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26 Dec 2011I love you Bruce, but………no.About a week ago, one of my favourite grumpy ol’ bike builders, added to his already superb back catalogue of rants with this pearler. As is customary with most rants, it’s important to firstly express how qualified you are by prefacing the rant with qualifications consumate to the length or intensity of the rant, and in this respect Bruce firmly trumps all-comers by having being building custom bike for nearly 40 years. However with this, also comes the customary rose coloured glasses as well as a more conservative approach to the concept of what you are doing and saying is right, and has never been more right. Bruce lists these items as being what he feels are key innovations of the past 40 years -
Phil Wood hubs are also now IMHO one of the most unrefined and anachronistic hubs available, and now exist not because they’re innovative but because they’re ‘retro’. All sealed bearing hubs really do is make the manufacturing process easier - they don’t per se make for an instantly better hub.
EPS is an environmental nightmare, completely unrecyclable, and I cringe every time I put my helmet on. You could easily argue that Mr.Gentes has done the world a major disservice by popularising Styrene based helmets.
Goodonya Bruce!
Did they? What about Chris Chance? Im not even convinced either of those were the first, and without too much research on my behalf, I think there might’ve been much earlier examples of TIG welded bikes out there in the popular realm. Regardless, TIG is a production issue, and I think of all these millions of production enhancements in every aspect of bike manufacture, TIG welding is just one in a million. You could easily argue the inventer of Cold Forging has done as much for bicycle production, if not more.
Hard to argue with that one, although suspension forks for bicycles already existed.
People have been riding on dirt for eternity. It took the Americans to condense it into a ’sport’, and good on them for doing it.
And if you look at American derailleur design, it’s either a CNC monstrosity that does doesn’t work, or based on Shimano designs. In terms of drivetrain and derailleur design for the past 50 years, Shimano pwns all. No valuable IP at Shimano, Bruce?
And therein lies the rub. I think it’s a bit rich to say that Intellectual Property in cycling is predominantly the realm of The West. In fact, I think it borders on xenophobia (sorry Bruce). As manufacturing has declined in the West, the IP for manufacturing and production has been developing in SE Asia. Do you think the Designers and Engineers for Toyota for example are all Westerners, or that all the Designers and Engineers in Asia are sitting at their desks, never having had an original thought, spending all their time scouring the West for ideas they can ‘liberate’?
Not only that, but how many US based cycling companies invent something, and then rest on their laurels and not evolve that IP into something with longevity? While I adore what the smaller innovative companies do, I see so many with a good initial concept which turns into one product which then stagnates because of the inward looking US perspective and the decline of the US-Based manufacturing options. The jump from cottage industry is hampered by the fact that the relevant production IP is in SE Asia, and without which for a big chunk of companies I’m sure, they would not go much further than being a cute and romantic small company with limited reach. Probably just before being bought up by a larger SE Asian based manufacturer.
I don’t think for example that Mike Synard sold 19% of Specialized to Merida because they lacked the ideas to produce bicycle effectively without his great innovative Western brain.
Anyway, the reason I mention those two points above, is really just to illustrate the point that Intellectual property not only is not limited to Geography, but also not limited to the singularity. You need IP everywhere, throughout all stages of design, and a good idea without the good ideas on how to design, make and implement said design is worthless. I always say, there’s not a shortage of ideas, just a shortage of ways to get the ideas out there. The ‘Idea’ is the easy bit.
So, what else does Bruce have to say?
Honestly, in this ‘new golden age’ of the handbuilt bicycle, I find this statement a bit bizarre. It’s a small boomtime for the handbuilt bicycle industry, and there have never been so many lawyers, bankers, and doctors out there to buy the stuff. Yep, I was being facetious. Somewhat. I forgot IT dorks and Patent Lawyers….and of course the enthusiasts. Let’s not forget them. (10 points to anyone who can spot the irony there)
But what about other ‘Innovations’ - the ones that are out of the reach of the small machine shop or guy in his basement with a sewing machine? I don’t see any of those backyard-y innovators coming up with hollow cold forged cranks and the myriad of other processes that are completely out of the reach of those not fully immersed in the manufacturing industry.
Aside from the myth that everyone in China works for $1 an hour and has no interest in bikes, this is such a broad generalisation. Whilst the ideal that everyone who has a job does so solely because they love it and have a passion for the ‘thing’ they do is awesome, I’d hazard to suggest it’s not the reality for most people and that it is somewhat of a Western luxury. Personally, I’d just be happy that a ‘worker’ has pride in their job enough not to sacrifice it or the company he/he works for. If they love the job and the product, that’s just a bonus.
Environmentally, Bruce posted up this picture to illustrate how dire things are with manufacturing in SE Asia….
 For every one of those pictures you can post, you can post these…..
 Or this….
 It’s not like in the US all this amazing innovation is leading to huge leaps in bicycle usage. We’ll leave that up to the poorer developing countries, shall we? I’m under no illusion that the custom bicycle industry is driving increased bicycle usage or any IP resulting from it - it’s an upper-echelon, elitist minority of passionate lifestylers - and I’m just fine with that but I won’t be drawing a long bow and say for example that developing a bolt-on fixie hub or chain guide is going to change the world.
What people don’t get, is that once your innovative little company gets to a certain level, you just can’t make enough of the damn things quick enough to satiate demand. So, you either throw a boatload of money at increasing your investment in capital equipment and labour (stupid), or you look somewhere else and lo-and-behold you find someone that can not only produce in the qtys you need, but faster, cheaper, more efficiently, and often better. The two examples I often quote are Crumpler bags and Sun rims - both of which every marker of their product went up after they outsourced. *Shazam* you’ve freed up more capital to expand your product line and R&D. It will be the same with Rapha - especially considering costs generally go down but the RRP doesn’t.
I don’t believe there isn’t anything that can’t be scaled up using any form of labour - the problem is that there simply isn’t anyone to do it. As manufacturing moved out of the West during the last 40 years, a lot of that capacity and IP has moved offshore. To top it off, there’s been a lot of consolidation of businesses back to their core business and moving away from the smaller less profitable arms of their business, such as the recent withdrawal of SAPA from Aluminium bicycle manufacturing in the US.
The other thing to realise is that the higher up in the food chain you are, the higher the profits. Manufacturers are always being squeezed at the expense of increasing retail margins, so the smart money is not to get into manufacturing but to increase your vertical integration upwards rather than downwards because that’s where the money is. Freed capital is more money to innovate, more money for R&D, and more money for marketing.
I don’t think anyone would argue that sometimes keeping things small is just fine, and what Bruce does and essentially the whole US custom bike industry is fine too, or I wouldn’t have been involved in it for the last 10 years. I’m not however under any delusions as to where IP comes from, what is valuable IP and what isn’t, nor do I have any romantic ideas where we all only buy things from ‘passionate’ people and we all ride, wear, and use only locally produced handmade goods. That in and of itself is an unsustainable Western ideal. Whether we like it or not, we need ideas no matter where they come from, and we need mass production and the IP that surrounds that is super valuable.
What has to happen now, is a rationalisation of that manufacturing because essentially, very little has been done since the industrial revolution. The fact that ‘Cradle to Cradle’ is a new concept, to me, is much more shocking than anything else. The solution is not going back to pre-industrial revolution romanticism, but to turn mass production into a sustainable practice back to the ideals that the Gropius espoused at the beginning of the concept of Industrial Design. In 100 years we’ve pretty much not evolved that ideal one iota.
Posted by warwick @ 3:21 am 3 comments |