MICKEY SPOOKY-----------------------
Strengths
For us?- We can actually make true world-class pro-tested bike with a realistic level of capital. When can crowdsource funding for production. That's not going to happen with carbon bikes unless you are buying open mold frames and painting them. High-end crabon is expensive and complicated. For shiny corporate entities or tiny entities that are a lot better at business than I am they can generate a little money. They're going to need some sort of asset to leverage though. As a USA made bike company I have slim hopes of ever having enough money to buy a car.
How important to your customers do you think the "made in the USA" label is?
I'd say that country of origin is a priority for, and I'm not kidding here, all of our customers. Spooky is it when it comes to production road frames made in the US that broke bike racers(all of the good ones are broke). Cannondale left a few years ago. Everyone lost faith in aluminum, aluminum road bikes are considered priceppoint bikes. Real low pricepoints. Aluminum hardtail MTB frames at any price points aren't viable as mass-production bikes. The same goes for the 'cross frames we just sold out of too. We make production road frames because no one would ever pay the price we need for production mtb frames. We're so small that I need to zero in on people that we can reach.
I'm a decent all around bike racer- I have dreams at night about DS racing and DW helped us with a sweet DH bike(All Mountain too!)that we could proptype if we were thousandaires. I literally grew up inside the the last iteration of Spooky. We went broke doing too much contract fabrication~2000. All of that under-charging for fabrication helped to spawn the rider-owned bmx thing, so there's that. FBM,Kink,T1,Metal? Spooky made that happen. It killed us-but do you remember BMX then? It sucked.
In the late 1990's USA made was phenomenally important. The level of fabrication in Taiwan was nowhere near as good as it now and the working conditions were poor. If you were a bunch of guys walking out into the wilderness your bike had to be made in the USA. You didn't know how to do drawings, didn't fully understand how structures worked, you needed rapid prototyping for some x-games backflips. That's a story that people know. Made in the USA is a story that lots of long-time bike riders know. 100% USA 100% LOVE(i think we have a trademark on that. Score!).
We were the first people to really push the DJ/DS/URBAN! hardtail. I was 15 and everyone else was 10 years older...and everyone built bikes for a living. This was 1997 and they were already complaining about how poor their Chinese-made sandpaper was compared to the stuff that used to carry the same label. That imprints pretty fast- the people who make stuff notice quality first. People who make stuff feel the need to buy things from other people who make their own stuff.
I live on the East Coast. When I was a kid(and I'm only 31) my dad worked in a factory. And then he didn't. That town barely exists any more. The mill(once the largest in the world) burnt. It's now a hollow charred shell 10 years later. Peoples aunts and cousins and grandparents suffered for lack of pension and vanishing social services. Maybe it's an East Coast thing, it's probably the fact that we make USA bikes but I've never encountered a person who wouldn't buy a domestic bike if something hit the weight/price/geometry/suspension characteristics they want.
These are people who have lived through de-industrialization There is a cluster of consumers that you can sell bikes to. The rad shred-sleds that the West Coast FS companies sell appeal to a lot of people. A lot of the gram-shaving navel-grazing crowd both on the dirt and on the pavement just don't care about country of origin. This is the #1 demographic to avoid. USA does nothing for them. Time wasters, tire kickers, hagglers need not apply. Boosh!
How important to average MTB consumers do you feel the "made in the USA" is?
I think about 25% of consumers are even aware of country of origin in the bike industry and far less than that in the general population. Any freshman in college should understand the Bell curve, 50% of the population is straight up-retarded. This manifests itself in short-sighted decision making, selfishness, materialism and truely infuriating myopia that ranges from everything about perserveration over anodized chainring bolt colors to lack of understanding about their place in our political system.
To be clear- We've done XC race bikes, CX bikes and road bikes with SAPA. More than anything I want to build DS frames- but they'd need to be $900. That's a pretty silly price point for a bike that is usually a 2nd or 3rd bike in a market that seems to be mostly made up by people with limited disposable income. I think a few !USA! brands have small batches of ds/4x frames made in Taiwan so that they can actually sell them.
If I had 150mm light bikes I'd still have the same customer base I have now plus normaly people that actually buy stuff. Steber knows a lot more about those cats than I do. It seems like the base price for aluminum fs bike has gone down a few hundred bikes over the last seasons. That's seems tough. Maintain your consumer base. Push forward. Manage expectations.
I grew up around manufacturing. When factories close people starve and communities never recover. I can't reiterate that enough. Value is more than just dollars. People need to factor in the inadvertent suffering they cause when they buy imported products. Up here we have the company that is the standard in precision-they make surface plates, cutting tools, etc. My bandsaw blades are made in Brazil now. When I drive through Athol there are less cars in the parking lot now. Manufacturing is more than just factories. For every bike you buy consumables from 5 or 6 companies were used. That's before paint, screws, shock. Please think about that.
The bike corner of Sapa's Fabricated Components division didn't directly employ many people. Most of the people they did employ are likely already transferred to other jobs inside the mega-factory they work in. Airline seats or speed sensors for airplanes. Bikes are just some shit that get's welded together to them. No magic in it,just hard tooling, training and a bunch of numbers on a big piece of paper. So that's good right? People whinge about $40 differences in component prices, and have for years, but it's only till the last months that you hear the people complain about production leaving the US and the global economic whatever the heck they're calling it this week.
Lots of Americans have been really effected(devastated) by the way things have unraveled since Thatcher and Regan crushed the world with polo rackets back in the 80's and slit the throat of democracy in favor of concentration of power in the hands of a few self-absorbed suits who lived and died by the ticker tape. The voices or chronic under-employment have no economic voice but I'd like to think that when someone chooses to buy an American made product there is a real sense of duty and patriotism behind what they do. Our production bikes could be made just as well in Taiwan. they'd probabally be good enough that only I would notice. I hear Vietnam is actually getting pretty good too...
