Smithers MINNEAPOLIS

QBP Frostbike Wrap Up

For those who don’t know what I have been writing about over the past few days, Quality Bicycle Products is a wholesale parts and accessories distribution company located in the Twin Cities. Each year QBP hosts an open house event where their vendors display products and dealers can come visit with QBP employees, check out the facility and see new products for the new season.

It seemed to me that the event was success for Quality Bicycle Products again this year. I don’t know if the overall number of dealers in attendance was up or down, but I do know that traffic appeared to be steady both Saturday and Sunday and this at least gave the appearance of being busy, if not actually being so.

Years ago the Chicago Area Bicycle Dealers Association (CABDA) put on an annual industry show in Rosemount Illinois. They closed the show in 2001 due to lack of participation by dealers and suppliers. Correspondingly, over the past three or four years, the size and scope of the QBP open house event (now called Frostbike) has grown so dramatically that it almost serves as an effective replacement for the CABDA show.

There are two “problems” as I see it with the QBP Frostbike event:

• The event only hosts those vendors who sell their products via the QBP distribution channel. This means that any component or bike/frame manufacturer that does not have their products distributed by QBP is not invited to attend the Frostbike event.

• The Frostbike event is only open to bicycle dealers and their guests.

The first issue is a fact of life. The event is organized and promoted by QBP and they have no real interest in promoting brands that they do not sell. Bike manufacturers have their needs serviced by the Interbike show in Las Vegas each fall and a February show is far too late in the buying season to make any significant connection with dealers anyway. Component manufacturers who do not have their products distributed by QBP are simply out of luck in regards to the Frostbike event as well as the sales that QBP provides by being the largest bicycle parts and accessories distributor in the United States. The component manufacturer either has a reason not to use QBP (for example Icon products that are distributed exclusively by Trek), or the components are not in high enough demand to be considered by QBP for distribution.

The second issue is not so much a problem as much as it is an opportunity. I think a consumer day at both Interbike and Frostbike would be tremendously successful. It would be very easy to have a consumer day on the final day of Interbike as pure distribution companies, who have no real benefit to consumer contact, could simply close up their booth for the day and leave the final day of the show to the manufacturers.

A consumer day at Frostbike would be more problematic. There is the obvious problem of having consumers come into contact with wholesale pricing information. But to some extent this is already happening with dealers having the ability to invite part time “employees” or guests to the Frostbike show. Dealers seem unwilling to crack down on “unauthorized” guests attending the event. Gearing one of the two days of Frostbike to consumers would allow both QBP and exhibitors to more effectively control who has access to sensitive information for that day.

The bigger issue is, does QBP have the room to host a consumer show? QBP is not a convention center and they do not have endless square footage of space that they can devote to a show. I can easily see the space that QBP has used for the past two years being over run with consumers to the point of creating a fire hazard. So, while a consumer show would be great success and a valuable opportunity for vendors to connect directly with consumers, I don’t see this happening anytime soon. Unless, that is, QBP considers moving their event off site.

Moving Frostbike off site is an idea worth considering. The fact is that QBP no longer provides tours of their warehouse facility and dealers are no longer able to place orders for pick up the same day. There seems to be very little benefit provided by having the event take place on site. As a matter of fact, it would seem to me that it might be worth considering moving the Frostbike event off site for no other reason than to increase the on going security of the facility itself. If I owned a building with millions of dollars worth of inventory located inside of it I would want to keep its location as anonymous as possible. Maybe QBP and the Minneapolis Bicycle Travel and Fitness Expo should get together and work something out.