Wiggle Faces Insolvency: A Closer Look at the Recent Developments In a ‘private’ email to a supplier, Wiggle (Chain Reaction) has announced its intention to file for insolvency. This revelation is not that surprising considering the financial woes of the…
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Very sad news I always received excellent service from Wiggle. Great products and price but they were let down often by their choice of courier.
dpd?
they were ok in my area.
i have/had no quibbles at all with wiggle hence my link up with them. sad news tho
German perspective on this: wiggle is one in dozens of online stores that were part of the holding in question. They were all fitness related, many of them stepping onto each other’s toes in the German bike stuff web shop market that will still be crowded without them. B24, bc, r2, rose and h&s (radon bikes), that’s the competition they were facing. All the German Signa brands combined would not stand against even a single one of those.
Wiggle on the other hand, it looks super healthy compared to the rotting pile of crap that all the other Signa online brands were.
It must be tempting for bik24 to not bid for wiggle, but I suspect (hope! as a happy customer) that they will focus on more pressing problems. But I don’t expect Wiggle to disappear, very much unlike an the other brand zombies Signa was running.
yes, someone will buy the brand. Wiggle in the UK also own Chain Reaction, although it’s jsut another web front on the same stock.
My uneducated guess from continental europe would be that Wiggle have became a UK household name for cycling related ecomerce and thus won’t fold and go away.
I feel kinda a bit sad for Wiggle. They did offer some great bang-for-buck stuff of which I own a quite a few pieces but somewhere pre pandemic they lost their way. I can’t really put my finger on it but I haven’t bought off them for years now for that reason.
Why would I buy a DHB Aeron Lab or so rain jacket for the same price I can get a tried and tested Gabba or Perfetto Jacket or whatever Castelli’s name of the season for those are currently?
But apart from that, did they grow too much too fast? How big was their european sales and how badly did the Brexit hurt those? How well did their outdoor stuff sell? Did they expand to much out of road biking and MTB? Did Decathlon hit them badly?
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The german ecomerce shops under SSU weren’t the go-to shops for neither my cycling buddies nor I for a long time now.
Well at least Benko turned his profit. Good riddance to everything else it seems.
Be carefull with investement capital kids. It’s the most fickle mistress.
wiggle was more road bikes and chain reaction more mtb (same company behind the scenes)
they were definitely the pre-pandemic king of retailers for Garmin sports watches. they always got the early stock.
yes they expanded, yes they revamped the website and yes they’ve been hit by regular economic woes.
i don’t know how much the likes of decathlon would hit them, in the uk i wouldn’t have thought that would be an existential hit.
the dhb vs castelli type argument gets me as well. i know it makes sense for retailers to create their own brands but i never felt a great affinity to them (dhb). hence that kinda defeats the whole point of branding if i’d still rther buy a known brand and dhb werent exactly cheap.
From a Danish point of view – wiggle seems to have lost it when Brexit-happened. They simply failed to tell clearly their EU-customers that they shipped the Items from outside UK and as a result to that no taxes/import taxes was added.
EU customers was afraid of the possible lack of IOSS number (= buyers country tax paid – in my case Danish VAT and taxes) so most people decided to do the purchase on other sites.
A second issue the shipping costs exploded – the price more than doubled due to change of shipping agent – often the shipping costs would be 22 euro.
A third issue – A lot/ if not most NIKE produces are no longer sold on the website. Shoes like Pegasus/Vomero/Free that always have been super sellers, cannot be bought from the site.
when you buy things in the EU you pay VAT (unless you are a business). That hasn’t really changed although the colecltion mechanism has. Consumers (almost) ALWAYS pay VAT/country tax regardless of the source
companies you buy stuff from should show a price excluding VAT.
I agree any import DUTY may make the end price more expensive and that the shipper might require you to separately pay VAT