Some people want to think that they're buying SOUL. Sweedish Megacorporations don't have it but if we are making up an arbitrary SOUL metric some people believe that a chainsmoking Nascar fan who's just going to work everyday in a fairly rigid ISO factory is going to imbue a frame with special USA magic.
The customers I see for our bikes are progressive intellectual post-hardcore east coast establishment types that might work in the pharmaceutical industry or Wallstreet and want to atone for the sins of Selling Out by aligning themselves with their Punk Rock roots, poor kids from college towns, active and retired military personnel and people who work in manufacturing in the USA. What a badd-assed section of society. They all get along and find a way to use bikes to span a gap and create a community.
The #1 way we sell frames is through people seeing bikes at races or on group rides. A bitchin murdered-out deathmachine has universal appeal. I'm so stoked to talk to all of our customers. Last year people raced our stuff UCI events on 5 continents. We racked up serious results in XC and CX World Cup races and I think a few stage race victories in the Southwest. ClifBar even bought bikes from us for their road team for ethical(!) reasons. There is a big race presence. Domestic aluminum is revelatory on the road. It's just Spooky! Many of the other are customers are post-scarcity Anarchists that live in basements and work at shops to fund their bands that are really just an excuse to table at shows in Iowa and give out literature on animal rights. Some of them are creationists that train hard and live clean with that sort of pureness that people obsessed with original sin seem to be able to capture. A lot of them are really high level athletes. They buy our bikes to ride in the offseason or if the "team bike" they get doesn't fit or meet their needs. Taking the stickers off a black anodized bike doesn't say anything except Race.
They buy our bikes because they are better than other bikes at similar or higher pricepoints too- but the knowledge that they are made in the USA and sold by some sort of organisation that drips passion and social awareness really helps make the sale.
I end up having to sell our bikes less expensively than I'd like because we lack the material assets(including my time) to do anything more than build a grass-roots base. Money is speech. Time is money. Our bikes are better-but I don't have enough money to let the Freds, Joeys and Gapers in on the secret, but I do get free ClifBars sometimes.
With any sort of mid-production bike company domestically you need to be both bigger and smarter than I am to run anything more than a public service institution.
Now that Sapa is ceasing bike frame production, how do you think this will effect brands thatare now without a fabricator?
What brands? There is a handfull of "little" brands that Sapa built bikes for. I know that some of them are left in the lurch- there and Zen just hung out a shingle, but besides Zen there isn't and shop looking for work. I assume that's because it's pretty much impossible to make enough money fabricating complex 6061 bikes for other people without doing everything possible to reduce overhead-even then it has to be pretty tight. Industrial design has pushed lots of bikes into SpaceBikes.
Making weird shape tubes is pretty time consuming and most of the profiles that people are using on the "high" end right now are simply designed to replicate the shape of the carbon bike up the line. If you have to buy your tubes from Taiwan what's the point?
Being in Portland close to Sapa will give Zen and advantage. They are close to a skilled heatreater. Sapa might be heattreating their frames(a product is a product)as far as I know and I'm guessing their using the people that Sapa have used the last few years for ano. Those guys are good. They even seem to have a good time at work. The fact that the bike division of Sapa was originally an independent company called Anodizing Inc. When Sapa stopped anodizing frames in house back in 2009 or so it became obvious that the end was near.
I don't know who has been having their bikes made at Sapa lately. If they were doing significant volume they likely got more warning than people(like me) that only have a few orders a year.
People who are left in the lurch already have production ready products. A quote package to Taiwan one day can probabally get them 100 frames 90 days later. They build a lot of bikes in Taiwan and their production methods are way quicker and more advanced.
I really, really like the guys I've known at Sapa, and it's not their fault, but they, like Schwinn in the 80's have a pretty outdated facility. State or the art in the early '90s, never updated since. Manufacturing has become a lot more sophisticated.
I don't know how many customers were using Sapa for ideological reasons and how many were using them because Oregon is easier to get to and they speak english either. I wouldn't be surprised if proximity is a big reason for most of those people.
>>Do you feel Zen can take the place of Sapa quickly enough for companies effected by the change?
Way too late for that- It's a weird time of year. As a disclaimer I haven't talked to those guys yet. It seems like they are bringing over the Ellsworth contract. That seems great, but Ellsworth also seams to be making more and more carbon bikes every year. They seem smart enough to have multiple contingency plans.
The thing that is most likely going to make Zen work is the fact that they are floating around lower minimum order quantities and a willingness to work with steel and ti.
From my viewpoint the informed consumer will always choose aluminum but steel and ti have their merits and ardent adherents as well. Nobody that I can think of offers small-production steel or TI production except perhaps Waterford and Standard(no idea of pricing, minimums or even interest) and Lynskey for TI.
Steel and TI are more in line with the crowd that is willing to pay for boutique domestically made frame.
Time will tell, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a world where they are building mostly steel stuff for "companies" that consist of a bunch of buddies looking to sell some bikes to other people around where they live. That is what I'd like to see the small end of the bike biz be. Grassroots, decentralized, community focused- people learning how bikes are made and designed.
Remove all of the markup. That's what the radical in me wants to see. Join together and make your own bikes whether they be made in a garage or by Zen or FTW. Why not?
>> Does news like this effect you and Spooky at all?
I expected it to come sooner rather than later. I started the company with the idea that we'd have Sapa make slalom frames to sell to a distributor in the UK. That never happened. MTB consumers are, by and large, vermin. I mean that kindly. They live inside of their sad little cages looking, myopically I might say, for the hunk of cheese at the end of the maze. Consumers? That covers it. Too many of them are stuck in a world where everything is intangible except for blister-packed ideas.
