply want to do the right thing for their consumers, businesses, and each other. Despite this still being our industry’s biggest strength, doing the right thing became increasingly difficult when the rapidly expanding marketplace shifted consumer behavior, outpacing our abilities to adjust. In the past, communication within our industry was simple & didn’t require a lot of emphasis because the consumer was dependent on us. When the marketplace & access to information expanded, instead of responding by matching the way we communicated to these shifts, we went in countless directions where we made decisions with less consideration of how they affected others. This trend evolved over the last 25 years, becoming unreasonable for many to manage.
A key ingredient to the Bicycle Industry’s success has to do with the balance between our personal & professional growth and happiness along with a drive to become more inclusive. Our passion for this industry should be leveraged rather than taken advantage of, but too often we reach a point where if feels like we’ve run out of opportunities for professional or financial growth. We also need to better value the benefits of becoming more diverse, expanding both our professional culture and customer base.
Everyone here wants themselves & those around them to be happy, but it’s one of the most overlooked & important aspects when it comes to our professional growth and happiness. The increase of passionate people staying in positions for the wrong reasons… or feeling undervalued has become a sad epidemic in the Bicycle Industry. Much of what Industry Grease is based on has to do with nurturing the growth & happiness of the very people we need to drive this industry towards success. Much of the content found on Industry Grease will explore resources both within and outside of our industry that are designed to promote personal and professional growth.
There also needs to be more emphasis & flexibility as to how we welcome various of populations of both consumers & potential employees to our industry, and the products they desire. The lack of diversity in our industry directly limits the diversity of our consumers. There are countless opportunities right in front of us and we just need a better understanding of how we can go about making the kinds of changes that better serve a wider range of our communities.
Its not you… it’s us. This platform is about our consumer more so than the Bicycle Industry.
While this platform is only available to members of the Bicycle Industry, the goal of Industry Grease isn’t about improving the industry as much as it is about providing today’s consumers with the best experience possible. It just so happens, Trey believes the Bicycle Industry has the highest potential to achieve this… but first needs to make some adjustments that involve retailers & suppliers establishing some formal & organized discussions both internally and as a community.
So how does this all work?
The Industry Grease Blog
Up-front, members will find homegrown solution-driven content on current situations in the Bicycle Industry designed to spark the discussions below them. This isn’t industry news, statistics, or opinion pieces as we already have plenty of resources for those. Each article will fall under one or more categories like D2C & eCommerce, Marketing, Education, Community, and THE CRYSTAL BALL. While we can’t promise everyone will like the subject matter or answers being discussed, we can promise it will be honest, unfiltered, and worth considering.
Private Retailer, Supplier, & Community Forums
While the face of Industry Grease is the spicy discussion-filled content, the really good stuff can be found in the community & private discussion forums. Here members will network by participating in discussions, creating custom surveys, and asking others for feedback. There’s even an ‘I Need a Part’ subforum where members can use the industry as their warehouse to find an out-of-stock or obscure part they need for a repair. (Click on each forum to see the categories listed under each).
Retail Chatter is a private retailer-only forum where individuals can start & participate in conversations within several key & general sub-forums. This is a great place for retail members to collaborate & share ideas as well as establish a more uniform voice for suppliers to rely on when making decisions that affect them. People from retailers of all shapes & sizes across the country can network with others of similar make to share ideas & resources that may or may not have worked and use the built in survey builder to gain feedback from peers.
Supplier Row is a private forum where individuals from suppliers can collaborate on how to better navigate challenges both domestically and globally. From shipping & supply issues, to managing everything being affected by abrupt uncertainties like tariffs and overseas supply delays. This is also a great place for those new to the supply side of the Bicycle Industry who need help in navigating the unexpected challenges that lie ahead.
The Industry Hub is the community forum where Retailers & Suppliers come together to ask questions, share ideas, and establish a broader range of useable feedback both will value. This is a great place for retailers to share feedback on potential compromises with programs like D2C and collaborate with suppliers on ways to better support their customers. Here, suppliers have an opportunity to increase their presence with retailers and play a more active role in solving problems in real time before they fester.
Nobody asked for this but you’re getting it anyways! Here, members will enjoy a healthy combination of both informative & hilarious advice. Dear Bicycle Industry is a place for people to send in questions ANONYMOUSLY to be answered by us or guest ‘Industry Buttinskies’ who may or may not know what they’re talking about. Anything goes here… want to ask something without the risk of getting fired? Do you need relationship or parenting advice that may or may not be useful? Are you a mechanic that needs advice on how to talk to triathletes about electrolyte spills, sweaty bar tape, & lubing their chain? Perhaps you want to know the best way to ask a mechanic to borrow a tool…never mind, just don’t.
Private Messaging, Personal Profile Pages, & Your Privacy
While our goal is to create a wide range of resources & ways to communicate, Industry Grease respects your privacy. Private messaging is provided to all members as both a benefit and to keep their emails private (unless one chooses to list it publicly on their profile page in the optional place). We have gone to a lot of effort to protect your personal information from over-enthusiastic people trying to sell you things. Industry Grease will never sell or share your information to anyone for means outside of our own internal website functionality.
