Episode description

In the latest episode of “Talking Trade,” recently retired Trek Bicycle Corporation executive Maureen Muldoon discusses industry trends and how the company weathered COVID-19. 

Muldoon, who was the vice president of international business development for the Waterloo-based bike maker, highlights the “bike boom” seen early in the pandemic. 

“They wanted to get bikes for their kids so they could do some things outside, people were buying bikes because they were doing stay-cations, etcetera,” she said. “It ended up being that there was this sort of boom of sorts. We reacted quickly to that, we increased our [purchase orders] with our vendors.” 

Looking forward, she expects the trend of increased sales to slow down as people return to more typical buying habits. 

“Things are going to settle in, they’re starting to settle in now,” she said. “But what we’re seeing is we’ll land the plane at a higher level than what we were pre-pandemic.” 

She also discusses the effects that supply chain disruptions had on the industry. 

“There’s so many different parts that go into a bike, if you’re missing a disk brake, you can’t build a bike,” she explained. “So in some cases, our vendors had a lot of product, a lot of inventory … but they couldn’t build a product because they were missing one item.”