In the current climate you need adherents not consumers to shift aluminum bikes. They need to believe in the material, the brand, the design. See Turner or Intense or Ventanna or Ellsworth as an example. Carbon is coming from most of those guys but I'd like to believe that it's a purely economic decision. Carbon manufacturing is just so darn good now. Expensive. SO expensive. Less expensive every year though. Nick Crumpton makes custom carbon road frames down in Texas that are made the "good way". They cost less than lots of asian production bikes. As a one man gig he skims a little off the top-but even he has introduced production bikes from Taiwan. The production bikes are only something like $300 cheaper. No wait though. USA made stuff is difficult. The big custom frame houses aren't making much money either. Everyone is feeling it.
The frame is the frame. The material, marketing bullshit, sticker typeface are window dressing. Geometry and suspension kinematics are the only things that really matter. The cheese-eating consumers missed that.
I just(as in yesterday) finished moving the entire Spooky operation into Frank The Welders(FTW) shop about 40 miles up the river from where we were. This process has been chugging along for a year now. While we sell through the stock of Sapa made road frames we're working to dial in a custom bike program. After 30 years of building frames FTW has bike making dialed. He is one of the only people left that can handle aluminum production. He had a shop in AZ in the 90's that likely exceeded Sapas recent output(coincidence- they built some Turners for a bit I think).
All of the skills, tooling, know how and experience is in a sleepy little Vermont town now. He's not that stoked on doing production work. It's a lot of work and time for a really small margin. It's pretty boring too. Without someon dropping a ton of cash on us the financing of production is hard. You have a lot of money tied up for a long time.
Small batches of seasonal production frames and made-to-measure fancy-pants frames are the new path. For a one desk jockey/one fabricator relationship less is more.
We've already been funding our production runs via grass-roots fundraising by the teams that we sponsor. Miraculously it works. That amount of organisation sucks and it only works on less-expensive bikes.
From here out we build a waitlist until there is critical mass and then run a small batch of semi-production frames. 100 $900 DS frames are hard to sell. 10 $1200 frames are easier to sell, but still a time and money pit and about $400 more than most consumers would consider(and that's on the high end). 20 $1500 road race frames that are strong enough for dirtjumping and tie-dye anodized would be easier than both of those things, because they'd be a novelty on the market. Novelty/Innovation. That's what gets people stoked. The fine line is to make sure you don't lose cred by making stupid crap. I know there is a huge demand for high-end razor scooters right now for example...
We need to work with consumers that understand the true meaning of Value. It's a lot more than free shipping on Amazon or close out left-hand SLX shifters on Pricepoint. Knowhaimean?
>> Is it even a reality these days to have a brand with decent production numbers that are 100% made in the USA?
Not one that employees very many people. Mo humans Mo problems. Modular in-house production and distribution to countries that still see USA made as a selling feature could string that out.
Spooky exists in a tangential world where only one person needs to eat off the company. It's hard for me to do that already. They say that 2000 frames a year is the magic number you need to hit to run a "production" operation. I'm already pert near dead from stress from a few hundred frames a year and a bunch of t-shirts. I can't see selling 2000 frames without a lot of marketing and consumer re-education. I decided a while ago that I just can't and don't want to try that. I kinda-sorta suck pretty hard at running a business. My brain is fickle and easily flustered.
The level of stoked-ness that I need to fling every day to keep everything going is pretty intense. Imagine 3 dudes living out of van during a 52 day tour playing music most people don't like. Except imagine one dude and imagine he ran out of gas money in North Dakota after taking a wrong turn somewhere in Minnesota.
The only way we could make enough production frames to make it work would be if someone would have to gumption to drop a bunch of money on the company with no plans of getting it back and then have the knowledge and ability to sit at a desk all day. Not gonna happen.
I'm confident that capitalized brands could keep building domestic aluminum as long as they want to as long as they don't have investors looking over their shoulders looking at ROI. At some point very soon they are going to need focus group with their customers to figure out what the brand means to them. It's going to mean carbon at multiple price points. It looks like Turner moved over seas and already has carbon frames on the boat. They have a super loyal base- if it works for them that will be the signal-consumers care less about country of origin than ever before.
Look at Trek though. They produce something like 15 carbon models domestically. That's really badass. It's hard to see the frame through all of that paint though. Simple Waterloo, simple! They should perhaps use it as a marketing feature, but they're Trek and I'm me so I should shut my face.
In the real 2011 a scrappy aluminum oriented production brand could make things work with great international distribution and promotion, and a small number of extremely overworked employees living in a crash pad eating ramen and working part-time at the autobody shop. That's not a very good business model though. It's a squat trying to make a stand for something they believe in, that being the value of aluminum in grass-roots racing and the value of making stuff in their community. Or something like that.
I know more than a handfull of kids who make bikes in the tiny "handmade" world that explain their interest as a compulsion driven by a desire to preserve the knowledge and infrastructure of manufacturing and metalwork. Some of them are looking hard for fab contracts from biomed/aerospace/academia because they've decoded they'd rather work with customers that pay enough, pay on time. I think they must like the foot in the door. There are less and less people every year that know how to make stuff. The US is going to become a manufacturing nation again in some capacity. Do you want to work for yourself or do you want to bow to our new overlords? What a wild idea for a bunch of twenty-somethings to share.
The safest place to be during a zombie attack is a fab shop.
TREK------------------
We make the Top Fuel, Elite hard tail, Superfly 100 and Session carbon
bikes here.
We don't outsource anything to other USA plants, and we don't have any
aluminum production here anymore. We do, however, have a full prototype
shop that would put many a small builder into a jealous fit of arc-welding
fist pumping.
STEBER--------------------------------------
How important to your customers do you think the "made in the USA" label is?
