18 Jan 2012

I just stumbled upon this write-up by the online retailler Competitive Cyclist. I subscribe to their email newsletter and a simple word got me to click-thru -

Merlin.

At one stage, there was only Merlin. If you lusted after a Titanium bike, it had ‘Merlin’ on the downtube. With so many Ti builders now struggling for a piece of the pie, Merlin was one of those brands that honestly I hadn’t thought about for quite a few years. I don’t know the details of what’s happening with them at the moment (I’ll investigate further after this post), but this blog post from Competitive Cyclist just reinforces what I’ve been saying since NAHBS inception, about how amateur and myopic the thing is.

It’s been a yearlong struggle trying to nail down our goals for the resurrection of the brand: Is an art project OK, or should we pursue financially viability? Is it reasonable to maintain Merlin’s fanaticism for titanium, or is moving into carbon inevitable?

It was a debate with a deadline because of a daydream I couldn’t shed. I wanted to officially and pyrotechnically re-introduce the brand and unveil our design concepts in March at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS) in Sacramento.

NAHBS seemed like the perfect place for our kickoff. It’s a show that celebrates craft while simultaneously extending a big middle finger to the bike industry. There’s an appealing lack of retailer politics and the tedium of distribution and market talk. Like nearly all the brands present at NAHBS, Merlin would put the customer first, not the bike shop.

Ah-HA! But it doesn’t. It’s a tool for Don Walkers’ “You’re either with us or against us” conservative xenophobia. Welcome to the North American Lathe Owners Show.

We contacted the show about reserving booth space. But its reply was heartbreaking. Registration was limited to brands conforming to, among other things, these regulations:

“FRAME BUILDERS: PRIMARY DISPLAY BIKES ONLY (YOU BUILT THESE IN YOUR WORKSHOP).
No bicycles are permitted in any frame builder’s booth other than those built by the exhibitor, and if branded, bearing the exhibitor’s brand.
No sub-contracted bicycles are permitted. Not even those by a current-year NAHBS exhibitor.”

This last section I believe is a new edition. So, to put this into a real world scenario - Say for instance you build TIG bikes and you’re exhibiting at NAHBS, if you collaborate with say a fillet brazer on a new product, or you subcontract a sub assembly for a full suspension bike like a swingarm, neither of you can promote that fact. Retarded.

Given the vast untapped capacity for titanium bike production in the US, we never gave a moment’s thought to anything except subcontracting Merlin’s production. Doing otherwise would be staring into the economic abyss.

Here at Competitive Cyclist we keenly appreciate Merlin’s past, we’re consumed with a passion for riding….But when it comes to what we don’t know, like sourcing flawless raw material and the meticulous manufacturing, there’s a great deal of underutilized capability available in America. To develop that expertise within our four walls would be plain dumb.

Yes indeed it would. You didn’t think supporting US micro-manufacturing would be something NAHBS would want to support, did you? How naive!

One man in a shed = good.

Two men in a shed, letting someone else do all the tedious design, sales and marketing = bad.

And so the end of my NAHBS dream upended my vision of what Merlin may become. The one-time titans of Ti are breathing their last breaths. For a reason. The Independent Fabrication buzz from 2009 has seemingly vanished. What in the world is going on at Serotta? Doesn’t the resurgence of Litespeed rest purely on the back of carbon? What percentage of Seven bikes are Ti? The remains of Titus were bought by whom? And who with a taste for Ti wouldn’t just want to buy a Moots?

Well, not me. I’d rather buy an Alliance, Vertigo, (neuw skoul) Eriksen or Steve Potts (ould skoul). I do have to add that this last paragraph doesn’t really make much sense to me though. Those established brands are probably doing okay, but perhaps people are buying direct or thought their LBS and not places like Competitive Cyclist. The pressure on these small micro-manufacturers must be huge too - yesterday I walked into a bike shop (very rare occurrence as I hate them and they smell of rubber) and there was a full carbon Merida road bike, a 1100g frame with Ultegra Di2 for 3k+ change. Heck, if I knew nothing about geometry and were stupor-fied by the 543 times it said MERIDA on it, I’d think that was a pretty good deal, too.

Anyway, that reminds me. Geometry. In my size, these guys get it as right as it gets - Volagi bikes.

Top Tube - 596mm. Good.

Head Tube - 237mm. Good.

Seat Tube Angle - 72.75. Not the best, but workable.

Chainstay - 414mm. Acceptable. At least these change depending on the size.

These guys were brought to my attention when the owners - ex-Specialized employees - were taken to court by said company for contract infringement. You know you’re a potential threat when the company you worked for tries to bankrupt you - nice job guys. For the record Specialized won and were awarded ONE DOLLAR, which in layman’s terms means technically they were right, but the court finds their trying of the case as contemptible, and gives them a whole buck for their trouble. Personally I would’ve liked to have seen the Judge Judy version, especially if there was one where she swore. Specialized is officially on my shit-list, especially with douche-y comments….

