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

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

Tag: craft

The Big Ideas – Single-Piece Flow

Last week we wrote about our customer interview, and that process came from our need to be able to build exactly the bikes our riders wanted. It got us thinking about this whole bike building project we embarked on in 1997 and the foundational ideas that make what we do possible. These are our “big ideas,” and over the next few weeks we’ll walk through all of them, from our unique build process to the way we collaborate with our customers, to the way we deliver our bikes.

This first installment is about Single-Piece Flow (SPF).

We always wanted to be a different kind of bike company, one that offered both a product and a service, in our case a bike and the experience of customizing it. We wanted to give our customers an experience that was about them and their cycling, not just about the bike. In a very real way, we didn’t want to be a bike company. We wanted to be a rider company. That’s where we started.

But that idea has to be more than marketing. It has to be manufacturing, too. It has to be real. How do we do that?

The simple answer is Single-Piece Flow, a way of building things that unleashes the potential for deep customization. Single-Piece Flow literally means building things one-at-a-time. By building each bike one-at-a-time we can focus on the individual rider it’s being built. Their name is attached to every order. All their personal information travels with the bike through every stage of design and build.

Building by hand, to order, never in batches, allows for the greatest level of customizability. Every order is unique, so we break it down into its constituent parts. We spec tubes specifically for the rider in front of us. One builder works on one bike, refining all the raw tubing, the dropouts, to match that one rider’s needs.

SPF is also where quality comes from. By focusing on one bike at a time, the builder is only ever responsible for one thing, the work in front of him or her, one set of details. The fewer hands touch each frame, the more responsibility each set takes. Typically only 2 or 3 builders work on a Seven, a machinist passing a perfect frameset to a welder, the welder passing that frame to a finisher and/or painter. This approach maximizes accountability while still allowing for a high-level of specialization by each builder, whether machinist, welder, finisher or painter.

The kind of focus and experience SPF demands isn’t cheap. Our team of builders has more than 300 years collective experience. We invest a lot in them, and that investment requires another big idea to sustain in a competitive world. Next time, we’ll talk about Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing and how it helps us put our capital in experienced craftspeople, rather than inventory.

Data, Experience, Passion, Results

Checking the alingment of a rear triangle on the surface plate

When we set out to build custom bikes on a timeline measured in weeks rather than years, there were a litany of challenges to overcome.  Chief among them was how to bring all of our collective experience to bear on each frame.  Because of the scale and speed of what we do, making sure each person working on a Seven frame had the benefit of the years of frame-building work that had come before, became a real arbiter of our long-term success.

There are usually 10-15 people working on our factory floor.  About a third of them have been engaged in frame-building for more than twenty-years.  Another third fall in the 10-20 year category, and then finally we have a handful just embarking on their bike industry careers.  Everyone who works here, regardless of their experience, brings a passion with them.  That passion may be for high-end paint finishes, or for precision welding, rather than the “it’s all about the bike” mentality, but passion is one thing you can’t teach.  To work at Seven, you have to bring a certain level of motivation with you.  The rest we can teach.

using a depth gague in a CNC machine

And when we say teach, what we really mean is that we can show you the way we do things.  In order to transfer the knowledge and experience of our most seasoned staff, we created highly-defined systems based on real-world data.  We can’t impart five, ten or fifteen years of experience to people walking through the door, but we can build it into our way of doing things, so that those who are motivated to learn to do things the right way can replicate our results while they’re on their way to becoming veteran craftspeople, when muscle memory takes over.

We romanticize the craft of what we do all the time, but the truth is that, while important, craft alone would not let us achieve what we set out to do.  We are a long way from the one-person workshop, cranking out single frames in stoic silence.  We certainly have a crew of builders here who could step into that shop and build those bikes, but what we have tried to do is bring riders the same, full-custom experience you might expect from a single craftsperson, but without the long wait that comes along with the that type of custom work.

Pressing a Chris King headset into a Sevn IMX 29 SL

Doing what we do requires passion and drive. Those things are a given. One of the greatest sources of pride for us is that we are also data-driven, systems oriented, and customer focused.  We founded this company with the goal that every Seven embody the breadth and depth of our experience, expertise, skill, precision, knowledge and commitment to the customer no matter who builds it.