Currently the die hard "Intense for Life " customers buy into the fact that our Aluminum frames are produced in house in our factory and there is a sense of pride involved in ownership of a frame designed & produced in the USA.
Even more so with our international customers as we are very much so a Global brand , our customers are very passion driven and like to be different. I think you can say that mountain biking was born in the USA and specifically in California
so that should mean something.
How important to average MTB consumers do you feel the "made in the USA" is?
More and more to the average consumer coming into Mountain biking I don't think made in USA means so much , I struggle with that a lot these days, the fact that sticking to my ideals could lead to our demise.
Now that Sapa is ceasing bike frame production, would you ever consider manufacturing frames for other brands that are now without a fabricator?
Call it bad timing but we struggle to keep up with the 3500 aluminum frames we do a year as it is
Is it even a reality these days to have a brand with decent production numbers that are 100% made in the USA?
Again call it bad timing but I have invested over the years into a factory to produce high end aluminum frames others have chosen to place purchase orders to factories in Asia. We have put a lot of time & energy into making our factory more efficient and our MSRP's are actually in line or better than some of our competitors products produced in Asia. Carbon Fiber is quickly displacing aluminum at the high end just as Steel was replaced almost overnight by aluminum some 20 years ago. There is a lot of overhead attached to the manufacturing , employes, utilities, workman's comp , health ins, Social security on top of the administration , product development , sales ,marketing etc. Most of our competitors only have the later
I have and will always be a guy who makes things and will continue to do so at some level and that is one more thing that will help define why we are different . Intense frames will always look a bit different as they are coming from our own unique source
made by proud craftsmen from aluminum billet CNC'd and welded into works of art to be ridden by passionate aficionados.
It's no secret your carbon bike production is currently out-sourced overseas. Are you looking for any ways to produce carbon bikes in the U.S.? If so, what are the biggest hurdles to such an endeavor?
There was a point two years ago that we decided it was time intense embraced carbon and I wasted valuable time trying to find a way to do it here . We could do it but to source in the US would people pay $800.00 more so that was an easy answer . The only way
would be (like with our Aluminum ) to do it ourselves in house and we just don't have the expertise & resources to take that on .
So we are having the fronts & rears made in Asia and trying to add as much value as we can here with making the links , fasteners , assembly , shock etc. here and even the box made down the street.
This is still no easy task for a small undercapitalized company employing 30/35 Americans , a worst case sinerrio of sorts, the burden of in house manufacturing and offshore sourcing at the same time, kind of reminds me of the late , great GT of days gone by.
The next Generation of Intense “Part 1″
October 29th, 2011 by Mr_Intense
Part 1 ”My soap box”
Move over for my soap box!! I could talk this subject till black & blue for days and believe me it is from first hand experience. I have from day one and till this day always been a very hands on guy, basically I build stuff, designer / artist / craftsman type, with my hands.
I have hung on to this ideal to the bare end of our existence but there is a point when you have to buck up and do what currently works or risk losing it all. Carbon frames has been a huge step for a small under financed company like Intense especially when you have a shop full of HASS cnc machines & 35 employees & other local businesses we support in our community set up to produce High End aluminum frames.The overhead alone to support that structure in California / USA alone is challenging let alone the $ costs of developing proprietary Carbon frames off shore and we have stepped up to making both work.
Please blame it on the Big guys , Spec , Trek etc. as they have pollerized the small boutique
companies out of this Carbon trend , just as in road we now see Carbon taking over the high end moving up the segments from XC to Trail , AM even DH, the costs alone to do carbon are challenging to say the least but yes we must evolve or die so here we are doing our best. Just as aluminum displaced Chromo steel some 20+ years ago , overnight , and if you didn’t jump on the band wagon you where left in the dust to become smaller more niche, many are facing this same situation today.We are doing our best to add as much value on the new carbon frames here at our factory so we are just purchasing front & rears from Asia and manufacturing all the alloy parts, assembly, Fox shock etc. even the box is made down the street and you will see the Carbine MSRP is in line with the market.
If you check our made in USA in our factory alloy frame $ MSRP’s you will see we have remained very price competitive and some cases actually cheaper than others asian made frames with lesser suspension tech .
There is a movement in manufacturing these days as global economies crumble that you source where your manufacturing is and you manufacture where your customer is , so maybe our day is ahead of us if we can stick it out.
The next generation of intense “Part 2″
October 30th, 2011 by Mr_Intense
Part 2 ” Pass me a cry towel ”
Believe me when we decided 2 years ago, as we started seeing carbon pushing high end aluminum down stream, my first goal was to produce it in the USA. My good friend Jason from then ENVE and I thought we could do it and what a great story that would be for both of us. 6 months later the hard facts as our made in America Carbon frame would have to retail for $1000.00 more than the competition to cover the costs of the middle man doing the manufacturing.The decision was made based on the domestic trends and new buying habits that this would not work.
It would work if we produced it ourselves in our factory as we do with our high end aluminum but we had $ invested years into building our facility to produce aluminum and the casts to tool up for Carbon well forget it.
I decided to try an lobby for any programs avil to help us capitalize such a venture and set up a production cell for producing Carbon frames in our factory. Remember my brain says build not buy , but thats another story.I started local , chamber of commerce, county EDC, State , Federal, pretty much a waste of time for small companies our size. My wife & I even sent several letters explaining our dream & situation to President Obama, very frustrating not getting a response not even from an intern, time for the cry towel.
During all this we had decided we could make our aluminum factory work if it could become more efficient and started to introduced LEAN manufacturing principals
to improve capacity , QC, overhead etc. and this has been working well and is a process of constant improvement. We have started seeing the fruits of this direction and as stated earlier our Aluminum $ MSRP’s are in line or better than most in our class.
