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news
2024 Orro 2025 Gold Evo 105 Hydro Bike - riding 4.jpgMajor UK cycling distributor behind Orro Bikes enters administration and 'all staff asked to leave without September pay'
All staff at UK-based cycling distributor I-ride, best known for its popular in-house bike brand Orro Bikes, have been made redundant and are still without pay for last month after the company entered administration, sources have told road.cc.
I-ride distributed many major brands' products across the cycling industry, including those of Continental and De Rosa, and had last year moved to a new multi-million pound facility in East Sussex.
However, road.cc has heard from a source at the company that it has entered administration, with all staff made redundant and asked to leave yesterday. The source also suggested that nobody has been paid for September, a claim that has been backed up by others.
I-ride's parent company Martlet Group has not yet commented, nor has the distributor itself, Martlet Group's Companies House page so far unchanged too. We have contacted I-ride for confirmation of the accounts emerging from those formerly employed with the distributor but had not received a reply at the time of publication.
(PAU Run and Ride Trentham on Facebook)
A source told road.cc that the news came as a shock to employees, with anger reportedly mounting about the situation, and on the surface there were few indications that the company was so deeply troubled. Orro Bikes, I-ride's flagship in-house bike brand, had an active Instagram account up until around five days ago at the time of writing, and over the weekend Sir Bradley Wiggins was pictured riding an Orro bike as part of his 'Ride With Wiggins' charity sportive departing from Sandon Hall in Staffordshire.
I-ride calls itself "the specialists' specialist" and distributed products for SeaSucker, Kool-Stop, Gemini Lights, Green Oil, DeFeet, Cyclus Tools, Catlike, Seatylock, Token and more, in addition to the bigger name brands listed earlier in this article.
In August, the distributor advertised a "huge overstock clearance" sale with "cheapest prices ever" on a host of products, including some from Shimano, SRAM, FSA, Fulcrum and Continental, suggesting I-ride may be struggling with the inventory troubles felt across the bike industry since Covid.
Last year, fellow distributor Moore Large entered liquidation, the distributor for brands such as Tern Bicycles, Lake and Forme going under one year on from the long-running business being sold to board directors from the Moore family.
That meant stock worth £35 million was auctioned off, with 35,000 bikes and £10 million worth of bike accessories listed via John Pye. The inevitable scrum saw road bikes sell for as little as £110 and further huge discounts elsewhere as Moore Large's stock was shipped off at whatever price could be got.
Two months later, Livingston-based distributor 2pure entered administration, before another UK cycle distributor FLi ceased trading shortly after.
FLi Distribution's director Colin Williams was outspoken in the aftermath, citing the impact of Brexit, the complexities and restrictions surrounding UK and EU trading, and the difficulties facing the bike industry in the post-Covid lockdown period as the main reasons behind FLi's demise.
"If you voted for Brexit, please realise this is 90 per cent because of your decision back in 2016," he said. "I'm done fighting, I'm done with the red tape and the barriers to trade. It hadn't been fun for some time, so the time was right to end it now, life is too short."
Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.
Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.
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52 comments
I have been a supplier to iRide (Orro) for the past 12 months, and this collapse has meant that I've been shafted for £18k in unpaid invoices.
On my visits to their state-of-the-art HQ, it did seem like it was a case of 'no expense spared'. Little did I know that it was mainly for show.
I personally funded an Orro video shoot back in July (including expenses for 2 guys overnight in hotels) to help them on the online side. I fail to see how the company didn't know they were in trouble at that point.
I would have appreciated some honestly, but instead I feel like my goodwill was taken advantage of.
I'm sorry for the staff because they were all very nice, smart people. Shame. I hope they all find work quickly.
Playing devil's advocate, and in no way defending them or denigrating your sh!tty experience, I wonder whether when companies are in trouble they don't want to admit it - it would be like chumming the sea around a ship, attracting the sharks (or vultures, if I can mix my metaphors?).
In some countries that kind of thing is illegal.
Only when they're caught, unfortunately…
It's an unfortunate position for the employees, but the company accounts (the ones they posted) show that they've had some concerning financial conduct, for them and higher up the ownership chain, over the last few years. It's not surprising, it's just a crap state of affairs, for the staff, who weren't directors.
Orro website is still running, with bikes still on sale. Proceed with caution.
"If you voted for Brexit, please realise this is 90 per cent because of your decision back in 2016,"
Except that the decision was made by Parliament, the government, and the PM.
"It's not my fault the cyclist was killed, I might have had my foot on the accelerator and my hands on the steering wheel, but it's the car's fault because that's what actually hit him."
I am aware the referendum was non-binding, but it would have been politically impossible for a government to just say "yeah, you had this single-issue vote but we're not doing it". The Cameron government is of course largely to blame for having the referendum in the first place, on an issue which voters had never really seen as a priority, but those who voted for it to happen bear the most responsibility for it happening.
