Case Analysis: Boo Bicycle Inc - Bamboo Bicycle

Case Analysis: Boo Bicycle Inc- Bamboo Bicycle

Summary: Focusing on high-end, hand-crafted, racing bicycles, Boo Bicycle offered serious advantage over its competitors and had started to earn its name and reputation among the competitive racers, but the handmade customized bicycle also are expensive and built more slowly, which constrain the company’s business growth To expand the market beyond high-end custom bicycles and reach a broader customer audience with its new price-accessible bicycle Aluboo, the company need a coherent market plan to decide how to position and promote, which will determine the success of the company.

Company: Boo Bicycle was founded in 2009 by Nick Frey, a professional bike racer with a degree in mechanical engineering, and focus on high-end, handmade, racing bicycle. Besides the founder’s expertise, the company also made bicycle from “Iron Bamboo”, one of the strongest, densest species in the world, and together with James Wolf, a bamboo expert in Vietnam, they developed an unparalleled level of expertise in designing bicycles from bamboo and won a great reputation in the core biking community. Moreover, with its new fund raised via the Kickstarter project and the new model Aluboo, the company had the chance to touch a larger customer base. Despite those strength, the company also had some weakness they have to face in this competitive market. First, the bamboo material. Bamboo made the bicycle ride more smoothly, more durably with its combination of strength and shock absorbance, very stiff in bending but not in torsionfor climbs and power transfer, and much more environmentally friendly, but the failures by other players in the industry have hurt the reputation of bamboo as a bike material.Because of this, among the biking community there is suspicion of bamboo as a material, and a belief that carbon fiber is superior. Besides, as all of the bicycle are handmade, so customer need to wait for almost two month after they order the bicycle. Moreover, the Boo Bicycle is almost unknown outside the core biking community, which make the company hard to reach a broader customer base. Beyond all of the above, Boo Bicycle was still a young and small company, it didn’t have enough budget for a big marketing promotion campaign with its limited resource.

Competition:Ranking 7th most popular recreational activity in the United States with nearly 40 million Americans above the age of seven riding a bike at least six times in 2012, bicycling is one of the top popular activities in U.S., which made Boo Bicycle in a very competitive market. The company faced different levels of competition. First, the competition within the bamboo bicycle market as below.Boo is not the only player, even in the bamboo bicycle niche market, there were other six principal players, each of them offered various benefits to their customers. Besides, Boo also faced the competition of the whole bicycle market, which included almost 150 companies that make bicycles out of other materials.Moreover, Boo may face the whole completion again the way how people choose as their recreational activities. From the Exhibit 1 Competitive Landscape, we could find that Boo positions the Boo Bicycle as the end-end, but also the most expensive bicycle, compared to its bamboo bicycle peers and also the whole bicycle market.