Strengths
For us?- We can actually make true world-class pro-tested bike with a realistic level of capital. When can crowdsource funding for production. That's not going to happen with carbon bikes unless you are buying open mold frames and painting them. High-end crabon is expensive and complicated. For shiny corporate entities or tiny entities that are a lot better at business than I am they can generate a little money. They're going to need some sort of asset to leverage though. As a USA made bike company I have slim hopes of ever having enough money to buy a car.
How important to your customers do you think the "made in the USA" label is?
I'd say that country of origin is a priority for, and I'm not kidding here, all of our customers. Spooky is it when it comes to production road frames made in the US that broke bike racers(all of the good ones are broke). Cannondale left a few years ago. Everyone lost faith in aluminum, aluminum road bikes are considered priceppoint bikes. Real low pricepoints. Aluminum hardtail MTB frames at any price points aren't viable as mass-production bikes. The same goes for the 'cross frames we just sold out of too. We make production road frames because no one would ever pay the price we need for production mtb frames. We're so small that I need to zero in on people that we can reach.
I'm a decent all around bike racer- I have dreams at night about DS racing and DW helped us with a sweet DH bike(All Mountain too!)that we could proptype if we were thousandaires. I literally grew up inside the the last iteration of Spooky. We went broke doing too much contract fabrication~2000. All of that under-charging for fabrication helped to spawn the rider-owned bmx thing, so there's that. FBM,Kink,T1,Metal? Spooky made that happen. It killed us-but do you remember BMX then? It sucked.
In the late 1990's USA made was phenomenally important. The level of fabrication in Taiwan was nowhere near as good as it now and the working conditions were poor. If you were a bunch of guys walking out into the wilderness your bike had to be made in the USA. You didn't know how to do drawings, didn't fully understand how structures worked, you needed rapid prototyping for some x-games backflips. That's a story that people know. Made in the USA is a story that lots of long-time bike riders know. 100% USA 100% LOVE(i think we have a trademark on that. Score!).
We were the first people to really push the DJ/DS/URBAN! hardtail. I was 15 and everyone else was 10 years older...and everyone built bikes for a living. This was 1997 and they were already complaining about how poor their Chinese-made sandpaper was compared to the stuff that used to carry the same label. That imprints pretty fast- the people who make stuff notice quality first. People who make stuff feel the need to buy things from other people who make their own stuff.
I live on the East Coast. When I was a kid(and I'm only 31) my dad worked in a factory. And then he didn't. That town barely exists any more. The mill(once the largest in the world) burnt. It's now a hollow charred shell 10 years later. Peoples aunts and cousins and grandparents suffered for lack of pension and vanishing social services. Maybe it's an East Coast thing, it's probably the fact that we make USA bikes but I've never encountered a person who wouldn't buy a domestic bike if something hit the weight/price/geometry/suspension characteristics they want.
These are people who have lived through de-industrialization There is a cluster of consumers that you can sell bikes to. The rad shred-sleds that the West Coast FS companies sell appeal to a lot of people. A lot of the gram-shaving navel-grazing crowd both on the dirt and on the pavement just don't care about country of origin. This is the #1 demographic to avoid. USA does nothing for them. Time wasters, tire kickers, hagglers need not apply. Boosh!
How important to average MTB consumers do you feel the "made in the USA" is?
I think about 25% of consumers are even aware of country of origin in the bike industry and far less than that in the general population. Any freshman in college should understand the Bell curve, 50% of the population is straight up-retarded. This manifests itself in short-sighted decision making, selfishness, materialism and truely infuriating myopia that ranges from everything about perserveration over anodized chainring bolt colors to lack of understanding about their place in our political system.
To be clear- We've done XC race bikes, CX bikes and road bikes with SAPA. More than anything I want to build DS frames- but they'd need to be $900. That's a pretty silly price point for a bike that is usually a 2nd or 3rd bike in a market that seems to be mostly made up by people with limited disposable income. I think a few !USA! brands have small batches of ds/4x frames made in Taiwan so that they can actually sell them.
If I had 150mm light bikes I'd still have the same customer base I have now plus normaly people that actually buy stuff. Steber knows a lot more about those cats than I do. It seems like the base price for aluminum fs bike has gone down a few hundred bikes over the last seasons. That's seems tough. Maintain your consumer base. Push forward. Manage expectations.
I grew up around manufacturing. When factories close people starve and communities never recover. I can't reiterate that enough. Value is more than just dollars. People need to factor in the inadvertent suffering they cause when they buy imported products. Up here we have the company that is the standard in precision-they make surface plates, cutting tools, etc. My bandsaw blades are made in Brazil now. When I drive through Athol there are less cars in the parking lot now. Manufacturing is more than just factories. For every bike you buy consumables from 5 or 6 companies were used. That's before paint, screws, shock. Please think about that.
The bike corner of Sapa's Fabricated Components division didn't directly employ many people. Most of the people they did employ are likely already transferred to other jobs inside the mega-factory they work in. Airline seats or speed sensors for airplanes. Bikes are just some shit that get's welded together to them. No magic in it,just hard tooling, training and a bunch of numbers on a big piece of paper. So that's good right? People whinge about $40 differences in component prices, and have for years, but it's only till the last months that you hear the people complain about production leaving the US and the global economic whatever the heck they're calling it this week.
Lots of Americans have been really effected(devastated) by the way things have unraveled since Thatcher and Regan crushed the world with polo rackets back in the 80's and slit the throat of democracy in favor of concentration of power in the hands of a few self-absorbed suits who lived and died by the ticker tape. The voices or chronic under-employment have no economic voice but I'd like to think that when someone chooses to buy an American made product there is a real sense of duty and patriotism behind what they do. Our production bikes could be made just as well in Taiwan. they'd probabally be good enough that only I would notice. I hear Vietnam is actually getting pretty good too...