Precisely, the government took the voters' decision and implemented it, having made an electoral promise that they would. Leave voters were vociferous in the early days (before it became obvious even to them quite what a car crash it was) in their outrage at any suggestion that the result could be ignored or legally challenged, it's a bit late to break out the Pontius Pilate, "I didn't actually make the decision, I handed it over to the government", excuses now.
Sorry, but that's a ridiculous analogy. A car doesn't make laws or run the country. And there was a lot of leeway between saying "well we're not going to do it" and going for the version of "brexit" we ended up with. And "politically impossible" is surely just a fancy way of saying "we'd rather screw the country for generations than risk our own positions". Anyhow, the ballot said "Leave the EU". It didn't say when.
It's funny seeing all the Brexit voters now claiming 'it wasn't what I voted for, the Govenrmnet did it wrong'. If that's the case what exactly were you voting for? And how dumb do you have to be to vote for something which is that unclear. Sorry leave voters, but this is on each and every one of you, along with most of the other chaos in this country since 2016 and no doubt for generations to come. Sunlit uplands, undeed.
What were brexiters voting for? An extra £350m/week for our NHS, an end to being bossed around by corrupt unelected bureaucrats in Berlin and Brussels (the accounts have never been signed off), bendy bananas, imperial measures, freedom, self-determination and sovrintee (though some of them may have been added after the referendum). Naive indeed, but that's what we were told was on offer.
If only there had been warnings that this was patently a load of bollocks.
Oh, did I hear someone say there was lots of warnings from so called 'experts'? Well who would listen to them? What would people with knowledge and experince bring to this kind of debate?
Indeed. My point was simply that the government had ample grounds for saying "We're not doing it (and here's why: ...). If you're not happy with our decision, vote for someone else at the next GE." But, of course, if they hadn't been such short-sighted, self-serving idiots they wouldn't have held the referendum in the first place.
You forgot to mention the blue passports. Apparently they are very important
I remember the leavers' sentiments in my social/workplace bubble and the various comments I saw on social media back then very clearly and it was to leave as quickly as possible, even demanding to break the netotiations and walk away immediately, without any deal.
Surely unpaid staff should be first in the line of creditors to be paid when the assets are liquidated. Yet somehow I doubt it. Pretty sure the banks and vulture capitalists will get first pickings, and leave nothing. And someone will get the Orro brand name without paying anything to the people who embodied it.
I was once that unpaid member of staff (20 or so years ago), from memory the taxman comes first, the rest were all in a bunfight.
Staff were covered seperatly for missing wages and redundancy payments. The money came from a seperate government fund working out how many weeks wages were missing on both wages and compulsory minimum redundancy payments, unfortunatly they also had a ceiling on what a weeks wage was and it wasn't great compared to professional salaries
It strikes me as unfair as the company execs must have known that they wouldn't be able to pay the wages bill, but yet they didn't inform the employees and instead aimed to steal their employees time. That should be illegal with execs going to prison for fraud/theft.
Maybe the directors/board members should be held personally responsible for settling the wage bill so that there's an incentive for them to not stitch up their employees.
Knowingly trading while insolvent should get you struck off as a Director, but don't remember that happening to the Directors of the PLC I worked at 20+ years ago. They'd also tried to move all the money in the various company bank accounts to an offshore subsidiary in the last days and hadn't transferred pension deductions for 3 months.
It needs someone to be bothered enough to go through the striking off process.
Speaking from experience, 2013, I had to wait about four months for the gov't to pay me my statutory redundancy. It was capped then at £430 a month. Thankfully I had an emergency fund stashed away, much of which was the money I saved by cycling to work and bagging my lunch, to see me through.
It's dangerous subversives like you undermining the economic system that are the reason these companies end up in trouble in the first place.
The fees for the liquidators, then HM Govt/tax, then any secured debts (ie. secured bank loans), then everyone else gets to fight it out over the crumbs left.
The company's own employees are not secured creditors (along with any suppliers to whom the company owes money) so are right down at the bottom of the pile.
The employees are preferred creditors, so they rank below creditor's with security (as you say) but above unsecured creditors and shareholders. Obviously they may still end up with nothing if there isn't enough to pay the secured creditors.
Regrettably one more company for greedy Mike & friends suck what they have good and get rid of the rest. Good luck to all staff finding new jobs and getting paid.
No great loss if Orro disappears. Based on this video inspection, they are cheap as chips low-QC frames from far east factories that can probably make better for a matter of a few dollars more per unit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPEv4k-TSVo
My Venturi is the absolute mutts nutts.
Very bad though for those owed a month's pay and needing to find another job.
The bike shop mechanic who built my bike up around a Venturi frame at my request raised no concerns about the quality. Love it!
I feel very sorry for the staff... unforgivable in my view to have run the business to the point there wasn't enough for the month's payroll.
All too often a company's greatest asset is seen by senior management as a liability (and dispensible).
I have snapped up a few pairs of Kool-Stop road pads before they disappear. It's the only brand of rim brake pads I'm happy with and the LBS couldn't get hold of any in the Covid years.
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