Single-Piece Flow – Seven Cycles

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.

The Big Ideas – The Rider/Retailer/Builder Partnership

The Big Ideas, as a series, is about this whole bike building project we embarked on in 1997 and the foundational ideas that make what we do possible. The first installment was about Single-Piece Flow (SPF). The second installment was about Just-in-Time manufacturing (JIT). Last we explored the 5 Elements of Customization.

We started with an idea, a different kind of bike company, one that offers a product and a service, an experience, and we found a build method that would support it, Single-Piece Flow. Then we backed it up with a manufacturing model that would streamline the process and hold down costs, Just-in-Time manufacturing. Then we created a language that would free rider’s from the constraints of production models, that would allow them to speak the language of custom, the 5 Elements.

Finally, we needed a way to connect all the dots.

Everything we’ve done so far, philosophically, has been about gaining focus on the individual rider, so how do we understand the roads they ride? How do we see and measure them effectively? We always want to be a local builder. The machine shop we get most of our small parts from is local. The builders who work here all live nearby. If we can’t be near all our riders, how do we get closer? How do we localize ourselves?

We needed partners in every cycling community, and the obvious way to get that was to work with bike shops who wanted to collaborate with us and our riders on custom builds. Seven riders are de facto bike designers. We are only building them the bike they tell us they want, and our bike shop partners facilitate the process.

We are the only builder who does direct, systematized interviews with each customer while also working with the shop. Together, the three of us create the custom experience, and THAT is how we get from the idea of fully custom bicycles on a short timeline to delivering fully custom bicycles on a short timeline.

These are our big ideas. They’re simple when you break them down, even though we are still refining them, even after 30,000 bikes have passed through our hands.

The Big Ideas – The 5 Elements of Customization

This week we explore the 5 Elements of Customization.

It is all well and good to tell someone you can build their ultimate bike, but if they don’t have the vocabulary to tell you what that bike should look like, you’re no closer to that bike existing than you were before you met them. The 5 Elements give riders a useful way to think about customization.

The 5 Elements are the language of Single-Piece Flow on the bike shop floor.

1) Fit & Geometry – Think of the upper half of the bike, the points where you touch the bike, saddle height, set back, reach, bar height. These are the angles and centimeters that address different riders’ size, proportions, age, style and health (injuries). We address these, at the shop, through a bike fitting, and then follow up with body measurements that allow us to consider that fit in terms of your new frame’s geometry.

2) Handling and Performance – Think of the lower half of the bike. This is where we fine tune for rider weight, comfort, handling and riding conditions. Bottom bracket drop, fork rake, chainstay length, all these things affect how the bike feels. If you tell us you want your bike to be stable or quick handling, we can produce those characteristics through fine tuning of handling and performance features.

3) Tubing & Materials – We work in steel, titanium, and Ti/carbon mix. We start from the beginning when designing a bike for you, choosing a material that speaks to the kind of riding you do, then we go further, picking a tube set, in that material(s), that matches your specific preferences for stiffness and/or comfort, then we go further still, refining your rider-specific tube set through tube butting processes to accomplish the most personalized on-bike experience available from any custom builder, anywhere.

4) Options – Brake types, rack and fender mounts, decal colors and placement, paint, cable-routing, couplers, chain or belt drive component optimization, the configurations and permutations are close to infinite. This is how you dial the bike in. This is how you meet ALL your goals for your new bike, without compromise.

5)The Future – This is how we make our design as durable as our materials. We plan for the rider’s aspirations. Racing? Touring? Commuting? How does the bike age with the rider’s body? Is it adaptable? How do we keep the bike useful for the rest of the rider’s life?

You don’t have to be a bike designer to collaborate with us on the design of your new bike. You just need to be able to express your preferences in simple terms and let us map them onto the 5 Elements of Customization.

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.