Some people want to think that they're buying SOUL. Sweedish Megacorporations don't have it but if we are making up an arbitrary SOUL metric some people believe that a chainsmoking Nascar fan who's just going to work everyday in a fairly rigid ISO factory is going to imbue a frame with special USA magic.
The customers I see for our bikes are progressive intellectual post-hardcore east coast establishment types that might work in the pharmaceutical industry or Wallstreet and want to atone for the sins of Selling Out by aligning themselves with their Punk Rock roots, poor kids from college towns, active and retired military personnel and people who work in manufacturing in the USA. What a badd-assed section of society. They all get along and find a way to use bikes to span a gap and create a community.
The #1 way we sell frames is through people seeing bikes at races or on group rides. A bitchin murdered-out deathmachine has universal appeal. I'm so stoked to talk to all of our customers. Last year people raced our stuff UCI events on 5 continents. We racked up serious results in XC and CX World Cup races and I think a few stage race victories in the Southwest. ClifBar even bought bikes from us for their road team for ethical(!) reasons. There is a big race presence. Domestic aluminum is revelatory on the road. It's just Spooky! Many of the other are customers are post-scarcity Anarchists that live in basements and work at shops to fund their bands that are really just an excuse to table at shows in Iowa and give out literature on animal rights. Some of them are creationists that train hard and live clean with that sort of pureness that people obsessed with original sin seem to be able to capture. A lot of them are really high level athletes. They buy our bikes to ride in the offseason or if the "team bike" they get doesn't fit or meet their needs. Taking the stickers off a black anodized bike doesn't say anything except Race.
They buy our bikes because they are better than other bikes at similar or higher pricepoints too- but the knowledge that they are made in the USA and sold by some sort of organisation that drips passion and social awareness really helps make the sale.
I end up having to sell our bikes less expensively than I'd like because we lack the material assets(including my time) to do anything more than build a grass-roots base. Money is speech. Time is money. Our bikes are better-but I don't have enough money to let the Freds, Joeys and Gapers in on the secret, but I do get free ClifBars sometimes.
With any sort of mid-production bike company domestically you need to be both bigger and smarter than I am to run anything more than a public service institution.
Now that Sapa is ceasing bike frame production, how do you think this will effect brands thatare now without a fabricator?
What brands? There is a handfull of "little" brands that Sapa built bikes for. I know that some of them are left in the lurch- there and Zen just hung out a shingle, but besides Zen there isn't and shop looking for work. I assume that's because it's pretty much impossible to make enough money fabricating complex 6061 bikes for other people without doing everything possible to reduce overhead-even then it has to be pretty tight. Industrial design has pushed lots of bikes into SpaceBikes.
Making weird shape tubes is pretty time consuming and most of the profiles that people are using on the "high" end right now are simply designed to replicate the shape of the carbon bike up the line. If you have to buy your tubes from Taiwan what's the point?
Being in Portland close to Sapa will give Zen and advantage. They are close to a skilled heatreater. Sapa might be heattreating their frames(a product is a product)as far as I know and I'm guessing their using the people that Sapa have used the last few years for ano. Those guys are good. They even seem to have a good time at work. The fact that the bike division of Sapa was originally an independent company called Anodizing Inc. When Sapa stopped anodizing frames in house back in 2009 or so it became obvious that the end was near.
I don't know who has been having their bikes made at Sapa lately. If they were doing significant volume they likely got more warning than people(like me) that only have a few orders a year.
People who are left in the lurch already have production ready products. A quote package to Taiwan one day can probabally get them 100 frames 90 days later. They build a lot of bikes in Taiwan and their production methods are way quicker and more advanced.
I really, really like the guys I've known at Sapa, and it's not their fault, but they, like Schwinn in the 80's have a pretty outdated facility. State or the art in the early '90s, never updated since. Manufacturing has become a lot more sophisticated.
I don't know how many customers were using Sapa for ideological reasons and how many were using them because Oregon is easier to get to and they speak english either. I wouldn't be surprised if proximity is a big reason for most of those people.
>>Do you feel Zen can take the place of Sapa quickly enough for companies effected by the change?
Way too late for that- It's a weird time of year. As a disclaimer I haven't talked to those guys yet. It seems like they are bringing over the Ellsworth contract. That seems great, but Ellsworth also seams to be making more and more carbon bikes every year. They seem smart enough to have multiple contingency plans.
The thing that is most likely going to make Zen work is the fact that they are floating around lower minimum order quantities and a willingness to work with steel and ti.
From my viewpoint the informed consumer will always choose aluminum but steel and ti have their merits and ardent adherents as well. Nobody that I can think of offers small-production steel or TI production except perhaps Waterford and Standard(no idea of pricing, minimums or even interest) and Lynskey for TI.
Steel and TI are more in line with the crowd that is willing to pay for boutique domestically made frame.
Time will tell, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a world where they are building mostly steel stuff for "companies" that consist of a bunch of buddies looking to sell some bikes to other people around where they live. That is what I'd like to see the small end of the bike biz be. Grassroots, decentralized, community focused- people learning how bikes are made and designed.
Remove all of the markup. That's what the radical in me wants to see. Join together and make your own bikes whether they be made in a garage or by Zen or FTW. Why not?
>> Does news like this effect you and Spooky at all?
I expected it to come sooner rather than later. I started the company with the idea that we'd have Sapa make slalom frames to sell to a distributor in the UK. That never happened. MTB consumers are, by and large, vermin. I mean that kindly. They live inside of their sad little cages looking, myopically I might say, for the hunk of cheese at the end of the maze. Consumers? That covers it. Too many of them are stuck in a world where everything is intangible except for blister-packed ideas.
