Dude, @Meriwether, I was just in the right place at the right time, as you well know. In the early 2000s people would just throw money at you if you could build them a 72.5 HTA 29er with a 120mm stem… and I was that idiot that did it for them.
At the time there really weren’t many people doing custom mountain bikes, it was almost all roadie stuff/lugs. If you did find someone willing to build a mountain bike they’d have no idea what a 29er was. Hell there were people who would outright refuse to do disc brakes.
So what I’m saying is there wasn’t any competition, and a ton of demand.
If I can dig up photos of some of those old frames I will. They were terrible (for a variety of reasons, some due to my inexperience and some due to the design philosophies of the day) but most of them are still out there getting ridden, I get messages all the time from folks with pictures of bikes I built that make me cringe a little bit now. They make decent gravel bikes with short stems and drop bars!
I am not sure the one-person all-custom model makes much sense anymore given the wild variety of bikes you can buy off the shelf. Almost any geometry you want is already out there unless you’re SUPER weirdly shaped or have bizarre taste (nothing wrong with that!) If you didn’t experience the 90s “every bike is the same geometry” NORBA scene, you should take a moment to look around and appreciate how good bikes have gotten.
Anyway, the boutique/small batch production system might be the way we see the “custom” bike industry going in the future. It will be interesting to see.
I wanted to add my personal perspectives to this conversation. A few qualifiers:
I am not in the business of selling frames. Nick’s money, insurance, and name are on the line, not mine
Even though I am dedicating half a year to research and investigate ways to make framebuilding more profitable, realistically I plan on going back to tech for the next few years for financial stability.
Small slices of pie:
I don’t think the custom framebuilding business is limited by the number of builders, it is limited by the reachable market. From my outside view, framebuilders are often fighting for the same small slice of pie. Few builders are able to break out of that niche custom bike market (@adamsklar does a great job of this).
Nick and I purposefully don’t position ourselves as the made-by-hand, secret tube butting, progressive geometry, MUSA, dream bike builder. All of these are true, but we don’t highlight that. Instead, we focus on things that matter to the average cycling enthusiast. Because of that, I think most of our customers have never considered a custom frame before.
I go after the big bike brands: I’m coming for you Specialized. (Ok, realistically, maybe Jamis or Cannondale…) If those companies can convince someone to drop $5k on a poorly fitting bike with fully internal cable routing, I can convince them to buy a better-fitting, better-designed bike, for less money.
Going after bigger pies:
Stock vs Custom:
Going “stock” saves a bit of customer interaction, design, and build time, but that is not why we do it. We do it because I believe stock models appeal to a broader audience.
With my CAD workflow, I can automatically generate totally custom geometries and detailed construction drawings in less than five min. Nick has optimized his workflow so that he can use these drawings with the same efficiency. From a fabrication and design perspective, the custom is almost no different than stock for us.
I’m lucky to roll with a pretty diverse crew of people: different backgrounds, educations, professions, genders, and ethnicities. They all have one thing in common: they are passionate about cycling. Many of them own multiple>$3k bikes, but none are custom. Why? Because they are actually turned off by the “custom” aspect of custom framebuilding. They are smart enough to know that they don’t know enough to benefit from custom. In addition, many are turned off by the idea of being “judged” on their fit and cycling knowledge, and I don’t blame them.
Parts and Pricing:
IMO, the biggest barrier preventing framebuilding from going mainstream is the availability of high-quality, low-cost, OEM parts. I would guess that only 10% of cyclists are comfortable building up a frameset from scratch. Yet most of the custom sales are framesets. Framebuilders not only miss out on the extra margins of completes (debatable). But more importantly, they are missing out on 90% of the cycling population.
available parts suck.
parts are expensive
parts are never in stock
you waste time communicating back and forth with a customer to build up a complete
you waste time communicating back and forth with manufacturers to check what’s in stock
I am not surprised that most bike shops are struggling, they have nothing to sell!
Framebuilders also align themselves with high-end, niche cycling brands. While this is good for marketing and those companies, I think it can be counterproductive to the custom framebuilding business. It prices the complete bike into a category that most people cannot afford. You end up competing for the same slice of the pie as other builders. To add some perspective: ask any first or second-generation immigrant, they probably don’t care about MUSA.
This is why I created Superb Components, as a tool to bring down the cost of a completes and go after the Treks, Specialized, and Giants.
Specialized isn’t putting a $180 headset on their $14,000 weird Sworks gravel suspension bike. Infact, they don’t even list a headset . For sure they are slapping on a $8 headset and charging you like it’s a $400 headset.
