I agree, the show is not geared towards builders, much more focused on designers and brands that already have a presence in bicycle media. I was mystified last year when Wilde bikes was there, and this year had more brands and less independent manufacturers.
A distinct separation would be nice to showcase the difference between sending drawings off to have bikes built and people working within their abilities and tooling. If you don’t have to build the bikes, or buy tooling to make them, a person inherently has more time and money to throw at marketing and the designs can be as amazing as their imaginations.
There were a fair amount of builders who did the smart thing, which was have their bike displayed at a component manufacturers booth. If you can get yourself in that position, that’s the move.
The people I want riding my bikes probably don’t attend that show, but it’s an opportunity for me to get on the internet to stir some interest. The shows proximity to my home is the main reason I attend and will more than likely go back. I had a great time talking with attendees and listening to their stories that were centered around riding bikes.
I used to work for a PR firm and I know why it’s a full time job or a contract service. Going to shows is only a teeny part of an entire marketing plan; it has to be part of multi-arm approach with advertising, press releases, social media posts, collaborations (you’re right about this @maxwellkeegan ), shaking hands with media EDITORS (they decide who gets coverage or not, not the writers), etc.
One could go the grassroots / guerilla / word of mouth marketing route, but I bet you need to sell more than one bike a month to survive.
This might be one of those instances that “it takes money to make money”.
I am not fortunate enough to be able to attend any international shows. In fact, most of the time I opt out of even regional “shows” because they are often just outdoor focused with a bike section and cost too much money… not my market demographic
As you say, lots of money and hard work + time to be able to attend these things, I’ve never personally experienced any notable gains from going to shows ( Maybe an international one would be better because Canada sucks ) but for the most part im too busy building bikes to even consider.
In short - I sleep better when making money by working rather than spending money for clout and hoping to see some kind of returns. Just my opinion.
I will chime in as a first time attendee and Made 2024 being my first show ever for Rare Earth. I had a lot of potential upside going into the show with pretty low awareness of my brand being less than a year old. I put a lot of effort and $ into the two bikes I brought to the show and I even road tripped all the way from Wisconsin with my 16 yo son to the show, so my time away from the shop was considerable. All that being said, I found the show to be worth it in terms of increased awareness, media coverage and customer leads. My question now is if it will be worth coming back next year. I really value meeting other builders and getting inspired by their work. I worked in outdoor footwear design for almost 20 years and my experience with trade shows was that they absolutely weren’t worth the money spent on being there. Made is on a much smaller scale than Outdoor Retailer, but I think most shows mature into benefiting fewer and fewer brands as they grow. Overall, I had a great show and I’m really happy I went.
After chatting with more builders offline, many feel the same way. I think I honed in on the problem: we are pretending that the framebuilding has bigger market than it actually does. None of the artisan framebuilders are at the size where we can benefit from these big PR pushes. And when everyone is forced to pretend all at once, everyone drowns each other out in the noise.
Some people point the finger to “production” brands being at the show. But I feel like companies like Ritchey, Wilde, OTSO, Curve and the USA giants like No22, Moots, Mosiac are allies to the artisan framebuilders. Those companies feed real money and attention to the event, and events need money and attention to survive. But we need to be real. Those companies probably have marketing budgets bigger than most framebuilders can make in a year.
If you are new, you feel obligated to go and be a part of the community and be noticed. However, for many new brands, the amount of work, time, and money needed to attend the event is enough to bankrupt your fledgling business. People’s attention spans are so short these days that photos on websites and social media do nothing.
MADE is really cool. I think it is the best show for passionate, bike loving people. It is unique in that it highlights a lot of small to mid-sized brands. There are rumors of a MADE Japan, which I would love to attend as a fan. However, as a framebuilder, I think these shows kill us. And that is a shame because my favorite part was engaging with the framebuilder community.
The economics, the incentive structure, and our own culture need to change. Otherwise we end up at the bottom of the pyramid of the bike industry ponzi scheme.
I felt this really hard when I attended in 2023 and is part of why I didn’t come back (also I was packing up to move back across the country ). It felt like if you weren’t in the “cool kids club” of hot established builders with fancy finishing and premium everything, you weren’t the focus of the show. Like you said, I invested thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into attending and while I did end up getting a few leads from the show, I was too burned out from the prep work to follow up on them.
