If you were wondering where all that unsold WiggleCRC stock went to, you could do worse than to pop to your local Evans Cycles store.
Pictures have appeared in a Facebook group devoted to UK gravel, which show vast amounts of reduced footwear, including kit from Wiggle clothing brand DHB, up for sale at Evans Shirebrook in Derbyshire.
Evans Cycles is owned by Frasers Group – the company which bought Wiggle Chain Reaction Cycles back in February after it went into administration.
As well as DHB, the brands up for grabs at Shirebrook include Giro and Fizik. Arranged in long rows around the store underneath makeshift ‘Warehouse Sale’ signs, every item is apparently priced at £50, including – according to the lucky shopper who chanced upon the sale – premium items which sell for as much as £300.
Shirebrook is where one of Frasers Group’s main UK offices is, and so far we haven’t been able to spot any DHB gear (or indeed anything obviously WiggleCRC related) in our local shops of Bristol and Brighton. However, Frasers Group does have another office in London – which houses a host of Evans stores.
Walking into a physical Evans Cycles store is not the only way of procuring leftover WiggleCRC stock. It is also currently for sale on the Evans Cycles website, though not necessarily the same items at the same reductions.
Searching through the site’s clothing options reveals DHB kit of all kinds from jackets to shorts, much of it reduced by around a third. A DHB Aeron men’s softshell 2.0 jacket, for example, has been reduced from £120 to £84.99, while its Aeron 2.0 bibshorts are £57.99, reduced from £80.
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There are also deals on DHB jerseys, shoes, helmets, gloves and tights, as well as triathlon kit – a key staple of Wiggle’s offering.
WiggleCRC entered administration in October, following the loss of €150 million of financial guarantees by its parent company Signa Sports United. Several rounds of redundancies followed as the company streamlined, with nearly all staff – around 450 people – having been made redundant by February.
From very early on in the process Frasers Group boss Mike Ashley, who also owns Sports Direct, was said to be interested in buying the beleaguered company. It was finally revealed in early March that Frasers Group had acquired WiggleCRC for an undisclosed sum of less than £10 million ($12.6 million).
Frasers has since launched both Wiggle and Chain Reaction Cycles websites, though the latter has yet to be meaningfully populated with stock.
Cycling Weekly has asked Frasers Group for further information about placing its stock in physical Evans Cycles stores but has yet to receive a reply.
