Here is the deal, true believers: Were you one of those folks who really really wished you got yourself an orange Troll or a Green Ogre?
Well we’ve got them. Usually in this bike industry, when a company rolls over a new model year all of their old product (with it’s nifty graphics package, and “colorways”) becomes (somehow magically) obsolete. They discount their “old junk” take it off their website and begin the long haul of pretending like it never existed at all. The new bike is the one (like a new smartphone) that is top of the line. Advanced technology.
It’s all true to a certain extent. But with Surly, it’s sort of not. Sure we come out with some new cool shit, but often it’s the same tried and true bike, just in a different color. Usually (unless we are forced to by discontinued bits and pieces) it has the same spec.
When the new bikes come out, we don’t discount the old ones. We let them sit here and slowly go away. People like those colors, and sometimes, seeing the new color is all they need to make up their mind about the old one.
So why do we take them off the website?
Lemmings that we are, we do it because it’s what everyone else always does. Which is a super stupid reason to do anything.
So we’re not going to do that any more. We’re going to leave bikes on our website until they all sell. That means that anyone who is a Surly dealer, or has an account with mom and dad (QBP) can get that bike for you.
Sometimes that means we’ll have a bike on the website that we have in limited quantities. Some sizes of the bike we’ll have 10 or 15 of, other sizes we’ll have 2 of. If that is the case, you’ll see a fancy “while supplies last”, which means exactly what it says. We will have the bike, until we don’t; and then we’ll take it off the website.
So if you’ve been waiting for an orange Troll or green Ogre (or for that matter, a Disc Trucker with Shimano bar-end shifters instead of Microshift) you can still get them. Brand new, in package, other buzz words.
That’s all I got, I’m gonna go ride my Ice Cream Truck.