You remember (or at least I remember) strange stuff in the world. Like I remember this one really cold TradeZone race (for those without the reference, this was the big winter training crit series in the Mid-Atlantic) and I had a warmup playlist that had two Decemberist (since it's December, yaknow?) songs on it - The Perfect Crime and The Sporting Life. Not exactly the death metal or hardcore house that some people warm up to, and perhaps another little clue as to why I was never really all that good at the racing of the bicycles?
Mike and I have this continual conversation, which I think any reasonable business leaders should have among themselves, which is "how do we increase the company's value while also increasing value to the customer?" The pre-order is a great example of this - you save money, we get an easier job of self-funding operations through sales. Just giving you money, in the form of giving you money, sure doesn't increase the company's value, so it's no good.
However, when you buy a new wheel set, there are generally a few things you need. A cassette is one of them, and tires are another. We have a bit of arbitrage to play on these, as we can (almost always) buy them for less than you can. So to increase activity at a slack time and allow us to do a better job, we're offering December pre-orders placed before 12/15 a free pair of tires. This applies to all of our carbon disc wheel sets.
How does this allow us to do our job better? We have a bit of a success disaster with each pre-order, in that orders come in at the last possible time every time. This is laudable and predictable behavior - keep your money as long as possible and maximize the effective discount. But what that does is create this giant log jam in building and shipping, further impacted by a conga line of "are they almost ready?????" emails. We might get a dozen orders in the last day of a pre-order, and let me tell you we can build nothing even remotely approaching that many sets in a day. So splitting that up and giving some extra incentive to get in early and wait a bit longer (and the APR is something like 100000% on this, so it's an easy one to choose) works for us as well as it works for you.
You may have clicked the link and said what are these guys smoking on their tire prices? Good question. Our tires include valves, sealant, and installation. Go to a shop and pay somewhere close to $100 for all this. Plus we're the only company I see installing rim tape at no charge (of course it's baked into the price but other places charge well more than what we bake in). So when you look at the whole thing, our tire prices are a great value.
A note on mountain bike wheels - if we install the tires for you, we can't fit the wheels in the box, so we can't install the tires. In these cases we'll include the valves, sealant and tires in the box and you'll have to install them. You'll also notice we don't put mountain bike tires in the store, which is because there are so many tires and so many strongly held preferences and people use one tire for the front and another for the rear, so it's no use. Just email us your preference and we'll work it out.
Please note that there are approximately infinity tires out there, and we can't list or carry or access all of them. Our selection in the store is more "greatest hits" than "boxed set." If you're looking for deep cuts, just email us and we'll do our best.
And since December is kind of a dull period for sales, we're doing free continental US shipping on alloy wheel sets. Just use code "cindylou" at checkout. (note that this is actually a $35 discount, which makes AUS and NZL shipping effectively $65 or so - check for latest rates)