In the current climate you need adherents not consumers to shift aluminum bikes. They need to believe in the material, the brand, the design. See Turner or Intense or Ventanna or Ellsworth as an example. Carbon is coming from most of those guys but I'd like to believe that it's a purely economic decision. Carbon manufacturing is just so darn good now. Expensive. SO expensive. Less expensive every year though. Nick Crumpton makes custom carbon road frames down in Texas that are made the "good way". They cost less than lots of asian production bikes. As a one man gig he skims a little off the top-but even he has introduced production bikes from Taiwan. The production bikes are only something like $300 cheaper. No wait though. USA made stuff is difficult. The big custom frame houses aren't making much money either. Everyone is feeling it.
The frame is the frame. The material, marketing bullshit, sticker typeface are window dressing. Geometry and suspension kinematics are the only things that really matter. The cheese-eating consumers missed that.
I just(as in yesterday) finished moving the entire Spooky operation into Frank The Welders(FTW) shop about 40 miles up the river from where we were. This process has been chugging along for a year now. While we sell through the stock of Sapa made road frames we're working to dial in a custom bike program. After 30 years of building frames FTW has bike making dialed. He is one of the only people left that can handle aluminum production. He had a shop in AZ in the 90's that likely exceeded Sapas recent output(coincidence- they built some Turners for a bit I think).
All of the skills, tooling, know how and experience is in a sleepy little Vermont town now. He's not that stoked on doing production work. It's a lot of work and time for a really small margin. It's pretty boring too. Without someon dropping a ton of cash on us the financing of production is hard. You have a lot of money tied up for a long time.
Small batches of seasonal production frames and made-to-measure fancy-pants frames are the new path. For a one desk jockey/one fabricator relationship less is more.
We've already been funding our production runs via grass-roots fundraising by the teams that we sponsor. Miraculously it works. That amount of organisation sucks and it only works on less-expensive bikes.
From here out we build a waitlist until there is critical mass and then run a small batch of semi-production frames. 100 $900 DS frames are hard to sell. 10 $1200 frames are easier to sell, but still a time and money pit and about $400 more than most consumers would consider(and that's on the high end). 20 $1500 road race frames that are strong enough for dirtjumping and tie-dye anodized would be easier than both of those things, because they'd be a novelty on the market. Novelty/Innovation. That's what gets people stoked. The fine line is to make sure you don't lose cred by making stupid crap. I know there is a huge demand for high-end razor scooters right now for example...
We need to work with consumers that understand the true meaning of Value. It's a lot more than free shipping on Amazon or close out left-hand SLX shifters on Pricepoint. Knowhaimean?
>> Is it even a reality these days to have a brand with decent production numbers that are 100% made in the USA?
Not one that employees very many people. Mo humans Mo problems. Modular in-house production and distribution to countries that still see USA made as a selling feature could string that out.
Spooky exists in a tangential world where only one person needs to eat off the company. It's hard for me to do that already. They say that 2000 frames a year is the magic number you need to hit to run a "production" operation. I'm already pert near dead from stress from a few hundred frames a year and a bunch of t-shirts. I can't see selling 2000 frames without a lot of marketing and consumer re-education. I decided a while ago that I just can't and don't want to try that. I kinda-sorta suck pretty hard at running a business. My brain is fickle and easily flustered.
The level of stoked-ness that I need to fling every day to keep everything going is pretty intense. Imagine 3 dudes living out of van during a 52 day tour playing music most people don't like. Except imagine one dude and imagine he ran out of gas money in North Dakota after taking a wrong turn somewhere in Minnesota.
The only way we could make enough production frames to make it work would be if someone would have to gumption to drop a bunch of money on the company with no plans of getting it back and then have the knowledge and ability to sit at a desk all day. Not gonna happen.
I'm confident that capitalized brands could keep building domestic aluminum as long as they want to as long as they don't have investors looking over their shoulders looking at ROI. At some point very soon they are going to need focus group with their customers to figure out what the brand means to them. It's going to mean carbon at multiple price points. It looks like Turner moved over seas and already has carbon frames on the boat. They have a super loyal base- if it works for them that will be the signal-consumers care less about country of origin than ever before.
Look at Trek though. They produce something like 15 carbon models domestically. That's really badass. It's hard to see the frame through all of that paint though. Simple Waterloo, simple! They should perhaps use it as a marketing feature, but they're Trek and I'm me so I should shut my face.
In the real 2011 a scrappy aluminum oriented production brand could make things work with great international distribution and promotion, and a small number of extremely overworked employees living in a crash pad eating ramen and working part-time at the autobody shop. That's not a very good business model though. It's a squat trying to make a stand for something they believe in, that being the value of aluminum in grass-roots racing and the value of making stuff in their community. Or something like that.
I know more than a handfull of kids who make bikes in the tiny "handmade" world that explain their interest as a compulsion driven by a desire to preserve the knowledge and infrastructure of manufacturing and metalwork. Some of them are looking hard for fab contracts from biomed/aerospace/academia because they've decoded they'd rather work with customers that pay enough, pay on time. I think they must like the foot in the door. There are less and less people every year that know how to make stuff. The US is going to become a manufacturing nation again in some capacity. Do you want to work for yourself or do you want to bow to our new overlords? What a wild idea for a bunch of twenty-somethings to share.
The safest place to be during a zombie attack is a fab shop.
TREK------------------
We make the Top Fuel, Elite hard tail, Superfly 100 and Session carbon
bikes here.
We don't outsource anything to other USA plants, and we don't have any
aluminum production here anymore. We do, however, have a full prototype
shop that would put many a small builder into a jealous fit of arc-welding
fist pumping.
STEBER--------------------------------------
How important to your customers do you think the "made in the USA" label is?
