VeloNews Q&A: Seven's custom niche

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Rob Vandermark has always had a knack for turning the impossible into the desirable. As the head designer for Merlin Metalworks, back when Merlin was a struggling independent, he figured out how to create externally butted, seamless titanium tubing. The result was the Merlin Extralight, which for many years reigned as a benchmark in the road bike stratosphere. He also created the Merlin Newsboy, a bona fide mountain bike disguised as the most stylish of cruisers.

Easy to do, you say, if you have all the money in the world to work with. So at the opposite end of the price scale, he delivered the Merlin RSR and Taiga, affordable titanium bikes that were viable alternatives to a torrent of inexpensive aluminum frames that flooded the market in the mid-nineties.

But as much as his reputation was born of his work in titanium, Vandermark's career has never been about metal. At heart, he is a design engineer, and industrial process is as important to him as bike performance. When his studies on manufacturing efficiency revealed a better way to build bikes, he left Merlin to create his own company and put his ideas into practice.

The result was Seven Cycles, a thriving bike company in Watertown, Massachusetts, which has turned the custom frame paradigm on its head. Seven specializes in custom work, and has perfected a way to deliver tailored frames in a matter of weeks, not months - this despite the complexity of the titanium, carbon fiber and steel materials the company works with.

It's a market that, judging from Seven's success, was vastly underestimated. Seven's motto, "One bike: Yours" has resonated with a much larger pool of finicky, well-heeled customers than anyone could have predicted. Today, Seven churns out a huge range of road, mountain, cyclo-cross, triathlon, single-speed and tandem bikes. Nearly all of them are custom in the fullest sense. Geometry and sizing are individually determined, of course, but so too are tube diameters and wall thicknesses. It might be literally true that no two Sevens are identical, and yet the company manages to deliver most orders in 21 days.

Seven's philosophy, materials mix and operating basis are unique in the bicycle industry, and lately the company's profile has been elevated with the success of Olympic contender Mary McConneloug, who Seven has sponsored for a number of years. We talked with Rob Vandermark about how he put it all together.

VeloNews: What is the breakdown of your product mix?

Rob Vandermark: We're 20 percent steel and 80 percent titanium or Ti/carbon mix. Ti/carbon is probably right around 15 percent of the total and growing, and I think it'll continue to grow.

VN: So most of your production is full Ti frames?

RV: Yes, about 65 percent, I guess it is. It's going really well, and our sales are growing 20 to 30 percent. It's continuing to grow with the majority of our sales in the U.S., although now we're starting to do more internationally, so I think for next year it will be a challenge to keep up. But yes, Ti is very strong for us. But I think [our growth] is more market share than growth in the Ti market.

VN: If Seven has grown even though the titanium bike market has not, where has the growth come from?

RV: I think the unusual thing about Seven is that because it's all custom, that's what is growing. The titanium in some ways is incidental - not entirely, but our situation is kind of artificial in terms of material because I think it's the custom elements that we offer that have helped us grow, more than, "Oh, Seven's a titanium brand, we need that in our store." There's certainly some of that, but I think the growth is that more and more people see custom as a reasonable, and achievable and not intimidating option. We're trying to show that everyone should be on a custom bike, whether it's Ti or carbon or steel or whatever.

When you say we're a Ti business first, ten years from now that very well may not be the case, and maybe three years from now - who knows as the market changes, and what's going on with carbon? It's changing so fast, faster than any other material stuff that's been going on. For Seven to remain viable and continue to do things with customization that other people aren't doing and be at the forefront of that, materials do play a role.

VN: So the real key to Seven's success is that you are primarily a custom builder, and the material is almost secondary?

RV: Yes, when a dealer or a customer thinks of Seven, the first word they think of may be "titanium," or it may be "custom;" they're both pretty high on the list. But we try not to have it be "Seven titanium." I think tying solely to titanium can be a problem, as you can see with other companies. In fact, that's one of the reasons why we did steel [frames] early on - not that we were doing a large volume, but we didn't want people to see us as only a Ti brand. It's one of the reasons why we started working with carbon seven years ago, early on working with carbon, Ti and steel to keep it in people's minds that it's not just ti. Although I know that because the percentage of Ti is so high that people would perceive us that way.

VN: You bring up an interesting point. You were the first company, at least in the U.S., to do a mix of carbon and titanium in a road frame.

RV: Yes, applying the carbon in the seatstays, or using carbon that way in a frame. The Specialized [Epic Ultimate] carbon/Ti [mountain] bikes came before that - we built those for Specialized at Merlin- but to use the concept of the carbon seatstays and fork as the bike's suspension units and the titanium or steel being the chassis of the bike, that was apparently a strong enough proposition that it is now extremely common, so it's kind of a cool sidebar to Seven's history.

