Robvolz 

These came into the shop.

cute!!



Inspired huh??!?

Mr. 66

Cyclone?

mpetry912 

I love Campy. But how the mighty have fallen.

it's just a name now. I suspect Valentino's kids are shopping the company to "investors"

who wouldn't be ? they cannot possibly compete with Shimano from an R&D standpoint.

I suspect the value of the brand is 2-> 2.5 billion max

if bought, it will be reduced to hawking chinese made branded logo sunglasses and jackets.

I wish they would re-pop a real vintage gruppo. Maybe with 7 speeds and a 110 BCD alloy crank

Prolly won't happen

/markp

Nemosengineer 

MKS RX-1 Keirin pedals.

Untitled by nemosengineer, on Flickr

: Mike

iab

I'm going to have to disagree with most everything you wrote. Campagnolo innovated 65-70 years ago, milked that cash cow and did nothing util they got their asses handed to them 40 years ago. Their business mistakes were 40 years ago, get over it.

No, a small R&D group can innovate, happens all of the time, but it is mostly luck, as with all R&D groups. Maybe you can increase the odds by being bigger, but most of the time bigger means slow.

No clue on their valuation, I'd like to know where your number appeared to you. But if your crystal ball guess on what they will do if bought is any indicator, I'd say it is equally wrong.

Why in god's name would any company make an obsolete part? To lose money on the 500 people who will buy it? It get abused in threads like this like when Jan Heine does it? Or the company that makes a 12-speed bar end did?

And what company isn't just a name? Shimano is a name. SRAM is a name. Suntour is a name. What's your point? That Tullio is dead? Yup, he is.

Kabuki12

Campagnolo rose to where they got because of quality and innovation. I don’t think a lot of “luck” was involved, I think that early on they knew what it took to make winning components. Were they the best? That is a matter of opinion but none of us can argue the success they achieved. Imitation is a pretty high compliment and Campagnolo had imitators galore, in Japan, Italy, and other countries. I think when SunTour came out with a line that did not imitate, but improved the design , then they saw success. Shimano came into the scene and took over, now - no more SunTour. All of these companies had really good innovations and very little luck.

nlerner

abdon 

Sadly not really. Suntour was an amazing innovator for quite some time but eventually their small R&D staff could not compete with Shimano's very large R&D staff. One of the nails on their coffin was the lack of in-house design work; as the years went by they focused on shifting components subcontracting brakes and other gear to other manufacturers. For example my Superbe Pro brakes are marked Dia-Compe on the back. When indexing became the norm they had a really hard time getting a system that would work across the board while using what amounted to off-the-shelf components.

Their shifting was innovative as usual, they just could not design it end-to-end. Then vendors would take their less expensive components, hodge-podge it with other parts in order to assemble inexpensive bikes, and everybody complained how bad Suntour shifting was compared to Shimano.

oneclick 

Not them - cage plates don't match.

Robvolz 

As someone who has scuffed the bejesus out of black anodized pedal cages, I do respect the removable/replacable cages.

iab

Campagnolo held the parallelogram patent until 1958, about the same time they came out with the group. The group is only a marketing innovation. And yes, it was lucky Tullio bought the patent before Simplex, or some other company. That, combined with sponsoring teams (not an innovation, done long before Tullio was born) allowed him to gain market share. I will fully agree the quality was the best, along with market share, you are the 600 pound gorilla with everyone just trying to chip away share.

He ran a great business. But like all companies, including Suntour, you innovate or die. Everything after the GS was only a slight derivative of GS, it is not innovation. Sure SR was great quality, weighted a couple grams lighter than GS, but so what? His marketing didn't change at all and did nothing to improve his manufacturing process for 25-30 years. Slant parallelogram was the next great innovation and Suntour sat on it doing nothing. Shimano then made it SIS, combined it with dual pivots and it was only then they had something other than price. Which was something Shimano did innovate too. They could put out the highest quality at a low price.

Campagnolo was able to soak a product innovation for 30 years, not shabby. Suntour lasted only a few years and Shimano is now the 600 pound gorilla for 30 years. In terms of components, that's about it. e shifting is only a derivative, as with disc brakes. Tubeless is not proprietary, so there is no one way or the highway. Chainless? meh.

So why does an idea become wildfire in the market? The parallelogram derailleur and dual pivot calipers were around for years before they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. You need a good business infrastructure and some dumbass luck. Build it and they will come is only a movie fantasy.

mpetry912 

I think Tullio had a patent on the cam-operated quick release as well.

