German consumer-direct bike maker Canyon has been teasing Americans for some time with the promise of bringing their high-value, high-performance bikes stateside. Last spring they made it official, but without much of a timeline, and as recently as this past December with their disc brake road bike introductions Canyon promised more details in January. Well, they made us wait one more day, but here it is – an official path to their entry onto the US market in 2017. While many American cyclists have been itching to get ahold of the latest crop of road and mountain bikes from Canyon, they’re going to have to wait until the third quarter of the year…
Bringing Canyon to the US has been a long work in progress (which we talked about in detail last year), but now that it is happening let’s summarize the key points…
Direct-to-consumer sales of Canyon bikes in the United States will begin in Q3 of 2017. Canyon is currently setting up a distribution & service facility in southern California which will serve as their base of operations.
The idea behind starting deliveries in July-September is that all bikes will come out of model year 2018 stock of new and carry-over bikes that Canyon will debut starting at the beginning of the summer through to the end-of-summer trade shows.
Canyon already has some staff for their US team in place, but will still be hiring more full-time staff for their warehouse & office operations between now and the middle of 2017. (Canyon regularly has job postings on their site under the Careers link at the bottom of every page, and says that US-based postings will show up there in the coming months.)
All of Canyon’s bikes are designed/developed in Germany with actual manufacturing in Asia. While some bikes for the US market will come from the upgrade state-of-the-art assembly facility that Canyon built at their Koblenz, Germany HQ, they have also been setting up a similar production hall in Asia so the bikes can be assembled to the same quality there without incurring the additional cost and delay of traveling first to Europe before heading to the US. Those bikes assembled in Asia will get the final step of prep at the new SoCal facility before making their way out to US buyers in Canyon’s typical Bike Guard Box.
All bikes are shipped to buyers in a pre-setup & pre-assembled state that usually means just installing the front wheel, handlebar & seatpost (then adding your own pedals in most cases) and away you ride. The idea is that it takes about 10-15 minutes to have the bike together out of the box, with shifting and braking already ready to go.
Delivery timing for bikes marked as ‘In Stock’ on Canyon’s website is expected to be less than 2 weeks across the US from the time of order.
The new SoCal facility will also serve as the US service center, and will handle any technical issues, returns, warranty concerns, or replacement parts needed for a Canyon purchased in the states.
It isn’t totally clear which bikes will be available when delivery goes live, mostly because we don’t know what new bikes will be announced by July. But Canyon has said that they expect to have the vast majority of the bikes that are available in Europe in the US as well.
They do specifically mention road, mountain, and triathlon bikes and say they want to offer the wide variety of complete build options and the same competitive pricing that they have built their business on. Now it is just time to start saving up your hard-earned money in time to buy a new bike this summer.
Canyon will continue with updates as the third quarter approaches, with all info now to be found on a dedicated US version of their website.
Canyon.com & more specifically Canyon.com/en-us/