Currently the die hard "Intense for Life " customers buy into the fact that our Aluminum frames are produced in house in our factory and there is a sense of pride involved in ownership of a frame designed & produced in the USA.
Even more so with our international customers as we are very much so a Global brand , our customers are very passion driven and like to be different. I think you can say that mountain biking was born in the USA and specifically in California
so that should mean something.
How important to average MTB consumers do you feel the "made in the USA" is?
More and more to the average consumer coming into Mountain biking I don't think made in USA means so much , I struggle with that a lot these days, the fact that sticking to my ideals could lead to our demise.
Now that Sapa is ceasing bike frame production, would you ever consider manufacturing frames for other brands that are now without a fabricator?
Call it bad timing but we struggle to keep up with the 3500 aluminum frames we do a year as it is
Is it even a reality these days to have a brand with decent production numbers that are 100% made in the USA?
Again call it bad timing but I have invested over the years into a factory to produce high end aluminum frames others have chosen to place purchase orders to factories in Asia. We have put a lot of time & energy into making our factory more efficient and our MSRP's are actually in line or better than some of our competitors products produced in Asia. Carbon Fiber is quickly displacing aluminum at the high end just as Steel was replaced almost overnight by aluminum some 20 years ago. There is a lot of overhead attached to the manufacturing , employes, utilities, workman's comp , health ins, Social security on top of the administration , product development , sales ,marketing etc. Most of our competitors only have the later
I have and will always be a guy who makes things and will continue to do so at some level and that is one more thing that will help define why we are different . Intense frames will always look a bit different as they are coming from our own unique source
made by proud craftsmen from aluminum billet CNC'd and welded into works of art to be ridden by passionate aficionados.
It's no secret your carbon bike production is currently out-sourced overseas. Are you looking for any ways to produce carbon bikes in the U.S.? If so, what are the biggest hurdles to such an endeavor?
There was a point two years ago that we decided it was time intense embraced carbon and I wasted valuable time trying to find a way to do it here . We could do it but to source in the US would people pay $800.00 more so that was an easy answer . The only way
would be (like with our Aluminum ) to do it ourselves in house and we just don't have the expertise & resources to take that on .
So we are having the fronts & rears made in Asia and trying to add as much value as we can here with making the links , fasteners , assembly , shock etc. here and even the box made down the street.
This is still no easy task for a small undercapitalized company employing 30/35 Americans , a worst case sinerrio of sorts, the burden of in house manufacturing and offshore sourcing at the same time, kind of reminds me of the late , great GT of days gone by.
The next Generation of Intense “Part 1″
October 29th, 2011 by Mr_Intense
Part 1 ”My soap box”
Move over for my soap box!! I could talk this subject till black & blue for days and believe me it is from first hand experience. I have from day one and till this day always been a very hands on guy, basically I build stuff, designer / artist / craftsman type, with my hands.
I have hung on to this ideal to the bare end of our existence but there is a point when you have to buck up and do what currently works or risk losing it all. Carbon frames has been a huge step for a small under financed company like Intense especially when you have a shop full of HASS cnc machines & 35 employees & other local businesses we support in our community set up to produce High End aluminum frames.The overhead alone to support that structure in California / USA alone is challenging let alone the $ costs of developing proprietary Carbon frames off shore and we have stepped up to making both work.
Please blame it on the Big guys , Spec , Trek etc. as they have pollerized the small boutique
companies out of this Carbon trend , just as in road we now see Carbon taking over the high end moving up the segments from XC to Trail , AM even DH, the costs alone to do carbon are challenging to say the least but yes we must evolve or die so here we are doing our best. Just as aluminum displaced Chromo steel some 20+ years ago , overnight , and if you didn’t jump on the band wagon you where left in the dust to become smaller more niche, many are facing this same situation today.We are doing our best to add as much value on the new carbon frames here at our factory so we are just purchasing front & rears from Asia and manufacturing all the alloy parts, assembly, Fox shock etc. even the box is made down the street and you will see the Carbine MSRP is in line with the market.
If you check our made in USA in our factory alloy frame $ MSRP’s you will see we have remained very price competitive and some cases actually cheaper than others asian made frames with lesser suspension tech .
There is a movement in manufacturing these days as global economies crumble that you source where your manufacturing is and you manufacture where your customer is , so maybe our day is ahead of us if we can stick it out.
The next generation of intense “Part 2″
October 30th, 2011 by Mr_Intense
Part 2 ” Pass me a cry towel ”
Believe me when we decided 2 years ago, as we started seeing carbon pushing high end aluminum down stream, my first goal was to produce it in the USA. My good friend Jason from then ENVE and I thought we could do it and what a great story that would be for both of us. 6 months later the hard facts as our made in America Carbon frame would have to retail for $1000.00 more than the competition to cover the costs of the middle man doing the manufacturing.The decision was made based on the domestic trends and new buying habits that this would not work.
It would work if we produced it ourselves in our factory as we do with our high end aluminum but we had $ invested years into building our facility to produce aluminum and the casts to tool up for Carbon well forget it.
I decided to try an lobby for any programs avil to help us capitalize such a venture and set up a production cell for producing Carbon frames in our factory. Remember my brain says build not buy , but thats another story.I started local , chamber of commerce, county EDC, State , Federal, pretty much a waste of time for small companies our size. My wife & I even sent several letters explaining our dream & situation to President Obama, very frustrating not getting a response not even from an intern, time for the cry towel.
During all this we had decided we could make our aluminum factory work if it could become more efficient and started to introduced LEAN manufacturing principals
to improve capacity , QC, overhead etc. and this has been working well and is a process of constant improvement. We have started seeing the fruits of this direction and as stated earlier our Aluminum $ MSRP’s are in line or better than most in our class.
12/13/2011 8:49am
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