A look at Frank Berto's book "The Dancing Chain" will shed some light on why the Shimano and Suntour derailleurs eclipsed the Campagnolo offerings.

I do agree that it's innovate or perish. And it's pretty hard to compete against the billions worth of R&D resources available to a company like Shimano.

/markp

Classtime 

Innovation at Campagnolo bitd meant winning more races. Not sure that modern innovations regarding drive trains and brakes means winning more than money.

mpetry912 

maybe innovating to stay ahead of the competition would be a different way to say it ?

Every year the Cycling Industrial Complex needs to have something new to sell to keep those consumer dollars flowing.

and sadly Campagnolo just doesn't have the R&D resources to keep up with Shimano.

/markp

Classtime 

I don’t think it’s sad. The MBA approach to cycling innovation kinda screws thing up and the product life cycle has no place in my cycling world.

abdon 

Suntour managed to hold on for more than just a few years. They held the slanted parallelogram patent for 20 years, all while campy kept saying that it was not significant enough to matter to anybody and yet copied it the second the parent expired. Well after that their vgt was the standard first for touring derailleurs and once it was born for mountain bikes. To this day their clicky friction shifters are on par with anything modern being produced.

The world became too fast and complicated for a smaller company to exist. It was literally grow or die.

repechage

if one looks back, Campagnolo was desperate to come up with the next big thing for rear derailleurs about 1980 onward by patent applications. Some ideas made it to market, but no winners.
they were slow actually to brand their own slant parallelogram mech.
Shimano obviously was tooled and engineered up to pounce when the Suntour patent expired.
the index question was not really asked about.
”sissy” shifting as it was nick named met a market need experienced cyclists did not ask.

if one looks back the Shimano dominance was decades in development.
Tullio should have been concerned in 1974, I think that was the first year a pro team rode Shimano if I recall correctly.

Campagnolo it appears had a gentleman’s agreement to leave Chains, rims, bars and stems to others, only eventually making a freewheel, a Campagnolo freehub instead, using open source ideas by that point would have been good.
much later did rims, tried pedals but burdened by a heavy, complicated design, SGR.

a lack of creativity and critical thinking.

abdon 

I think the biggest flaw of campagnolo is the same flaw that affects a lot of the Italian high end market, arrogance. When they can't compete in the performance arena they fall back on artistic design and just assume that anybody not seeing this as better must be stupid. During the steamer era used in Atlantic crossings, they fell further and further behind in speed so they started building these slow floating palaces because obviously glamour was more important than travel time. Italian cars fell behind Germans, Americans, and eventually Japanese, so for a while they doubled down on making them prettier and prettier.

And let's not forget the contempt they have for anything that is not what they believe in. They got dragged kicking and screaming into long cage derailleurs because whether they liked it or not the market took a hard turn that way. The original rally was a turd that would break if you looked at it sideways. The second version would take at least three looks. They fixed the weak bit on the third while taking away chain capacity (the opposite of what everybody else was doing) and in the next interaction they went back to the original design but finally fixed the weakness.

SurferRosa

Seems Campy is doing pretty well with its Ekar line.

georges1

I disagree only roadbike racing professional team uses them , the rest is on dura ace. Again no presence of Campy in the Hybrid, Downhill, Trail and MTB segments and the turnover is much lower than Shimano. Quality wise, Campy is not what it used to be and way more expensive than Shimano.

repechage

the team component provider contracts are in my observation- about money.
a number of teams have flipped back and forth between Shimano and SRAM.
the biggest departure for Campagnolo was Jumbo-Visma. That might have been pushed by a drivetrain mishap. Although those happened to other brands this TdF.
the other departure of note- Colnago bikes no longer with Campagnolo, but not run by Ernesto any more.

waiting for Microshift to enter the fray.

Mackers

Jumbo-Visma were never on Campagnolo.
Rabobank->Belkin->Blanco never were either, always Shimano.

Last year SRAM made them a crazy offer and they switched.

SurferRosa

Campagnolo reported record financials growth just a year ago. Have things change so dramatically? Link?

repechage

it is privately held, not like a public company where financials are audited.
hopefully going well. They have totally dropped complete product lines very quickly.
Potenza we hardly knew you.
veloce, centaur… bye bye.

repechage

thanks. I did a quick reference and read Jumbo is gone after the 2023 season. So much for grand tour wins.