I’ve gotten the most media attention from errant shitposting on instagram so I’m going to focus on that for the time being, but it’s cool to see the results of your video work! I think that sort of thing is huge for creating long-term brand trust. I personally enjoyed the video and appreciated the perspective you brought to your interviews.
This is definitely what I’d do if I were to exhibit again. It feels like the only financially feasible way to stoke that brand awareness fire.
Part of me feels like it’s almost worse to get profiled during a big bike show since you’re lost in a sea of other builders in an easily-scroll-through-able format. I appreciated the coverage from Bikepacking.com last year that had a bit more editorial content to each post, but the ideal would really be a singular in-depth profile for each individual builder.
Not to flog the horse too much…agree that we are all guilty of thinking we MAY have a much wider audience than we actually do. I am surprised at the reach sometimes but then always brought back down to earth when people within the local riding community still don’t know about my brand. As Daniel commented, those once a year galleries do sweet feck all in lifting our market segment up and as we’ve stated before, up higher in the thread, we are seen as a cute distration than a real alternative in a lot of peoples eyes. I’ve even had a riding mate, who is an engineer, tell me he doesn’t trust steel in a bicycle frame. Carbon only for him. I was quite dumfounded by that. So much so I didn’t know how to respond to it.
We need to media support. Even Dave Rome for all his time spent at the shows covering them and taking great photos, still tends to only froth and report in depth on the top end of the niche. I see multiple articles on the Prova/Baums/Mosaic/Bastion/etc. etc. but none on the smaller guys who are arguably pushing their products just as hard. I get the interest in the 3D printing and carbon intergration but those bigger guys aren’t the only ones doing it either. I definitely don’t begrudge the coverage they get as they are doing awesome stuff and they are all great people to talk to and work with. Baum and Prova have helped me a bunch with refining my product and any focus on the alternative smaller brands is a good thing. Rising tide and all that.
I honestly think getting review bikes to the media is a better investment than the shows . Especially if you have a ‘production’ model with stock sizing and set build kits. I know Pinkbike will only review complete bikes where they are testing a set build kit etc. That way you get a whole post/article concentrating on your brand and bike and bonus if you make something they gel with and write a good review about.
I think the shows are seen by the public as a different thing to what us smaller builders are hoping they would be. I think the NAHBS phenom of building show specials with the idea of winning awards has changed the perception of what the shows are meant to be. I’m 50/50 about bigger brands being their. On one hand they could possibly draw a bigger wider crowd…but then they may come to over shadow the smaller guiys once again unless they were limited in their floor space and number of bikes.
I’ve tried to get my frames onto component makers booths as props for their products in this years shows. Just about every brand already had a frame to use alrady and they were all the brands mentioned above. With one brand having about 12 bikes at one show when we had hard limits of 3 per builder in our booths.
I spoke yesterday with one of the organisers of the Australian Sea Otter next year and I said to him I am not attending due to the cost of the booth space. I can’t justify the fees, travel, accom, and all the costs when I am yet to see a return on the 8 years of shows I’ve already invested into. He understood and seemed concerned but didn’t offer any advice or solutions. Not that I expected any to be honest.
I attended the MADE show for the first time this year. Few comments;
there were some VERY impressive bikes on display! The level of craftsmanship in the bikes on display was off the charts!
I purchased a cool stem cap from Yellow Bird Thread Works and had a good laugh at their comment, …“we went on the industry bike ride and were surrounded by some of the most expensive bikes ever seen on the roads” (not verbatim
not sure I agree with a prior comment that the event is becoming “too mainstream”, as there were very few mainstream bike companies there. Shimano had a very low key booth, displaying mostly shoes (was kind of weird), however, they were giving away free local coffee (nice). Yakima, DT Swiss, Hunt Wheels, Chris King and a few others were probably the ‘larger’ companies. I would not lump No. 22, Mosaic, and/or probably even Moots into the ‘larger’ company categories as they’re still made on a much smaller production scale to the industry giants
a shout out to Salt Air bikes, https://www.saltaircycles.com/ …nice guy, making beautiful bikes, one at a time, out of his garage in Salt Lake City!
staying nearby was a plus
I appreciate the comments regarding the costs of exhibiting and attending. I believe MADE should focus more on online marketing for their exhibitors, driving traffic to them. In my opinion, this should be a priority to ensure vendors see the benefits of participating, both at the show and afterwards
I’ll be returning next year, possibly as an exhibitor!