No idea. But if I don’t try, I can’t say shit! One thing is for sure: when people ask me what I do, I would say “I am a software engineer” and their eyes would gloss over. Now I tell people I design custom bikes, and they instantly light up and tell me about their biking stories.
It’s undebatable whether bikes (custom and regular) make people happier and healthier. In the bigger picture, Isn’t that the most important thing in life? If it’s important people will value ($) it. I am optimistic we are starting to see that cultural shift in certain parts of America (Europe is already decades ahead ).
The drivetrain has been pretty reliable and decent margin for us. It’s the random assortment of wheels, tires, cockpit, etc… has been a huge headache. There are not even the items that sell the bike!
When I was working in 3D printing land, the head of the supply chain had a pretty memorable quote, something along the lines of:
Our printer has multiple sub-assemblies and thousands of individual parts. But if a single screw is missing, we can’t ship the product.
Great response @Daniel_Y lots to think about here. I really like this part above because it really surprised me that people are turned off by being judged by the builder for their current bike fit or lack of knowledge in that space. I highly doubt most builders would act that way, exceptions exist, but most builders farm out the fit to a custom fitter anyways since we don’t live near most of the customers that contact us. Plus I’ll be honest, mountain bike fit has been extremely subjective for as long as I can remember, only recently has there been movement in this space.
Most customers I’ve had know their fit variables/contact points having messed with their current bikes enough to know, but they want something not offered in any stock frames whether it’s a look, special features, or just to have a part in the process so it’s THEIR bike, a form of personal expression they can keep for a long time.
Weird aside: I’ve noticed a factory in China now offering custom frames. A friend of mine sheepishly actually asked if I’d fix a MTB he bought online from this factory because it got built with a 31.8 seat tube… Serious oversight on the designer, but they obviously feel the need to offer custom for some reason. There’s no name on the frame, just a blank Ti frame with whatever the customers ask for and at half the price shipped as one of mine. I’m addition it’s now totally cool to farm out your production to Taiwan, made popular by Mone’ but I see more and more each year going this route since it’s so economical even for small batch frames (Tumbleweed, Crust, even Sklar now). I’ve thought of trying that for a stock model and keep my custom market separate. Anyways…
It’s worth remembering that this is exactly how everything started in the 70s and 80s. People like Gary Fisher, Keith Bontrager, etc built custom or small batch stuff on their own. Then as those companies grew, they realized that outsourcing the fabrication was way cheaper and easier, and here we are. So it’s a bit like we’re repeating that process, and maybe in 30 years bike dorks will be poo-pooing the latest Sklar/Mone (Waltworks?!?) wonderbike so they can buy something hacked together in a garage by someone from their own generation.
@Meriwether - “Waltly” (I take it as a compliment, I guess) in China has been doing custom ti frames for <$1000 for a decade or so now. There are probably others doing the same. I’ve heard both horror stories and about happy customers, so who knows.
XACD has been doing it even longer (since the 90s, Dean used to get ti forks from them back when I was a sponsored dude) though I’m not 100% sure they’re still in business. They built some pretty awful stuff back in the day, but maybe they’ve improved.
Welp I skimmed a lot of this but I did want to chime in a little bit.
Hi Walt, happy to hear about the retirement, I’d love to hear more about how that journey went. It is super cool to see a builder doing that.
It seems like every time this convo comes up, it is about how hard it is to make it happen, but I’ve been doing it full time for 9 years now and I am making it work. Frame building bought me a house and has afforded me a really cool lifestyle, I am thankful for it every day.
Obviously the profession tends to draw in folks who are in to the craft. The craft is cool but the craft is not the business. It seems like these days all of my friends are mostly self employed people who make things and the way we always put it is “the thing is not the thing”. Or as Carl Strong put it to me way more elegantly - we deliver bicycles but what we sell is a lifestlye.
I really never understood the custom angle. When I was obsessed with fabricating bikes I looked around and everyone else making bikes was building custom stuff, so I did too. As I got into it I found it wasn’t for me. Customers are buying the person behind the bikes, that is 100% of the success of any of these small brands - cycling and beyond. It is about the people behind it. I think builders who focus on the fabrication, craft and technology draw in those geometry/custom-centered customers and serving those people is an incredibly tough go. I found that it was not a sustainable way to focus my business. In my messaging I have always let people assume that quality in craft etc and focused more on the enjoyment of cycling and I think that has been the success of my brand, not to mention bringing in customers I have more in common with. That sets you up for success.