VN: And then over the years, the amount of carbon going into Seven's frames has been increasing. So what is the request level from your customers for an all-carbon Seven?

RV: If they're not thinking custom first, they're thinking titanium first, so we're not getting dealers saying "You need to do a full carbon bike." When we introduced the Elium [road bike, with carbon main tubes and seatstays], there were some dealers who said, "What are you doing? It's too different." But now that they've ridden it, they say this makes sense, it's a good use of the material. At this show, I don't think we've had a single dealer say we need a full-carbon bike.

VN: It's more a matter of you needing to lead them than their requests to you?

RV: Yes, it's a tricky thing to say. But part of product development's job is to figure out what the customer doesn't know that they want or need. We have to listen to dealers and provide what they want, but we have to stay a few steps ahead, if possible - and not be off in some weird tangent. So having a full carbon bike, there's a lot of logic to offering that to our dealers, and I never say never. And we're pretty close - the Elium is not many steps away from a full carbon bike.

But the whole carbon market is in an interesting stage. There are a lot of carbon manufacturers and suppliers, and the bikes, the way they are fabricated, are all very different, and nobody really cares what technologies people are using - is it monocoque, or hand laid up or filament wound? - all that. It is going to be an interesting thing in a couple of years when we'll see if it becomes important how the bike is made.

Two years ago, how do we butt tubes, and why don't we use shaped tubes, and the contractile strain ratio of the grain of the titanium, all that stuff was really important. There was a hunger for that knowledge. In the past two years we've seen that just fall off. Nobody cares anymore, partly, I think, because the titanium bikes are durable no matter who's making them. And with carbon, it's so esthetics-driven right now, and people don't have enough experience to know what's going to hold up and what's not. If it looks cool, that's good enough - "That's the bike I want."

So that's a really interesting thing to see in the next few years. Are people going to care how a bike's made? And how will that then affect who is left in the carbon market? In some ways it's like the Ti market. Ten years ago, everybody had a Ti bike, at least in their brochure, and that's sort of - people have stopped doing that. I don't see carbon being marginalized like that; it's just too strong. People will figure it out, like aluminum. I mean, I hear people saying "carbon's going to go away." I don't think that's possible, I don't see how that's going to happen.

VN: Can you offer the same level of customization in a carbon bike as you do with your current line-up?

RV: With the carbon tubes and Ti lugs system, the way we're doing welded lugs, absolutely. Even to the tube tailoring, and certainly to the geometry, no question. And with the new work we're doing with MacLean [Composites, a carbon tube supplier] and the filament winding and the way we're doing that, we're getting a great variety of characteristics. But what's interesting with the more classic carbon bike, the monocoque or the way that Trek does it, the OCLV style, it makes customization extremely limited or extremely expensive or causes very long lead times. So that's a limiting factor.

With the current stuff that's available, I know that Parlee and Calfee are doing custom work, but the process is still a production process that they're squeezing into a custom system, which is really difficult to do. I mean, they're doing it, but I'm certain it's not much fun. I don't want to speak for another manufacturer, but certainly not a lot of people are able to do that yet. And it's similar to what we're doing now; it's using a lug that's adjustable with a fixed tube. So if we were to take what we're doing and expand it to full carbon tubes, titanium lugs would certainly make it fully customizable. But that's an entirely different bike than, say, a carbon Orbea. It's a totally different customer, it's almost not a carbon-to-carbon comparison in a way.

VN: Changing the subject slightly, you had a great year this year with Mary McConneloug; will you continue that sponsorship next year?

RV: We are in talks with her and it's our intention to work with her again. I think her goals will be different, because getting to the Olympics was her focus for the whole time that we've sponsored her. Now her goals are changing, and we're working with her on how we participate in that. But it's been an amazing relationship and she's been the best ambassador we could hope for. So we definitely want to work with her and she wants to work with us.

Sponsorship in general is an interesting challenge, to figure out what is the return and to what extent is it worth it. A lot of the reason we do it is for industry participation. We are in this industry and we want to participate in all the facets of it, so sponsorship is part of that. And getting people out there and the exposure, not for Seven but to be able to support Mary to do good things and to bring something to cycling.

VN: Do you get much in the way of product development out of it?

RV: Yes, Mike [Broderick, McConneloug's travel partner] has been great because he thinks about it quite a lot. When they're traveling he's the mechanic and [also] racing at a really high level, so that's been helpful. It is really a good piece of the puzzle. And within the company there are so many people who ride hard and race, so even internally there are a lot of avenues for getting good product development.