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.
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.
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.