This is pretty novel, and for $10 bucks, a good deal. Fantastic name.
Curious, are all bike seat underpinnings standardized? Will these work on all seats?
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@porterhaney The size and spacing of most saddle rails is standardized, so the short answer is that Ass Savers should fit almost all bikes. If you're unsure if it will work for you we do offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee when you purchase directly from us. That means that for whatever reason, if an Ass Saver isn't working for you and we can't help you get a satisfactory experience with our products, we issue a complete refund.
For the longer answer, I do want to mention a few exceptions in terms of fit. Brooks saddles have their rails spaced much wider, but we've got a model for that called BrookShield. As well, some carbon/square railed saddles may present a fit issue – but I've got a saddle from Specialized with these rails on my bike and it works for me. Monorail saddles are always a no go, as our patent pending attachment system snaps between the saddle rails just ahead of the seat post.
Hope this answers your question, happy to go into more detail if you like.
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http://www.musguard.com/ had a similar approach almost 1.5y ago...I prefer the fender to be as close to the wheel as possible, to be honest.
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@boettges We think Musguard is a really great product for those times when you need even more protection. So is the Fendor Bendor from Wit Industries: http://www.witindustries.nl/coll...
That being said, we've been around for a little over three years now and have seen quite a bit of growth both in terms of our own sales and the sprouting of "competitors" pretty regularly. I use quotation marks because there are enough asses to be saved in the world and we like that others have joined in - we don't see things as "with us or against us".
And, just for some insight into our design process we intentionally sought out a way to provide the most amount of protection in the smallest package. In fact one of the original design requirements was that it be able to store underneath the saddle which dictated some of the dimensions. The other thing to take note of is that what you gain by having the fender closer to the tires is the ability to stop the water from splashing onto your inner thighs. This comes at the expense of requiring a lot more material, in fact, Ass Savers use about 10% of the material as your standard "beaver tail" fender and probably about 1/3 of other foldable plastic fenders. As a company with a strong focus on sustainability we think that's pretty good.
Also, if you're just curious about how well it works we'd be happy to send you one to try out. If you don't like it, just give it to a friend – drop a line to jungho / at / ass-savers.com if you're keen on that one.
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@najunghoya Wow! Talk about caring about customer relations and standing behind your product. With that offer I sure will drop you a line and give it a run (and report back, of course!).
Regarding your product...kept thinking about it the last (rainy) days: Design-wise I see one big advantage of your product. You can rely on the only product that is the most heavily standardized one, as well on newer and older bikes. – The saddle's mount.
This provides higher compatibility than catering for the various forms of seat stay / seat tube combinations. Not to mention all the different sizes and issues that brakes (if mounted) evoke regularly with other products out there.
I honestly did not know that you were in business since 3 years? And I'm a bike guy, but word spread about the Ass Savers unluckily didn't reach me. I guess the crowdfunding campaign ran by musguard was clever to gain attention.
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@boettges Yes, we've found that the saddle rails are standardized to a good degree (some exceptions for very wide saddles like Brooks, monorail saddles, and squared carbon rails) which allows us to confidently attach it to most bikes we find around.
Other solutions have their positives, too, but we do think this attachment point allows us to be surprisingly efficient at preventing annoying, embarrassing, irritating brown stripe from going up your crack (or down your crack if water/sand/grime gets between your jersey and bibs).
We know everyone in the world hasn't heard about us, and we're working on spreading the word. Our objective is to do that in an organic manner that doesn't annoy people and is at a rate that we can manage as a small company. Our point of view is that steady growth leads to a sustainable business and we're quite proud that it's taken us this far!
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Well with a name like that, they're sure to blow up.
Only thing I wish companies would do is localize pricing - this goes for US-based companies as well.
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@stttories In the past we have used plugins to offer pseudo-localized pricing which is pulled from sites like xe.com that do currency conversion. The problem we have with this is that prices end up with awkward numbers like $10.03 which isn't something we like from a product positioning point of view. If we're going to localize pricing we want it to be truly localized and be able to target psychological price barriers. To offer true localization requires a level of e-commerce sophistication which is realistically beyond what we're able to manage at this point – we're still quite a small company.
Of course, we're totally open to any suggestions that anybody might have in regards to alternative ways to approach this. Hope this sheds some light on where we've ended up! Happy to discuss it more.
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