Black Friday: What YOU bought and WHY

This year’s Black Friday sale was easily our biggest sales event of all time, both in terms of the effort we put into it, and the response we got back from it. We really put a lot of time, thought, and energy into making sure it would be meaningful to people, and based on our sales, you absolutely loved it. So today I want to take a quick look at the general trends of that sale, and talk about what we think that means. And of course, I’m not going to get into specific numbers, but rather just rankings, of what sold the most in terms of units ordered.

And we’ll start at the top. By numbers of units sold, the most popular product during TriRig’s 2024 Black Friday sale was … our Multi-Bottle BTA Rail! This is actually our newest product, and a pretty simple one at that, but it fills such a specific need that perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised it was so popular. I’ve been saying that 2024 is the year of the double bottle – more athletes than ever are trying to take full advantage of the space between their arms and behind their hands, but there really haven’t been any off-the-shelf products to help do that, until we launched this rail. It’s basically a solid brick of tempered aluminum with holes everywhere, designed to be a rock solid platform onto which you can put just about anything you like. And it has a huge range of adjustability in mounting, so you can put that gear just about any-WHERE you like as well. One bottle, two, three, or even four, they’ll all fly. Add your computer with our 3-in-1 polymount, the only limit is your own imagination.

Now, that was product #1. Looking at 2, 3, and 4 … well, that would be our BTA riser, and our two cages – Kappa and Kappa Saddle. If you’re detecting a theme here, you’re on the right track. Hydration is what you are all working on improving on your rigs, and we’re really happy to see that you’re turning to our products to do so. The BTA Riser is the simplest solution to add height to a bottle cage mount – just a few grams of material and your setup is now 80mm taller than it was before. This can put the bottle closer to your chest, helping close the aero bag a bit more, and it can also allow you to run a narrow arm position where before the bottle might have been in the way of making that adjustment.

And of course our cages are best-in-class, with the most grip strength of any cage on the market, and they come in two unique geometries – our Kappa Cage is for standard bottle positions, and Kappa Saddle is for inverted positions like behind a saddle or upside-down between the aerobars.

Interestingly, #5 most popular during Black Friday was our Omega One aero rim brake. The death of the rim brake has been greatly exaggerated, and although the industry clearly wants you to forget that rim brakes exist, we at TriRig have not forgotten. They are still a fantastic mechanism in the sport of triathlon, and we have the best solution on the market if you still want to run rim brakes or want to upgrade your existing rim braking rig. It’s aero, adjustable, easy to set up, and POWERFUL. It’s been one of our signature products since its launch, and is one of the most well-loved products we’ve ever made.

Coming back to the list, 6 through 10 are all front-end parts. Scoops arm cups in various shapes, and Alpha One aerobars. Interestingly, we see this shifting pattern over time. For six months or so, most of the arm cups we sell will be closed-back arm cups, and then for the next six months, the majority sold will be open-back cups. And then it will flip back to closed again. For Black Friday, almost two thirds of cups ordered were in fact closed-back cups. TriRig was one of the first companies ever to offer closed-back arm cups, and to this day we are definitely the brand with the best selection of both closed-back cups and also ultra-long cups for that extended forearm support. No matter what kind of shape and size your arms are, or what bike you run, or whether you want that closed back or not, we have a product that will be just right for you. Personally, I love closed back cups and tend to recommend them as the default for anyone who is trying to improve on the bicycle. They really help with both control and comfort, but that’s not all they do. Jim Manton of ERO sports has told us he buys our closed-back scoops exclusively and uses them with his clients as a fit tool, to help them find the right aero position on their bikes, and using that rear cup surface as a kind of a home position.

So that’s what happened on Black Friday, but those trends really do apply to our wider sales as a whole. Front-end hydration and fitment, our unique solutions for the evolving aero landscape, these are things that YOU, our customers, are telling us you like. The products we think are special, you’re telling us you agree. So if our Multi-Bottle Rail and our Kappa Saddle cage got you excited … just wait for 2025. We think we have a few things in store that might just pique your interest.

That’s going to be all for today. Happy Holidays to all of you out there from the TriRig team. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.