As far as doing it professionally the equation is pretty simple: start with how much money you want to make, divide that by the number of bikes you want to make and there is your average bike price. It turns out that number is really high if you want a decent quality of life. When I really upped my prices a few years back I know it got some hate, but it managed to increase my demand as well as my quality of life. You need to support yourself to have a sustainable business and that means making real money. Framebuilding would be such a fun hobby and I would rather get a job and do it that way if I can’t support myself in a dignified way.
That said, I did live like a total dirt bag for a lot of years as I worked my way to that average bike price. Also, could I do it today? I don’t know. Instagram and the bike blogs where I got my start are not the tools they used to be. The overall industry is going to see a big drop, but that is mostly low end bikes. There will continue to be demand for the high end bikes that we make, probably more than ever IMO.
Annnnnnnnyway. That’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about.
-Adam
What a great survey and discussion stemming from it. I’ve only been in the frame building realm for about a year so I don’t have much insight from that perspective, but for my day job I’m a Corporate Controller (accountant) that spent half my career working with manufacturing companies and the other half managing the business side of creative companies (mostly video production). I was always curious about how many builders keep other jobs to pay the bills, and the volume full time builders were hitting.
My assumption was a builder starts by doing what they can, keeps a second job or lives the starving artist life while it grows, gets big enough to get wholesale pricing from QBP and sram etc, and finally makes a good living off the margins of selling complete bikes. It’s the model similar manufacturing industries follow so really no reason frame building would be different.
But after thinking about it more, that requires more $ that they might not have at their disposal to maintain component inventory and keep lead time down, and the discipline to spend money on boring things like components. Cash turnover is the key for businesses like a frame builder.
@sklarbikes It’s interesting, I was talking with a framebuilder buddy the other day about this topic and we both concluded that we just can’t stand production runs/non custom stuff because there’s no, for lack of a better term, problem to solve. It’s just ripping out the same thing over and over. I actually like talking to customers and trying to come up with a unique solution for them each time. The times I’ve done production runs (ok, just once) it was awful. I felt like a robot.
The retirement is pretty simple, I started in my mid-20s, built bikes for a price where I could pay myself really well (at least after the first few years and a stern talking to from Don) and kept overhead low. I invested the considerable excess money and here we are almost 20 years later. Not very complex. As I’ve said before, I was lucky to start when I did and I’m not sure the path I followed is replicable today, though.
I did fail to complete the framebuilder trifecta (white, middle aged, spouse who works for big $) though - Sarah never used her PhD for anything but being an elementary school librarian, and that was only recently. I was looking forward to being a kept man…
we just can’t stand production runs/non custom stuff because there’s no, for lack of a better term, problem to solve
I was in a similar line of thinking as that until I got a chance to visit Uriel at Austere Manufacturing. He is so dang excited about process details, process improvement, and process theory that it couldn’t help but rub off on me. His interview with Joe on SU&BB podcast conveys that well, but it’s another thing to see it in person. It got me thinking a lot more on how refining a process can be just as creative an endeavor as building custom hardware. I’m now looking forward to having a chance to really dial in my process - trying to cut out as much wasted time as possible and making sure I am using my resources as efficiently as I can.
My perspective is also that of someone who is incredibly new to this so I’m ready to eat those words after my first production run
I think that can be fun to optimize the process of production for different items if you don’t have to actually be the one cutting up the metal. But having done it, even if you’re super efficient, you’re still just one person (at least in my case I’m was never interested in employees) so you end up trying to be a hyper efficient metal cutter or butt-finder (lol) or whatever and really, those are menial tasks when it comes right down to it that are done most efficiently by doing 30 or 40 identical things in a row.
I did something like 100 fatbike forks for what is now Fatback cycles in AK many many years ago because at the time the owner couldn’t get forks to match his overseas-made frames. I made good money doing it, but I was miserable. Spending 8 hours welding dropouts into fork blades is what I imagine hell to be.
I enjoy my production model. It has allowed me to target a specific market, and allowed me to develop a product that supports that market. It defines marketing requirements and reduces required parts inventory to deliver complete bikes quickly. It also means that for the most part my customers share the same riding interest as I do and it helps streamline the customer interaction.
This is one of the big mysteries for me still (and something that @liberationfab was speaking to on a different post about customer acquisition): just how big is the market for “handbuilt” bikes?
