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Current Lead Times: Simple-Custom Framesets: 1 week. Full Custom Bikes: 7 weeks.

U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix

The “New” Look of Seven: Paint

Antsy scheme in serrano, graphite, and snow white

How do you control the look of your product line when your whole business is predicated on letting riders customize every aspect of the bikes you build for them?

For good and obvious reasons, Seven Cycles has come to be associated with the bare titanium frame aesthetic.  In the ‘90s, when we started building custom titanium frames for people, this was very much the current look. And even now, for many people, the classic look of hand-polished Ti is where bike style begins and ends.  It has been a good look and a good association for us, even though it belies the depth of customization available from our paint team.

Today, we are painting approximately 30% of our customer frames, with schemes ranging from the standard paneled look to the exotic and unique.

Seven Brassard detail

As a custom builder–and painter–it can be very hard to have any control over your frame aesthetic and people’s perception of you.  We paint what people ask us to paint.  Much of that is influenced by the schemes we display on our website, but our customers’ influence bends and shapes our own ideas, so that the whole thing becomes a big collaboration, a good one.

The challenge is evolving the look of your bikes to make sure you’re always contemporary.  To that end, we’ve replaced 10 of our 20 stock colors and have revised the paint gallery on our web site to display some of the more cutting edge work we’ve done over the last year.

The hope is that by giving our customers some new choices and infusing the process with more ideas, we can take the next step in the collaboration and, together, define the new look of Seven Cycles.

Timelessness

Sola

This is Seven Cycles #10, the tenth bike we ever built. It is 15 years-old. It has been all over the US, all over Europe. It has a lot of trail miles under its wheels. We built it for one of Seven’s original founders, who has gone on, happily, to live and ride the world.

Last week, it came back for refinish.

With more than 20,000 custom bikes behind us, it’s hard not to think about the first bikes out the door, wonder where they are, what they’re doing. Seeing this bike again was a real treat, and maybe it validates a decision we made a long time ago to offer only one finish for our bare Titanium frames, one that is a bit painstaking to execute, but turns out a frame that can be easily maintained and refinished for the lifetime of the bike, which, as it turns out, can be very long time.

Part of the process of customizing a bike for an individual customer is thinking about the future. Often riders know what they want in the moment. Sometimes they have a longer range vision of what they want their Seven to be, but most of the time it’s up to us to help them think through what they’re riding needs will be five, ten, or even fifteen years down the road. The hand finish is part of that thought and vision. It’s part of the value of what we do.

This bike will leave here today, destined for some far flung trail, and we look forward to seeing it back again, fifteen years further on, if only to see how we’ve done.