This was a great suggestion from @Coco_PMW: lets focus on how to grow framebuilding either as a profession or a hobby.
I can’t say we’ve figured it out, but let’s share some ways. I will start:
Bike Ride Events:
I hang out with the team at Ornot on their weekly ride. They are a small, high-end, domestic clothing company. One common thing I hear from their new customers are “I saw you (the company) at a bike race!”.
It makes sense: someone who pays $200 and takes a few days off work to ride 100 miserable miles will probably also have no problem buying $250 bib shorts. I think they also respect that the owner is out there with them, riding and suffering.
We have gone to Grinduro CA a few times. I don’t know if I can trace any direct sales, but people tell me they heard of us there.
Plus, riding bikes is fun, so is it really marketing?
For me I definitely notice an uptick from being at events and also just being out on the trails especially at focus points, trailhead or meeting points. Someone always asks about the bike Im riding and then its a chance to educate.
Hmm maybe I need to organise a UK bikepark autumn tour…for “marketing”
Seriously though, good thread. Hope people smarter than me can give me some tips.
For me the shows, Bespoked, etc are great for exposure. Everyone there tends to talk about direct sales but for me it’s not about that, not really. It’s about getting my bikes into Pinkbike, Singletrack, etc etc. and just for people to go away and tell their friends about the sick bikes and the nice guy making them (hopefully).
I don’t wanna go there as a salesman to sell my bikes. I just want to create buzz and reach more riders and that seems to work well.
Almost every customer I’ve gotten has reached out because they knew me personally, knew of me through a friend-of-a-friend, or something like that. I guess my main marketing strategy is being really nice to everyone I meet and working to create a kind and caring bike community? That’s obviously not super scalable if you’re trying to make 50 frames/year but it’s worked out well for the 1-2 frames/mo sort of pace.
I think a tricky thing with such a high-ticket purchase like a custom bike frame is that people tend to think about it for a year+ before making a decision so unless you’re doing something to incentivize a more instant purchase (limited time discount, pre-order deadline, limited edition drops, etc), you have a lot of potential customers who may never convert to real ones.
Decades ago I was dipping my toe in the water at Community College. Took a Ceramics class for the hell of it and I remember the Professor saying that a “real” Artist is someone who can make a living (or close to it) on their art. Selling / Schmoozing / Marketing was just as important as creating.
Wasn’t it the late framebuilder, Bruce Gordon who said something along the lines of "making them is easy - selling them is HARD . . .?
I’d suggest getting involved with forums or pages of some kind. Offer suggestions when someone has a bike specific question, especially in situations where a custom option may be better than off the off the shelf type. Don’t say things like “shoot me a pm if you want more details about my offering”. It’s better to say something like “I’ve had great feedback from the custom frames I’ve built for clients to address XYZ issue you’re having”. You’re dropping the cookie crumb to peak someones interest as well as helping the community as a whole. Become the “expert” on the page. I’ve built a very successful mobile bike repair business using this method.
I think bicycles are a little like cars in that you race on Sunday and sell on Monday. Hooking up with a local racing/riding club is a good move. Whether they are just training for the local 50 mile charity ride or are doing all the local crits or gravel races, it’s good exposure to give back to the sport. Offer a team discount if you’re just getting started. Join the club and ride your bike. Or start a club/team to do local rides/races. Racers/enthusiasts tend to have many bikes and ride in many disciplines, and they influence friends.
As you probably have noticed, I have been investing a significant time into YouTube. After 2 months of grinding, I believe it is the best marketing strategy for a small brand. It generated quite a few sales last month.
Traditional media still has a bigger audience (for now).
Youtube is a grind, but that grind sees results. 100% of that grind is invested in yourself
I could build a show bike every two weeks, try to get it “reviewed” or attend bike shows. That effort would go nowhere.
bike shows use our work to promote themselves
Youtube has the power of exponential reach:
The Meriwether video was 7 hrs of shooting, 4 hours of travel and 10 hours of editing—roughly 4 days of work. Right now, the video has 600 watch hours, equivalent to 75 8hr days of non-stop talking. That reach is impossible to get attending real-life events.
This is only the start for my channel. Framebuilding YouTubers like Brodie and Phil Vandelay show that you can routinely reach 100k people with videos.
Thank you for diving in and also thank you for sharing your results and observations. I do the non edit one shot videos on my Insta and they always seem to generate engagement. The amount of work involved to jump to Youtube seems daunting but seeing your breakdown makes it a lot more palatable.
Thanks for sharing your data Daniel. We haven’t self produced a ton on youtube, but we are finding it super valuable for our wheel brand.
Youtube is the second largest search engine, so anything that gets posted up there ends up being durable content for potential customers. Once an ad has been served or an instagram post has gone up its purpose has been served. There’s a lot less return to that content. I think Reels might have a bit more durability, but haven’t done the testing to verify.
I think there are some good nuggets in Paul Brodie’s latest video with Ross Shafer from Salsa. Ross at some point says something like well, my bikes aren’t any better than the dozens of other custom makers out there like Fat City or others so, really what people are buying is a connection to him and the community he built. He put on annual party (sounds like a big one!) and sponsored rides (not racers) and generally put himself out there. Anyway, it resonated with me.
2-3 per year mostly for people who know me or know people who know me. I have a day gig (corp product mgr in Tech) and I’m not really looking to grow that for the foreseeable future.
I do a fair number of repairs (tube replacements and such) and stems. I think of myself more as a bicycle-adjacent fabricator. I have done machine work for folks restoring old bikes who need something specific (brass ferrules of all things?!) and have picked up a couple repeat parts for other restoring similar bikes.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. I know I have seen them in other places. Apparently, there is science that shows people need to hear a message 7 times before it sinks in. And besides, I like reading your writing.
I know we’ve connected often on the other platforms and happy to continue here.
My observations are objective, and shouldn’t be taken personally by anyone reading.
If your output is as low as you say (fewer than a half dozen per year) I wouldn’t worry about, or consider marketing, or examine the ideas of branding at all.
With only a handful or frames to offer (and sell) you should already be overwhelmed by your local market.
On the other hand, were you to start producing full time, and with much higher numbers than we’re hypothetically discussing here, my response would be different.
I don’t know the local Seattle scene but would wager that if you continue to keep it small you should never not have folks waiting for the next Draper frame.
I’m here to help. And hope I have in some small way.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I am satisfied with my little side hustle - aside from each task not benefiting from a long history of repetition.
I was asking more for sake of the discussion. Knowing you have based a lot of your visibility and persona around your CX team, I think that is an interesting approach that resonates with me.
The team thing began in the late seventies when a NYC shop that sold my frames asked me to supply a batch to the racing team they sponsor. My background is road and track, and my singular interest (and passion) is inseparable from the sport. I agreed to make them frames and, after maybe three seasons, growing pains and personal aspirations led me to focus on my own team. That era started in 1981. And continued every year since. There were some 43 consecutive seasons fielding a team. Some years we had ten riders, some as few as three. For nearly all of these groups there was also industry and commercial sponsorship. So while my little company might have had the lights shining on it, it was always a wide collection and collaboration of suppliers, benefactors, and corporate check writers.
As someone who, admittedly, has little interest in bicycles per se, I’m fortunate to have found the sport and arena of competition in order to find some common ground so that what I did at the workbench could have an outlet to help legitimize my choices. It was Soichiro Honda who said, “Racing improves the breed.” I’d agree.