Unfortunately, my work doesn’t help answer this question as it would require some consumer-side inquiry, whereas I’ve really only looked at producers. This, to my mind, would be the sort of thing that some kind of “framebuilder organization” might be useful in generating–after all, it’s pretty common for various kind of producer/trade groups to produce market research with the goal of understanding (and growing) the pie rather than having everyone competing for thin slices in perhaps a zero-sum kind of way.
One random data point on this:
For part of this recent academic paper revision, I wanted to be able to situate for a general audience (well, for a general audience of sociologists/academics who would be reviewing my paper!) where framebuilders sat in relation to the general/IBD bike brands–this was also because I was making an argument about downward pressure on pricing in framebuilding b/c of lots of newcomers and churn. As a super rough comparison, I found the published MSRPs for the full offerings in 2020 for both Specialized and Trek. To cut out the kind of apples vs. oranges issues of full suspension bikes from the big brands inflating prices overall (especially since, in 2019, very few framebuilders responding to my survey would have been building many full suspension bikes), I decided to only look at “drop bar” bikes of any sort (road, gravel, cross) in their price lists. However, I included all drop bar bikes, from the cheapest aluminum-framed/Claris bike up to their highest offering, and averaged the MSRP across that whole line. In other words, this included bikes far cheaper than the typical “handbuilt” customer would be considering, so it’s a pretty conservative estimate of selling prices.
For Trek, the mean was $5,547 and the median $5,100 (with a range of $860-12,500)
For Specialized, the mean was $5,571 and the median $4,400 (with a range of $875-12,500)
The mean “typical selling price for a complete bike” (of any type) reported by builders in my survey was $6429.
Again, this is a very rough and ready way of comparing, but it seems to me to underscore that handbuilt bikes from framebuilders are not particularly expensive when compared with the offerings at IBDs (or, depending on how you want to interpret it, that framebuilder prices are indeed pretty low!). As such, @Daniel_Y and @Neuhaus_Metalworks strategy of going after the Jamis/Cannondale IBD customer seems like a good way of finding a larger pie!
There’s no competing with the <$4000 market, IMO. But above that, it’s pretty easy to compete on price with the big brands. The bikes I sell for $5-6k are spec’d way nicer than an equivalent Trek, in general.
That said, the whole handbuilt industry has a reputation problem at this point, so the first step in growing the pie would probably be to have less churn/fewer Matt Chester type stories.
This is exactly it. IMO the builders who fizzle out never find their little niche of what they build and are unable to design their business around that niche.
I would disagree with Daniel that framebuilders are fighting over the same pie. I think builders make their own market by having a unique POV. Designing the business to build a market/cater to one is the key to success.
I think it’s an outreach problem. The high turnover rate is unlikely to go away, especially with social media promoting a cool alternative framebuilder lifestyle.
The fact is, bad news travels faster than good. For every Matt Chester failing publicly, there is a Chris Kvale succeeding privately. Frame builders need to do a better job of collective self-promotion to capture more of the bike market. The market is potentially enormous, in my opinion.
It seems to me that a lot of frame builders loose sight of just how ignorant the average consumer is and scare them off. They make a name for themselves dealing with enthusiasts who think they know something and want to design a bike. They end up doing a lot of hand-holding with needy customers, get overwhelmed, waste a ton of time, and can’t pay themselves for it.
Agreed! But I like to look at it from a slightly different perspective. We (as framebuilders and forum members) have a very technical leaning bias. The average person could care less about geometry, ISO vs post mounts, 44mm vs tapered headtubes. They just want a comfortable bike that looks good and rides well! “Custom frames” in the 2010’s NABHS era don’t appeal to this group, and in my opinion, turn them away.
This is my business model
But it’s worth noting if we all did what Moots or Co-motion, etc. did there would be a limit to general interest in the US made handbuilt market IMO. For some the whole point of going custom is to get something that no one else can get using someone they can actually talk to and create a connection with.
No matter how much diversity there is right now in stock bikes, there will always be a desire for full custom, to co-create their own design and working with someone who will say “yes”. It just requires the builder charging the right price and hopefully not scaring off potential customers because of that price.
The reality is that if you want to be a production/batch builder, it really makes very little sense to build the frames yourself pretty quickly, because there are a ton of good production bikes out there already and those companies (whether moots or trek) are using individual workers for individual tasks for the sake of efficiency, and mostly paying those workers commensurate with the essentially menial manual tasks they are doing.
So you’re competing against companies with much lower labor costs and higher efficiency. In the past the way to compete with that was with custom design/added value.
. For sure they are slapping on a $8 headset and charging you like it’s a $400 headset.
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