Each member will have a Personal Profile page where they can list as much or as little as they want about themselves, their business makeup, professional/social media, and even their current fleet of bikes. For those between jobs or looking for new opportunities, after posting your availability in the FREE ‘Job Lookers & Seekers’ sub-forum in The Industry Hub, members can upload their resume & CV on their profile page for potential employers to download.
Podcast
We’re in the works to produce a podcast that summarizes the discussions & subject matter happening on Industry Grease along with topics revolving around other current events affecting the Bicycle Industry. This will be an easy-to-digest way to get a summary of what occurs here… and it might even be entertaining.
But wait, there’s more!
While we will never sell ad space or permit any sort of sales & marketing posts, we do want to provide opportunities where suppliers & service providers can be a greater resource to retailers, especially when it comes to communication, education, and anything that helps them support their communities. First on the list of things to come is a free Supplier Directory that gives retailers a single place to see the entire network of suppliers & service providers associated the Bicycle Industry. We have more that we’ll announce as things progress, so stay tuned!
How to Join
Industry Grease is a formal place where professionals in the Bicycle Industry gather to share information & learn. To keep things clean & focused, rather than litter the site with ads or capitalize through an assortment of intrusive data-sharing means that blows up your inbox with spam, we’re putting our entire worth in the Bicycle Industry’s hands.
To gain access to everything listed above, there will be a comically cheap annual individual membership fee that depends on what segment of the Bicycle Industry you belong to.
Annual Membership Pricing is as follows:
Retail Individual Memberships – $36/year (yes, a $3/month average)
Suppliers, Service Providers, & Media Individuals – $50/year
Non-profit Individuals – $50/year FREE
*If you are employed by a 501(c) non-profit associated with the Bicycle Industry, we will comp your individual $50/year membership fee. It’s the least we can do.
Feedback on charging a membership fee has been all over the place but to be completely transparent, this platform requires a full-time person to run it, the ROI should be a no-brainer, and memberships of this sort are usually considered a business or tax write-off. Many have even suggested we charge more, but first & foremost, I want Industry Grease to provide an inclusive place on a level playing field for all. From retail shop rats, mechanics, managers & owners, to those in all positions on the supply side, Industry Grease is designed to give all members an equal opportunity to learn, give feedback, and grow.
To be even more blunt, charging a fee automatically encourages people to value something while at the same time keeping those only interested in trolling at bay.
Click HERE to see the key benefits of becoming a member of Industry Grease and we would be most grateful if you joined!
*For those who want to purchase 10 or more memberships under one invoice, click HERE for the details & contact information on bulk memberships.
** Industry Grease does not support giving larger businesses a volume discount over others, but we are happy to help in any way we can to simplify the process.
The Founder & ‘Industry Rat’
“For years, I have studied the growth & demise of US & European industries from the Industrial Revolution to present, and make it a point to look for things that stand out as the marketplace shifts. Today, when it comes to things that are in our control (outside of economic & political influences), the most important factors hover around the level of communication & educational opportunities. Having attended countless workshops, training & educational seminars, and tradeshows within & outside of the Bicycle Industry, the most consistent trends that stood out had to do with there being a direct correlation between a business’s & industry’s health, and the communication & education opportunities that could be found within it… or lack thereof.
This was even more prevalent when participation involved those outside of management roles. While both of these elements were important, the kinds of education that focused on the general business or industry (rather than products & services) would not have come about without a system of communication creating a precise demand for it. When civilization adopted the access to a global economy and a virtually infinite level of communication, instead of coming together to collaborate in a similar fashion, the Bicycle Industry scattered into individual directions. Once I realized that our industry was trying to exist without that critical first step to build from, it motivated me to plan and build what became Industry Grease”.
Trey Richardson has spent most of the last 35+ years in various well-timed positions of the Bicycle Industry. His experiences throughout his career gave him an unfiltered view & fluency of how each segment of the Bicycle Industry operated, and the challenges they faced… often with each other.
Starting out as the proverbial unpaid shop rat in high school, he went on to become a mechanic, worked in sales, and later store management while taking the scenic route through college. He had a front-row seat to how things were in the Bicycle Industry before, during, and after the internet & eCommerce evolved. On the manufacturing side, Trey developed & marketed a new brand of tires & tubes for a major tire manufacture selling to OEM & distribution suppliers, retailers, and D2C in the mid-2000s. During the recession in 2008, he returned to retail management for a highly respected bike shop north of Atlanta as the explosion of mass-marketplace & online sales became more competitive than ever. While there, he was recruited to be an outside sales rep for a large bicycle, parts & accessories distributor which placed him in a face-to-face position between retailers & suppliers at a time the Bicycle Industry was seeing some of its most drastic shifts. Since then, he’s spent time on the online & print media side of the Bicycle Industry and has done extensive work in product development & consulting. He gained further experience as a Marketing Director for a global, Emmy award winning manufacturer in the commercial & residential audio-video industry where he developed digital marketing campaigns and attended product-based tradeshows that revolved around sold-out training & education events (some owned by the same company that owns Interbike). He has sat on various boards of and been involved with several non-profit organizations surrounding bicycle organizations. Trey currently coaches the local middle & high school GCA (formally NICA) mountain bike teams that both of his daughters participated in, with the oldest now joining him as a coach herself.
