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Originally Posted by sspielman
Like all of the Bridgestone's, they were cleverly marketed, average bikes....Cleverly marketed to the point that it was difficult to connect the hype and image created to the actual product. When the company folded (presumably due to a lack of sales) the company's fans elevated the brand to martyr status. It was not unlike the death of Elvis....
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elvis is dead?
grant was and is a very smart bike guy.
his flaw i thk is that he worked very hard to try to increase the size of his target market... and he could not increase it enough to make the company any money. a lot of folks rever the guy for what he has done and i give him full credit as a #1 genuine bike guy. i thk, however that he misjudged the opportunity to increase his "offbeat" market to a sufficient size to make bridgestone profitable. his bstone catalogs make great reading for sure, though.
his mustache bars, assorted somewhat quirky products and his unwillingness to accept newer technologies killed his company ( not him thankfully ) in the end. from inside the business i also believe that his heavy committment to suntour and sr products during that time period was admirable in some ways but even at that point suntour was sledding down a pretty steep slope to oblivion in the bike business. shimano at the time was the king and the future king....even though suntour first developed index shift years earlier they were really unable to market something that worked anywhere near as well as their now giant competitors.
also note that there are a lot of "grantphiles" on this forum...
i pass the torch to them...
dbrk...to you and the posse... fill in the blanks.