grolby

I don’t think I agree with this take. Hybrids were a really squishy category back in the day, some of them were good and a lot of them were really bad, but crucially they mostly weren’t designed with the high end of the market in mind. Of course enthusiasts didn’t buy hybrids, because there were very few that were aimed at them. In general the enthusiast market was smaller then, not because there were fewer of them but because the bike industry hadn’t figured out yet that they could get enthusiasts to buy multiple mid range or high end bikes if they were different enough from the bikes they already owned. Why target the enthusiast market? They already have a road bike or a mountain bike, why are they going to buy another one? Obviously the approach has been different with gravel.