IT infrastructure scared away potential buyers of struggling e-commerce site If there's a MAMIL in your life – a Middle Aged Man in Lycra – you may have heard them lament the recent collapse of UK-based cycling and outdoor goods website Wiggle, which has been revealed to have had IT infrastructure in a state that scared away prospective buyers. Wiggle was a very highly regarded site, as it stocked an …
Ultimately, it comes down to the business management.
You can fix bad IT, you can't fix bad business decisions. Want to have 80 separate fiefdoms? Go ahead but don't blame IT when suddenly there are 100 different ERP systems and versions.
Oracle is the least of your problems if nothing works the same between two neighbouring countries/cultures/markets.
Not saying it happened here, but I've met plenty of CEOs who live by the motto "It wasn't me, it was I.T. which done it (or didn't do it ... normally like being asked to redefine gravity as "3")".
> Ultimately, it comes down to the business management
Agree, you only design and implement an IT infrastructure capable of supporting a £1bn business, because that is what management envisage the business becoming.
I expect the inflexibility is due to both the selected platform and contracts, ie. It won’t easily downsize to something more appropriately sized(*), I wonder if one of the major SI’s are involved.
(*) I have hit this problem with divestures, parent ran something like SAP/R3, new business would of used SAP’s entry level offering, only SAP had no migration tools - their business model assumes companies only get bigger… fortunately one of their competitors did have tools to migrate off SAP on to their mid market platform offering…
Whilst this article is interesting from an IT POV, it's disappointing to see the writer jump on the bandwagon of adopting a sneering tone about cyclists.
I'd ordered a lot of stuff from Wiggle over the years, good prices for running, gym and cycling kit and also the free bags of Haribo that came in the box were a welcome addition. Sadly Haribo were owed a lot of money apparently when they went in to administration. Got some tools very cheaply in the clearance sale though.
> it's disappointing to see the writer jump on the bandwagon of adopting a sneering tone about cyclists
It's the MAMIL stuff that you don't like?
I hear it more within the cycling community than outside, and given "a sneering tone" is The Register's usual tone, I don't see any issue at all. Quite the contrary.
Also it should be noted that they done their homework : to be able to say that one of the biggest selling point of Wiggle was DHB (it's like 90% of my cycling wardrobe and I'm wondering how I'll be able to replace those kits when they are done) means that they looked thoroughly about Wiggle.
I'm well aware of it within cycling sadly, there are plenty of gatekeepers who look at me with open disdain for riding a cheap bike and wearing baggy Endura shorts for most of my rides, cycling in general though is under attack from a lot of the media (legislation to prosecute dangerous cyclists for example and the overturning of a woman's conviction for causing a cyclist's death by shouting at her to get off a pavement and she ended up in traffic).
As for the kit, no idea if it's the same quality or manufacturer, but the "new" Wiggle/Sports Direct are selling at least some of the range, although I'm also well aware how a lot of people feel about Mike Ashley and his businesses. I've got a few base layers, a buff and a pair of the dhb Dorica MTB shoes myself and it's good kit for the price, although the sizing was often a bit on the wonky side.
> adopting a sneering tone about cyclists.
Is it about the MAMIL? My, my, aren't we sensitive? I thought it was a good article and with cool insights about cycling concerns. Snarky, as we expect and love it from the Reg. And I learned a new word.
To each their own. I don't ever really go quickly enough on my bike to really get the point of lycra. And even less on religiously putting it on to cycle 5 km to a casual wear office job, just so you have to change when you get there :/<
Then again, you could certainly have a laugh at my clothes on multiday summer cycling trips: flowing, white, hat with neck curtain. Wearing, kid you not, ski goggles - which are great at protecting your face from the sun while allowing for glasses as well ;-)
Don't care about the MAMIL, as I said I wear baggy shorts normally. I assume (as the author has posted that he is a cyclist) he was going for self-deprecating, and as that information was not in the article I felt it missed the mark, especially as the Daily Mail and such "newspapers" are constantly attacking cyclists these days.
> Don't care about the MAMIL
You don't? Pray tell, which exact part of the article upset you then? Nothing else seems all that CRAP (cyclist-reprehensible aggressiveness pattern). All the rest of it is studiously neutral and if anything speaks to the cycling community's common sense in sourcing from an efficient and relatively affordable supplier.
"and also the free bags of Haribo that came in the box were a welcome addition."
Yeah, gotta put back those burned calories so you need to go out and do more exercise and keep the business ticking over as you replace the worn out kit more frequently!
Seriously though, a company trading on fitness sending sweeties out with their orders? Am I being too cynical here?
It was just the tiny little bags that get put in kids lunchboxes etc, and Haribo are well known to be many cyclist's go to snack food on the bike as they are cheap, full of sugar and easy to eat.
You can buy "proper" energy gummies these days, they're expensive though and not as nice (IMO) as Haribo.
If you have to sit next to 3 people for 8 hours a day, where the conversation resolves around the perfect cadence for a certain gradient or how this £350 wheel is souch better because it's 1g lighter than the £250 wheel,trust me you want to run them off the road.
Then again, you have the same with golfers, wine or coffee snobs or football fans....so hey ho.
Oracle? Ah ah, tout s'explique.
And the nature of software is that one doesn't much mind being one of the squirming creditors, as that sale cost you next to nothing in incremental production costs, while bagging you 18?, 20?, 22%? in support fees, per year, from your victim, sorry, customer.
"A going concern sale was not achievable due to the inability to right size the Company's operating fixed overheads, particularly the IT infrastructure"
"The inflexibility of the IT infrastructure ultimately caused the parties considering a going concern purchase to all fall away."
