The situation was a great advantage to guys like me, when folks were snapping up any bicycles they could find! To give you some perspective, I was usually doing 6 or 7 custom builds for customers a year, including a couple of my own randomly-chosen projects. However, during the COVID year of 2021, I nearly two dozen bicycles and was doing an outrageous amount of upgrades/repairs!
Unfortunately, when people were allowed to return to their gyms and other forms of exercise, this sales trend stopped. Companies had overshot their sales predictions, and now had more bicycles available than the public needed. Overstock saw prices drop dramatically for new bikes, and although I am in a bit of a niche market with my vintage racers, it very much affected me.
As prices on new bikes dropped, folks who had some cash to throw around were discarding their older machines instead of bothering to fix up what was sitting in their basements or garages. This, in turn, created a glut of used bicycles on craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Now older bicycles were going dirt cheap, and I was having a hard time finding a magic price point where someone would choose a unique, older bicyle over a brand new, modern product. That price point was proving difficult to reach, as the cost for the Campagnolo parts required to build my Euro racers was not dropping - vintage stuff always become harder to find, and demand during the original COVID bike boom hit that supply chain hard, as well. Those parts don't "come back", either!
While repairs and such held fairly steadily, my sales dropped off to a handful in 2023 and only two during 2024! My basement was really resembling more of a stockroom than a repair shop. I collect parts as I find them in good, inexpensive condition, but if I don't have room to store bicycles, I'm not going to continue building more, and space gets eaten up by hanging wheelsets and boxes of component groups.
Well, it seems things may have turned around slightly, at least for my little corner of the cycling world, as I've sold a few bicycles already this calendar year. The most recent was a interesting custom job involving a Dazzan frameset. Ottavio Dazzan was an Argentina-born Italian racer, most known for competing in the 1980 Summer Olympics in the sprint. The frames his company built are rare and are of high quality.
My new friend Chris commutes to work by bike and was interested in an inexpensive frameset of Columbus steel which he could build up as a single-speed. He didn't want anything flashy that would draw the eye of possible thieves, and I thought this lesser-known brand would fit the bill. It came with quality Miche components, and its silver-blue paint job was attractive, but understated.
Besides installing a single-speed freewheel and solo chainring, it was just a matter of some bullhorn bars (Chris' preference) and the appropriate brake levers. The Continental Gatorskin tires were a must for gritty NYC streets, and although I would have gone for the version with brown sidewalls for a more vintage look, he decided to go the all-black route.
