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10 Jan 2012

Because I’m on a roll and everyone else is too Chicken….

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.
I’m quite passionate about the new, the experimental, the different, and firmly believe that people should support newcomers to the custom bike industry regardless of where they come from. As with life, there are no shortcuts of course. Some people from a proficiency POV at least, could probably hang their shingle out after 10 frames, but conversely there are also people out there who have built immensely more who are very very average. And of course it’s not just simply a proficiency issue - deciding to be a ‘custom bike builder’ takes many, many more skills of which the actual building of a frame is only one in a long list.
I think one of the key issues nobody really speaks about when it comes to start-ups - and this goes back to my earlier point of ‘Representation’ - is that if you invest a lot of time, money and effort into something, there’s a lot of pressure on you to ‘bullshit’. Capitalism is build on Bullshit, and framebuilding is no exception. After you’ve been doing it for 10-20 years, others create the bullshit for you to an extent, but as a start-up trying to keep your noise above the white noise as it were, marketing and social media are the tools and you need to be proficient - and prolific. Decades ago you’d put a little advert into the back of a magazine and turn up to some local races and that was it, but these days it’s full-on. You add that to the fact that you need to have some marketable differentiation as well as create bikes of interest with hype and spectacle and it’s pretty easy to see why guys who cut their teeth the ‘hard way’ and still essentially make the same bike they did when they started get their noses out of joint. My god there is a lot of bullshit out there so it’s no surprise it gets more and more difficult to separate ‘fact from fiction’.
Despite the oft over-used phrase…..’at the end of the day’, this is just how the current environment is, and you have to play the game as the rules are presented to you. Of course nothing is ever going to be like it was ‘back in the day’, but there just has to be an acceptance of that’s just the way it is, as with everything.
I think that with all systems, there’s a natural trend towards equalibrium and that is constantly being played out. What my main issue is however, is that there seems to be guys out there to continue to thrive despite being sub-par, and others who have bucketloads of talent and aren’t as much thriving as they should. How many times have you seen people complained about on forums and yet they still have a wait list? How many customers buy pretty much what seams solely on price and then complain when 6 months later their phonecalls aren’t being answered? How much of quality work at trade shows isn’t given enough media coverage because it’s not a fixie or a 500 buck custom stainless steel rack?

Posted by warwick @ 1:13 am

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