What did Wiggles IT infrastructure run on. Why was it deemed inflexible and over provisioned. Just what prevented Wiggle from downsizing their IT infrastructure. Was it to do with inflexible contract lock-in terms?
--
"Just why Wiggle’s IT infrastructure was so inflexible was not discussed. In these cloudy times, it’s certainly odd to build for colossal scale given the many vendors who promise elastic services.
Ah so, I should have read the whole article before rendering thoughts to pixels. Who was it designed their IT infrastructure? @PinchOfSalt provided this most interesting link:
Online sports retailer Wiggle uses Oracle to support double-digit growth
This isn’t a new thing, I remember from merger and acquisition projects from the early 1990s, IT was a bit part of the due diligence. Hence prospective buyers will be looking at the “fit” of Wiggles IT with their own systems and the costs of putting everything on the same platform.
Would not be surprised if some prospective buyers have been put off as the due diligence has shown them their IT costs and existing practises will need to change and become larger and more formalised (and thus less flexible).
Looking at the figures presented by the auditors (which basically indicate a £100M pa business making £20M pa profit before tax). £1.4M for 6 months of “IT Support / Telephone and Internet” doesn’t in itself look excessive in relation to total sales and other costs such as “Carriage / Logistics / Couriers”.
From the Administrators comment, we have to assume the IT costs are more fixed than the logistics costs. However, for what is basically a web business it’s core overheads are going to be IT systems and warehousing, with (third-party) carriage/courier costs being variable. Assuming IT costs really were the problem, I wonder what level of IT cost the prospective purchaser was expecting, as even allowing for Oracle to be “expensive”, I doubt they would be able to save £2M pa. and maintain customer service levels.
I loved buying from Wiggle to ship to Canada until Shimano banned them from selling stuff to North America combined with them changing their shipping options which lead to more fees. I could get bike stuff for less than local bike shop's wholesale price. I could get 3 tires for the price of one locally. Also stuff from the UK would rarely get taxed, while stuff I ordered from the US got taxed nearly 100% of the time. Though Wiggle did some kind of shady shit. They had their own brand of bikes, but would order vastly more bike components than bike they sold, then re-sold the OEM components cheap. Order a set of pedals and they'd come in a bag instead of retail packaging.
The bike market in Canada is fucked up, there is a duopoly at the wholesale distribution level resulting in massive markups. It effectively eliminates many brands from being available here at all. Trek / Specialized sell directly to bike shops and provide smoking credit deals, so they've got most of the market share as shops are highly incentivized to just carry those brands.
We need to remember, it has been through several iterations, plus there are many systems run by Trainline, but actually belonged to National Rail et al. I got involved with one refresh through the SI who at the time ran the service contract. Oracle wasn’t part of the Trainline system I designed, but it could easily have been part of the legacy estate the new system had to connect to.
What a bummer. I liked Wiggle, both before and while I was cycling, because they supported all kinds of outdoor sports (and indoor). That they've gone bust is a real shame. They bought Chain Reaction out of administration, which was a good thing and kept that brand going for a while longer, but I guess when the floor drops out of your market, and you're not nimble enough, you're dead in the water. :-(
"but I guess when the floor drops out of your market, and you're not nimble enough, you're dead in the water. :-("
Yeah, from the article, I get the sense they likley would have gone away sooner or later anyway because of the way they were structured, but like some companies, saw massive growth through the pandemic, especially the lock down periods and thought they would maintain those levels and keep growing from their. But like most of that "pandemic growth", it faltered and mostly reduced afterwards and they didn't see that coming (or didn't want to see it coming)
An absolutely appalling website redesign shortly before going bust probably didn't help. CRC in particular used to have one of the best bike shopping websites in the game but the relaunch version omitted all kinds of sort and filtering options that made finding what you want unnecessarily difficult.
The design was so bad, it caused quite a bit of froth on road.cc and other cycling sites.
To make matters worse they didn't migrate your order data from the old system to the new system and they had to keep the old systems running for warranty purposes and also returns - they had a generous 'return with 365 days' policy for some goods and actually had very good after sales service that was pretty much useless without that old order data.
They committed the cardinal sin of computing - they ignored their users and built a system that they wanted, not what their customers wanted.
> They committed the cardinal sin of computing - they ignored their users and built a system that they wanted
I’m not sure if that really was the cardinal sin.
Many IT companies exist because they built products they wanted, which others realised they also wanted and found useful.
The cardinal sin, I therefore suggest was to implement enhancements etc without taking their users with them. In some respects we’ve been seeing this (ignoring the users) with Microsoft ever since the release of XP/2003 and Office 2003. Fortunately for MS it is harder for customers/users to go elsewhere and 2012 IT is nowhere nearly as comparable to modern IT as a 2012 (aluminium framed) bike is to a 2024 (carbon framed) bike (unless you are a professional and thus 5 seconds saved over 100km race is actually important).
Used to work in Wiggle IT. The problem in fact was a new IT director who totally misunderstood and misrepresented to prospective buyers the MACH architecture e-commerce system and its ability to scale down (and up) and be white labelled for other brands. So many talented engineers worked for wiggle and produced great results under the lead of the previous IT director who led the work to implement and deliver the new system. Yes the branding was off but even internally this was recognised. The new IT director wasn’t at all invested and failed at the task of explaining to prospective buyers - fundamentally misunderstood cloud concepts and systems - and was more interested in taking his oversized paycheck and heading to the golf course.
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Sigma Sports is a small chain of UK stores, Wiggle/CRC parent company was Signa Holding, a German e-commerce brand.
Wiggle was not the only outfit to assume the Covid bubble would lead to longer term growth when the opposite happened. But it had become a bit of an Amazon, dominating the cycle/triathlon retail market in the UK.
Pity about dhb clothing, which was very good quality, and I feel for the staff who lost their jobs.
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