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.
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.