“This lawsuit was a matter of principle and about protecting our culture of trust and innovation. We respect the ruling of the court in our favour. We are very satisfied with the outcome and the damages set at $1.00. We really want to put all our passion and time into growing the sport of cycling.” - Mike Sinyard

Laughable. Choi had a good comeback -

“We think justice was served. I want to tell the cycling world to breathe a sigh of relief, too, because we can still paint bikes red.”

Well….maybe not a good comeback because I hate red bikes almost as much as I hate white ones.

Posted by warwick @ 11:17 pm

10 Jan 2012

I was just reading this article after reading this response by everyones’ friend and mentor Richard Sachs. Despite my lifetime in the bike industry and 20 years as a design professional, for some reason I still have issue with the Establishment having a passive-agressive dig at the noobs. You’d think at my age I’d be stroking my beard, nodding my head in agreement on how there’s just too many ’sandwich artists’ (love this term!) polluting (mostly Portland) our beloved custom bike industry. You’d also think after having been burned so often despite my best efforts by framebuilding contractors that I’d be pretty damn brutal when it comes to recommending noobs, but I just can’t. The world needs noobs.

There’s two avenues of responsibility here in this discussion that I think are of equal importance.

The first is ‘Representation’. Start-up framebuilders need to project themselves as such - in virtua as well as in their pricing etc. - and need to adequately inform buyers of their experience, their background, and back up the talk with action.This takes time and there’s no short-cuts.

The second avenue is that of ‘Caveat emptor’. If you’re going to ‘invest’ in a noob framebuilder as a customer, do your homework and jump in fully with the knowledge that you are an ‘Early Adopter’ and there are risks pertaining to that. If you decide to go with a less established builder, you go in ‘eyes wide open’.

The world needs noobs and early adoptors, so I have no problem whatsoever with either.

Honestly, I think that if those two simple ‘Avenues of Responsibility’ are adhered to, then given time as with all things, the wheat will separate from the chaff as it were and an environment will be created where talented noobs will be ‘allowed’ to flourish, and the smoke and mirrors people will fall by the wayside, as they have always done. In every industry. Since the beginning of time.

I think the problem is with The Establishment, is there is a lack of understanding that in the ‘modern age’, there is -

1. More than one legitimate way to enter the custom bike industry
2. There is virtually no way to apprentice or traineeship in the custom bike industry
3. Self promotion and knowledge of social media is absolutely crucial

1. People in general have to understand that at the core of framebuilding is the very simple (and yet very complicated) act of sticking 8 tubes together in a reasonably straight and neat fashion. We’re not talking rocket science here, it’s a basic trade - simply learned but hard to perfect. Of course it’s very easy for me to say this because I’m not a framebuilder, but I have met in my years many people who are not framebuilders who could easily make a bike frame with very little if any training. There’s even people I’ve met who just have excellent hand skills whom I think could make a solid, sellable frame in very, very little time. People who come from engineering and design backgrounds, jewellery-makers, mechanics, machinists - there are so many ’satellite’ industries which could easily produce a framebuilder in a very short period of time - not to mention people with just flat-out talent. Nobody should be putting framebuilding on such a pedestal as to make it un-attainable by people unless they follow the ‘one true path’. This is Pro-Establishment drivel.

2. You can’t complain that someone hasn’t walked the ‘one true path’ when there isn’t one. There are no 1970’s style English apprenticeships to be had, you can’t fly to Taiwan and go work in a bike factory, and no established builder is going to take you on. I find it rich when established builders complain about noobs not doing traineeships and going to UBI when a) there isnt any traineeships, b) They’ve never ever had an apprentice thenselves, and c) when did doing a course not be a valid thing to do? Please, go to UBI, go do Dave Bohm’s framebuilding course, because everything is learning - just don’t think the learning stops there.

3. After selling custom bikes for the past 10 years, I can tell you, I spend less than half my time actually designing and documenting the frame.  Most of my time - and if you ask anyone, even the ‘Do everything yourself’ builders - they will concur. “It’s not about the bike” said Mr.Armstrong, and he didn’t know the phrase would have such universal application. You can’t bemoan this fact - you just have to look at it as a potential fast-track - because that’s what it is. The real reason why the Establishment often bemoans social media is because it makes what took them 25 years these days only takes 5. It also smacks of self promotion - not something your average engineering based mindset thinks has any value because you should ‘make it and they will come’. Over the din of the white-noise that is our modern life, I can tell you now. They won’t.

Posted by warwick @ 1:13 am