I’ve finally got all my ducks in a row with insurance, sales tax, website, and all that other business rigamarole. Now on to the fun part of buying wholesale bike parts! I’d love to hear what suppliers & distributors y’all have found the best to work with as a small builder.
Starting out, I have a lot of appreciation for:
who all let me sign up in the infancy of Liberation Fab despite having no idea what I was doing.
Sorry, it’s time for me to bail on the forum.
Anybody who has stock.
Would love to give a shoutout to MRP forks. They treated us with a lot of respect and are easy to work with. Also, they do all their assembly in house so they can customize the fork before they ship:
They were happy to configure a custom 27.5 Raven in 120mm for our XXS bikes. The customization is a good match for custom frames.
To give a balanced review, their forks are a bit heavier than mainstream offerings and I have found them more complicated to setup. But you could say those two things about custom frames as well 
Sorry, it’s time for me to bail on the forum.
Its mixed. Can’t buy a Shimano or SRAM chain or cassette for love or money. Have been waiting 4 months for a Force groupset. Can get Ultegra but GRX there aren’t any rear ders. One of my best mates works at Shimano Australia and they are pleading daily wiyh Japan to be sent more stock. They’ll order a thousand cassettes and will only be sent 200. Other things you can get but lots of skus are out of stock across all the distros I have access to.
Wren Sports has been really great to work with and they are very excited to get their products on small builders frames. Very affordable carbon bars, seatposts, and alum stems and a very interesting fork lineup.
Industry Nine was very easy to get setup with.
Astral & Rolf Prima have also been great to work with however I dont know if anything has changed since White bought them.
Sorry, it’s time for me to bail on the forum.
I second all the above except Shimano. I’ve tried several times over the years only to hear crickets. Same with QBP. If you get an account with either count your blessings since that’ll make full builds SO much easier.
White Industries has been awesome, and they now own Rolf Prima/Astral and are very small-builder focused.
I really like Cane Creek, they’ve been awesome with their people and pricing. Everyone wants King but i have never had trouble stocking Cane Creek headsets and more recently BB’s.
BTI is great IME for tires, stems, posts, random stuff like cables and housing, even if it’s all wholesale pricing.
Congratulations on getting it all together. Don’t have much to add except that.
Keep killing it!
Thanks mate. Really appreciate that.
I’m chatting with QBP right now. They wanted me to have $5mm insurance coverage which is a bit out of my price range, but the rep said they might be fine with the $2mm that I have under my current policy. Fingers crossed!
One of the things I love to do on vacation is go to the local bike shops to see things. Australia, wow! What an unbelievably beautiful country. The bike shops? My goodness. Everything is soooooo expensive there. I literally could not believe the component pricing. I recall doing the conversion math on the currency and thinking that parts were almost twice as expensive as the US. Is it supply and demand or just that the conversion rate is bad for foreigners?
A bit of both. Depends a lot on the brand. I think our dollar is around US$0.65 currently. Plus our market is so small compared to the northern hemisphere, so Australian distributors don’t get the volume discount that northern hemsphere markets get. I believe shipping to here is also more expensive. Even before covid.
I just did a comparison on a 12psd Di2 Ultegra rear der and it’s roughly the same if you use a mark up of 60%
Wholesale → 60% → retail
Aus$367 - Aus$587 (Shimano Australia) is being advertised online here for only Aus$480!!
US$255 - US$409 (JensonUSA)
(Aus$376) - (Aus$604)
We used to be able to order from the US and it be cheaper than wholesale here but Wall Street fixed that up so the USD was the currency to have.