To add on to this, I was struck by how many builders there were at the show this year who were all building such similar bikes. For such a tiny market, there’s tons of competition. I know that to us in the framebuilding community the subtle differences stick out (dropout design, yoke design, external/internal butts, cable routing, etc). But from the perspective of the average bike ethusiast, I think a lot of these details are lost.
Imagine you were one of the few prospective buyers of a new gravel/adventure bike attending the show. How would you choose which of the builders to select?
Now imagine you are a different prospective buyer reading/watching all of the post-MADE media. Is a steel double-diamond frame with drop bars really going to stick out in your mind?
As hobby frame builder, I’m more than a little biased here. But I was surprised that more framebuilders aren’t developing a more distinctive niche or style. I know that at the Cal Poly Bike Builders booth we had a ton of traction around the weird cargo and swing bikes we had on display. Similarly, other niche bikes had a lot of exposure online afterwards, especially things like the Destroy Bikes mini velo. Now of course I can’t say whether those things really converted to sales (CPBB doesn’t sell bikes).
To me it just seems like the competition is fierce in an already small market.
My day job is tattooing.
All of the above counts for the tattoo world aswell.
I stopped going to shows, because it felt like I was a 1000 euro floorfiller for the organizers.
I guess part of why a lot of bikes(tattoos) look the same, is because their drawn from tradition. And it takes quit some effort to become part of that, so when you finally there, it’s hard to do it different.
Potential customers choose you for how you present your product and yourself.
I’ll be going to bespoke for the second time this year.
I booked the cheapest possible booth, knowing that it’s not going to give me any business. But hanging out with enthusiasts folk and other builders , gives me energie, and probably learn something. That makes it worth to go.
I don’t think the issues talked about, above, have much to do with the show itself. I think the issues are with this little slice of the bike industry in general. In my opinion, the show just reflects the confusion within/around the niche, it doesn’t create it. There’s a lot more to say there, but that’s the gist.
For what it’s worth, this was the first show I’ve attended. It was SO well worth it. Three days of non-stop compliments, engrossing chats with builders and attendees, photos posted on all the blogs I’ve followed for so long, and I lined up my next couple commissions. I think the key was bringing something unique to the show and setting up a space that was inviting and personal–something the bigger brands have trouble with. If all I was going to do was bring another drop-bar gravel bike, stick it on a stand, hand out business cards, and hope for the best, I definitely wouldn’t go. But that’s not MADE’s fault. They’ve provided the exposure (the hard/stressful part), it’s up to the builders to capture it (the easy/fun part!).
Anyway. Just a slight zag. Looking forward to next year’s show.
The counter point to that, purely for discussion, is that there are generally two types of builders. Those in it for the styling and those for the pure performance. That is a fair bit of generalisation in that comment too as there are plenty who are mixing the two.
I think most of the guys, myself included, ‘building just another drop bar road bike’ are approaching it from the least amount of bike possible to get the job done. We are trying to connect contact points and do it as light as practical. The big thing with drop bar road/gravel bikes is the form was figured out some 50+ years ago with the consolidation of the classic road race frame and the publication of the CONI manual. Drop bar bikes have basically not changed in that time. There has been some wild styling exercises, some a success and most an abject failure, but the basic double diamond frame endures because it just plain works.
As commented above having something that stands out and is different means you have to move away from the road bike template and that is very hard to do and I’ve seen a lot of builders compromise good design purely for the sake of doing it different. Some have been a good effort and some you wince at the construction. I even look back at some of my earlier stuff and while I know they are sound I still know it could have been a better design.
So you are going to get a lot of bikes looking similar. It’s going to be hard to standout and as Chris pointed out having an inviting display and being able to strike up a productive conversation is key to getting an success out of the shows.
It’s awesome that you’ve gotten business out of the show and you obviously know how to work it but that is definitely not the norm for pretty much most builders that I’ve ever spoken too and that includes the likes of Prova and Baum who have never taken an order at the shows that I know of.
Exactly! And the sad thing is, we shouldn’t even be competing against each other; we should be competing against big bike brands! Maybe that is an argument to bring in more mainstream bike brands.
Thanks for chiming in, Chris. I thought you brought some of the most creative, beautiful bikes to the show. You are a great model for finding success at the show.
One builder I chatted with had a great point: framebuilder shows would be better off framed as local events. Even traveling from SF (10hrs drive) made exhibiting very expensive and difficult to bring our best work. I cannot imagine for those who had to travel even more.
