interungulate

Hello! I put together a sort of market research spreadsheet with components/descriptors for 285 hybrid models across 19 US-available manufacturers with data from September 2020, and I wanted to share the data in case someone else could use it.

Both the dataset itself (Excel file) and an explainer about methodology and stuff is available at setsailfor.space/hybrid-market-spreadsheet-explainer. Some things of note: I included models advertised as hybrid, fitness, commuter, city, urban, and anything that sounded like those words, but excluded fixies, electric bikes, and stuff marketed specifically as road or mountain, and also excluded anything with drops. These were a little arbitrary as distinctions, but I think they make sense in separating out the groups of models that would obscure trends in the data.

I'm going to use this data to finish up a first-time hybrid buyer's guide, but otherwise had pretty much no set goal for it. Since it's all off of manufacturers' public websites, I think I'm legally allowed to say you can just download the dataset and do whatever you want with it. No guarantees on it being completely typo-free, but I did try pretty hard.

[edited for formatting]

crn3371

Wow 😱

fishboat

Nice work up and a fair amount of work..thanks for putting this together. I was a market-logistics-data analyst prior to retiring. Much of my work involved modeling global logistics networks. I've not heard of Flourish, though I've been out of that business for a while now. I used Tableau for most of my visualizations. Modeling was done in software that is a world apart from Tableau/Flourish.

In any event, I like the plots..very interesting and nicely done. I would typically use plots like this to get a feel of what the data was saying and to emphasize specific points in a presentation(the sunburst diagram on market segmentation is nice). My audience (consumers of my work) was generally upper management and C-level folks. While a few (very few) were data-oriented, in general they had little patience for digging into lots of plots to answer questions..that's what they had me for. Often I would prepare one or more user-driven dashboards that was easy to filter down and answer (their) questions. I'd have a graphical workup with a half dozen filters (on/off, sliding scale..etc..) that would quickly narrow things down without them having to think too hard..questions are easy, answers actually require work.

With a couple filters clicked, one could answer a (completely arbitrary, I ride primarily road and mountain bikes) question like, "I want a triple crank, Tiagra components or above, rim brakes, and it has to fit 50mm tires..what bikes should I look at?" Four on/off filters would result in a list of Mfgs and models, along with price..etc..

fwiw..Tableau has "Tableau Public" software that anyone can use free..here's a gallery of all kinds of dashboards:
https://public.tableau.com/en-us/gal...&type=featured

Great work..if I were in the market for a new hybrid, this would be a gold mine of info..

interungulate

Thanks for the tip about Tableau! I don't really do much data vis (clearly), Flourish popped up as a resource somewhere and was useful enough that I didn't look much further.

The answers are definitely more difficult to generate than the questions I'm trying to do a little more of those kinds of data-driven value judgments with the other write-up I'm working on that's more geared toward people who don't necessarily have experience in bikes, but here I tried not to get into that too much since I assume people interested in a granular spreadsheet would have more specific opinions going into it.

I'm also predominantly a roadie, and one of the things I really love about the hybrid market is the amount of diversity. I was kind of trying to mimic with the spreadsheet that user-driven dashboard you were talking about (since Excel has a pretty decent filtering system), but I have nowhere near the kind of data visualisation skillset to present that in a more visually appealing way. I'll definitely have a look at Tableau - I didn't have much luck with Flourish's filtering models, and that would be a great thing to add.

fishboat

There should be, at least there were, tons of video tutorials available on the Tableau website, or elsewhere. They have (had..I retired and left it all behind) a huge and enthusiastic user-base. I think Tableau was sold to Salesforce? in recent years, not sure if anything has changed. Tableau can use Excel as a datasource, or any of the common databases.

Donlaw

Thanks for putting this together. Nicely done and very interesting.

JaccoW

Paging @RiddleOfSteel

Seems like we can gather some inspiration for our presentation from here.

He has made a comprehensive list of 66cm Koga-Miyata models in the The Koga-Miyata 66cm Club - A Comprehensive Listing thread and I have started something similar to this for the Show us your Koga-Miyata! thread using stated weight for certain models over the years.

Specifying models as hybrids has been a bit tricky over the years since the later 80's and early 90's had some crossover at times as well as clearer differentation between touring, mtb and hybrid models that would be called hybrids nowadays.

RiddleOfSteel

Indeed we can! Man, I never thought I'd be in the Hybrids sub-forum, but here I am. I wonder how similar the Koga-Miyata hybrid story is to the rest of the industry as it evolved from a few bicycle architypes, slowly becoming more defined as time went along.

After digging through the Koga-Miyata catalogs from 1984 through 2018, the differentiation between a hybrid, comfort, town & country, and (light) touring bike seemed primarily in name and handlebar type--upright vs. flat bar vs. butterfly bar (touring, trekking). At least in the 66cm offerings, the frame geometry was incredibly similar between all categories (and for several decades), as was the use of Deore LX as a groupset. Thinking back some more here, though, the step-through design evolved throughout those years to what they are today, which I think is good as a proper step-through is much more than a dropped top tube a la a vintage mixte frame (as lovely as those look).

Marktplaats over in the Netherlands is a great place to find Kogas as that is where they originated from. Nevertheless, cataloging 66cm frames had me looking at many non-race and non-touring models, in all of their fun (to me) names. The Prominence model was perennially offered in that 66cm size, so it was pretty cool to see one for sale--no company ever showcases the smallest and largest version of a bike model--it was a bit of a celebrity moment in that regard.

One of two 66cm Prominences are for sale presently, so I snagged a photo. Handsome bike, and this one has their "feather" suspension fork (think Cannondale Head Shok).

interungulate

That weight trends graph is so interesting! I would not have guessed it would trend upward over the years, I wonder what that's about.

And cool to see the same general concept of research but applied over time with a specific manufacturer, that's a direction of data I hadn't even considered. Really interesting, thank you for linking!

JaccoW

I haven't entered all the data for the 2000 till now period but my guess is you will see a decrease again in the 2010+ period. In short, I remember bikes in this period and Dutch bikes in particular to just add more and more small luxuries to make the bike more comfortable i.e. full suspension touring bikes. But all that extra complexity only makes the bike heavier than it needs to be. And at the same time the frames are becoming stiffer to make them more stable tourers because people in Europe tend to tour with a full complement of Ortlieb panniers.

BiciMan

Very nice work, Inter, and thank you for sharing. Also nice that you're inspiring other contributions. Agree that Tableau has been great for years now, though I also retired and stopped using it before it was sold. (Still have a Tableau t-shirt )

fishboat

"In God we trust, everyone else bring data.." ..went to a couple user meetings..Vegas and Wash DC..heck of a show both times. Attendance went from 500ish to 3000+ in the matter of a couple years..crazy growth. Lost track of it when I retired in '16.