August 28th, 2007
Wot No Langster?
Langster Chicago
Someone at Specialized has a sense of humour and someone in power at Specialized has let them play it out on their Langster singlespeed fixie. Well, how else do you explain the quirky ‘city’ models, each one playfully decorated for it’s target audience.
The Boston plays on the Ivy League image of the city; The Chicago ‘Gangster’ come in purposeful black; The London comes in patriotic red white and blue and has already upset some English bike culture snobs who had a sense of humour failure that I think even Jamie Reid would have raised an eyebrow at; the New York comes in yellow cab livery, naturally; and the Seattle is a green mudguard equipped easy rider with a paintjob that gives nods to coffee and the rain.
Sadly marketing appears to have gone AWOL - maybe the same person who put the spare Ss into the Skillet helmet? - and this idea has been neutered by marketing. Normally the company wacky concept guys with the extensive budget - remember the “Innovate or Die” hearse? - they’ve been unusually retiring with these models. You see if I was in marketing I’d be selling every model everywhere except where it was named. Riding round London on a Langster London is a bit cliched, ditto the New York in New York, and so on. You get the idea.
Unfortunately it appears that here in the UK the London is the only one of these models we might be able to get hold of. And that with difficulty. Which is a shame as we rather fancied a Seattle so that we could ride out together on singlespeed/fixie road bikes instead of one of us being unfairly handicapped/blessed* by gears as we are at the moment.
As Bez points out below you can’t even see those particular Langster models on the Specialized website unless you tell them you’re browsing from the USA.
Come on Specialized, stop being so reserved. We want Langster variety here in the UK.
* pick as appropriate depending on mood, terrain and singlespeed purity.
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August 28th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
How nice of Specialized to bork all of those links, only show you the bikes if you tell them you’re from a particular country, and then not serve up the Seattle at all.
Well done Specialized. Nice bikes, cocksucking website.
August 29th, 2007 at 8:13 am
Er, it was me that screwed the link to the Seattle.
I hate that you have to tell them you’re from the US too. You might want to try these pages:
Boston
Chicago
London
New York
Seattle.
August 29th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
If you recall when the Big Hits were first launched SBC UK said they weren’t importing then from the US because there was no market demand for them.
What then happened was that some sensible LBS owners who knew better imported them direct and made a small fortune in selling them to a public chomping at the bit to progress to some bigger drops and hucks.
After losing out in the launch year SBC UK then started bringing in the Big Hit the following season, where it was a fairly popular model up until the launch of the Demo range.
There might be a moral in this story.
October 1st, 2007 at 3:40 pm
[…] to our original remarks on the silliness Specialized may have underestimated the popularity of the Langster we tried to buy one. As my […]
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:43 am
http://www.bikescene.co.uk/ have one. (well on saturday they still had it)
I’m sure Andy would love to get rid of it.
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Thanks Tom, they have two, both too big :(