With a new year, a new race season, new victories and new adventures comes a new website. It was long overdue!
A few years ago, just after I joined René as the co-owner of 3T, we started on a long and paradoxically difficult journey to make 3T simpler. At the core are the products; we wanted fewer products and each product that made the grade, should really offer something special. Since that decision, almost all products have been overhauled, and although we have added new product categories (frames for example), the total number of of products has decreased significantly.
For example, the number of seat posts (model, level, color, diameter, length, offset) went from 92 to 6, without really changing the amount of functionality for the customer. We combined colors, made one post with two offsets, and scrapped diameters that were no longer in demand. We also made tougher decisions, such as scrapping the whole mountain bike parts line. At its core, 3T is not a flatbar brand, and if a product doesn’t fit with our core, we shouldn’t make it. All in all, the total number of SKUs (Stock Keeping Units, which is a simple but easy measurement of our inventory complexity) dropped by 60%.
Dropping the SKU count also simplifies our lives everywhere else inside the company, and the website is a good barometer of that. So the new site could be simpler, and therefore a lot easier to navigate for you, and that is the ultimate goal. Now, before you get too worried, the site is not completely finished so right now it is a little TOO simple – for example the aerobars and forks are missing, and they will be added shortly.
Where we haven’t skimped is in product information. Although the descriptions are generally shorter and don’t contain any fluff, the technical descriptions are clearer and more concise, and the spec sections have been expanded. If there is any info you’re missing, please let me know, and we’ll gladly add it.
Which brings me to the second part of our improvements; the newsletter. Personally I dislike newsletter that drop into my inbox too frequently, but I also don’t like companies that I almost never hear from after I sign up for news. Thinking about that some more, I realised that how often I want to hear from a company really depends on me, on my interest and needs, and not really on them.
I tried to incorporate that idea in the new newsletter, and so instead of a “one frequency fits all” approach, we offer you the choice between the instant newsletter (every time there is a new update, about 2-4 times per week, you get it), the weekly newsletter with all the news of that week and the monthly newsletter which shows just the highlights of that month.
The standard setting is weekly, if you would like to change that, at the bottom of every newsletter you’ll find a link to “change newsletter frequency”. You can also choose 2 or 3 of the frequencies if you want to be sure to never miss anything from 3T.
Thanks as always for the support, hope you enjoy the new site and keep exploring!