Also, different regions have different riding styles and aesthetic tastes. Our best selling product is a steel hardtail, but Pacific northwest mountain bikers prefer full suspensions!
To me, this is the true value that these events offer, and I hope we can find a way to do it in a way that supports the growth of our craft.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Given the current media landscape, it seems like old school, community-based marketing might be a good way to drum up at least a few customers.
If shows aren’t working, does anyone have a feel for what actually is effective?
The Radavist is an awesome resource as a fan of the scene, but it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio might not make for effective builder marketing (so much good content).
Legacy/print media brands are essentially dead at this point.
Instagram used to seem useful, but I downloaded the app for the first time in a few years recently and holy crap has that place changed. Short form video requires a pretty huge time investment, I feel like it would take me at least a day to film + edit something to share.
Might be factually wrong but it seems to me that being a frame builder is something a lot of people aspire to, enjoy or value for some other reason which brings enough people into the industry to make the average pay lower than what equally qualified individuals would earn elsewhere in the economy (similar to being an artists or an academic).
I think that makes sense as a mission as in “let’s try to convince more customers of the value of a full custom bike”. I agree and I’m certainly convinced myself
But beyond that the number of customers that are convinced that they need /want a custom bike is limited even if the number would increase. So of course there is competition among custom frame builders.
The custom frame building industry has aspects of
“superstar markets”: Those are markets in which the individual qualities of the market participants (e.g. music artists or professional athletes) are the dominant factor for success and where economies of scale (digital broadcasting / big concerts etc) make marginal costs vanishingly small, i.e. the cost to serve an additional fan is tiny. The consequence is that the top 0.1% (“top” = whatever customers end up paying for) earn most of the customer dollars.
The music artist / processional athlete markets have a lot more economies of scale than the custom bike industry: the cost of serving an additional fan on Itunes is more or less zero. And while a Michael Jackson track on Itunes costs the same as that of a local musician M. Jackson sells a lot more of these than the local musician. While “superstar” frame builders are limited in how many frame they can make (i.e. limited economies of scale) they can still charge more per unit of custom bicycle because of the “individual qualities” aspect: some builders are (PROBABLY WRONGLY) believed to be far superior to others.
Zero to One, the book, by Peter Thiel might also be an eye opener here: compensation is lowest where (a) competition is high, (b) the total reward is low. The examples Thiel gives are restaurants and academics competing for academic positions. Does this apply as well to the custom bike industry? A little maybe: (a) competition is high because like with academia many people want in because people find bikes and science aspiring and uplifting and at the same time demand for custom bikes and academics in academia is limited. And (b): in contrast to music artists and professional athletes the potential maximum payout is rather limited (Rob English and co can only charge so much per unit and are limited in terms of frames they can make if they don’t want to loose their “artisan magic”).
Totally. I didn’t mention… The Portland builders are spoiled being local to MADE. Only having to travel a couple miles down the road was huge. I’m not sure I’d attend if the show wasn’t here–for all the costs and headaches mentioned.
The attendees are also heavily Portland-based, too, which makes sense. All of them seemed truly delighted to find out I was local… instant connection. Both of the commissions I received were local folks who know the scene and were aware of my bikes before coming to the show. So, that’s a big advantage.
Anyway, agreed… lot’s of intangible/fun benefits to attending, but understandable frustration from those looking for direct returns on their time.
I had a small new builder booth last year and am glad I made it for the inaugural show. It was a blast - total immersion in the best way. Energizing and exhausting. This year I opted to show a bike in another brand’s booth, which was a sweet deal for me as I couldn’t make the show. I also noticed last year some cunning builders had placed bikes in bigger brands’ booths and that had to have boosted their exposure big time (Acoustic Cycles in the I9 booth, for example). I had some conversations with veteran builders who said that shows like this (NAHBS) have never resulted in more sales - but they keep showing up. Maybe it’s a community thing. I’m new to it all and building as a secondary/part-time job will never have the kind of record that builders have who are 20-30 years in full-time. @Daniel_Y I wonder what folks like Inglis, DeSalvo, Sycip, etc have to say about the value of shows like this. Did you ask Curtis? Interesting ideas about how the show could be reformatted to be less of a financial burden on the builders.
). It felt like if you weren’t in the “cool kids club” of hot established builders with fancy finishing and premium everything, you weren’t the focus of the show. Like you said, I invested thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into attending and while I did end up getting a few leads from the show, I was too burned out from the prep work to follow up on them.
