History – Page 2 – Seven Cycles

Core Strength

Your coach will tell you that a strong core gives you a better platform to pedal from, that it takes strain off the rest of your musculature and contributes to endurance in ways that are palpable, if hard to measure.

Seven is a strong, independent business. After nearly twenty-years of building bikes we are fortunate to be able to make our own decisions, guided by the same mission we’ve always had, with only our customers to answer to. We have successfully navigated the stormy seas of several economic booms and busts. We have seen the industry change through two full decades.

Just as on the bike, on the shop floor.

The Value of Experience

We sat in a circle in the showroom, low morning sun teeming through the tall windows, discussing our readiness for the coming season. We meet here regularly to talk about how things are going, where the bike industry is going, how we will address all the changes that come in endless waves, all the things that make building bikes fun and challenging and sometimes maddening.

January is a funny time for us. The end-of-year rush has subsided. Those bikes are delivered. And we are turning our attention to building the bikes that people will want to ride when the warm weather comes again. Now is the time to start. So there is a busy quietness about January. It can be tempting to go easy, but experience tells us that hard work in January makes the rest of the year much easier.

As we sat discussing our prospects for 2016, it occurred to us that we were all one year wiser. What is the value of that experience? It can be hard to quantify. We are 19 years into our bike-building adventure, and each successive year brings new challenges. Simultaneously, we have a lot of problem solving behind us, a lot of engineering, a lot of craft. We have been in business through a few up and down cycles in the national and global economy. Emerging trends look more and more like things we’ve seen before.

And so, it feels good to sit there in the sun in the morning light and be able to say that we are in good shape. Leadtimes are short. The shop is staffed with experienced and passionate bike builders in every department. We have been the grateful recipients of recent media exposure both local and global. We have a committed set of retail partners who want to help us build great bikes, and every day we’re getting phone calls and emails from riders who are excited to build their own best bike.

It could be that the value of experience is the calm certainty that it’s going to be a great year, and that just how great is entirely up to us.

The Local News

We were on the local news last night, part of a series called “Made in Mass,” features on companies that still make things in Massachusetts. The piece ran just short of two minutes and didn’t say a whole lot that cyclists who are familiar with our work didn’t already know. We were glad to be featured, though it is a little frightening that simply making things makes you newsworthy now.

It was also very cool to engage with the reporter’s curiosity about how we do what we do, and the response from friends and family has been overwhelming. It reminded us of when we were kids, perhaps not coincidentally the time when our bikes first became central to our lives, the way being on TV was still some act of magic.

19th Anniversary #tbt

We just realized that we opened our doors 19 years ago today. That first year, we crawled all over each other in a 1000sf space that had machines, builders, desks, phones and computers packed into it tighter than a Russian nesting doll. Then we moved into our current space, much larger. We had a party (and an indoor race) before we hauled all the lathes and mills in. Here is a snap from those heady times. We were young and (almost) carefree, at least when racing around the shop floor wearing a chimp mask and a Santa hat.

There Are No Bikes

There are no bikes, but only riders, more than 30,000 of them. They came to us and told us about their riding, the roads and trails they wanted to ride, and we gave them a way to get there. It’s true that, in some ways, it was the bikes that took them where they wanted to go, but without the riders, there was nothing.

This is an important distinction to make. We have never built a bike with the express purpose of convincing someone to buy it. We have only ever built the bikes that people asked us to build. The rider comes first, always.

We get somewhat regular calls from people who ask something like, “Hi, I wonder if you have a 56cm road bike in stock that I can just buy.” And we say, “Sorry, we don’t actually have any bikes in inventory,” which is true.

There are no bikes until there are riders who want them, and what they want is very specific. We wouldn’t build the same bike for you, because you are different. We have built more than 30,000 bikes, and never two the same in a row. It is a lot more fun to do it this way.