The duo returns for the 8th episode of The FSC. In this episode, they teamed up with Tony and Sam of Allied Cycle Works, the USA’s newest carbon fiber bicycle manufacturer. They chat about how Allied got its start, the challenges of production scaling and lots more. Definitely check this one! Huge thanks to Allied for their time!
Dan: 00:00 Hello everybody and welcome to our eighth episode of the fiber side chats where your hosts Shawn Small and I’m Dan Stein lead and we’re here with our friends Tony in Sam from his Velo allied cycling. So hello.
Allied: 00:15 Nice to meet you guys.
Dan: 00:16 We are very excited. We’re doing our first interview with Tony and Sam today, so stay tuned to hear all about the great made in the USA carpet and organization.
Dan: 00:43 Tony, are you doing? We’re doing great. Nice to meet you guys. Nice to meet you too. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. A bicameral video, right? Yeah, that was a great, great video.
Allied: 01:03 Thank you for saying not too much and it was going to say that too much. Actually. It’s pretty alarming.
Dan: 01:10 I mean it’s just, it’s the nature of hearing yourself talk, beating on camera. You just got to fill the spaces is pretty much how it goes every time I think.
Allied: 01:20 Yeah, well people live in pretty kind to us so far
Shawn: 01:27 while you guys are doing really good job, so I don’t think that much to knock you for, but value through at website will find a way. It’s, it is what it is. You guys want to get into it. The first question that we have for you guys is how did you get your start in composites? What kind of made the spark for you that made you realize that, hey, this is actually something that I want to pursue a as a goal, as a career
Allied: 01:59 is a business opportunity smart? Yeah. For me personally, I came from the uh, the bike business. I worked for a long time at specialised. I started there really when there was, it was basically the start of composites in the bike industry start start. But when things really started to take off, so the specialized carbon, ruby had been produced two years before I got there. We had one tarmac that had been done and we were working on the second version of the tarmac when I started. And um, to be honest with you, I didn’t know a ton about composites going into working there. I had my engineering degree, I came straight from school, but I completely fell in love with composites, given engineer the ability to do basically whatever you want to do. It’s like a, it just gives you so much control so it just, it opened things up in a way that aluminum just wasn’t able to do, giving you control over stiffnesses in certain areas, being able to target certain things and it was just, you know, it, it just opened up so many doors and it was so fascinating and it was, it was changing so quickly in the beginning that I just completely fell in love.
Allied: 03:05 And uh, and you could just, you could really, you knew what we were looking for a bike ride really in whatever way you want it, which was just amazing. So that’s, that is my love for it. I also love how it can be so high tech and low tech at the same time really tinker, you know, like aluminum. It’s tough to tinker in the shop. It’s tough to, you know, you don’t have extruded extrusion equipment, you don’t have heat treat equipment or whatever, so it’s a little. You need it. It’s a, it’s a large barrier to be able to start to play around with it were in carbon, you know, you can with a home oven and as you guys, I’m sure you guys have some experience with it, but for a few hundred bucks you can start messing around, you know, yourself in trouble, which is really fun.
Allied: 03:52 My mind answer that question. I’m not an engineer, I’m a bit of it in the bike industry since the early eighties and I saw a business opportunity. So all the factories closing saw is, you know, great. You know, manufacturers have bicycles and steel alloy that down and shift all their jobs overseas and pretty soon they were all gone and I thought wow, what a great opportunity to get back into the bike industry and create a brand that really was composite bicycles. Major scale. Campbell’s can’t believe it to been done over the last, you know, five or 10 years have been proud to be doing a downtown.
Dan: 04:23 That kind of leads us to one of the next questions. You said you saw the business opportunity. Why? Why, why start this now? Why Start Allied in the United States? Why arc and saw what was kind of the mode that you said you saw the opportunity, but really what? What is allied ultimate goal with domestic frame production? You know why now? Why were you guys are.
Allied: 04:57 now because I think over the last five years, most of the product out there is pretty much turned into the same thing and if you’re going out to shop for $6,000 road bike there damn near identical. Everybody and I felt that through a project like this, we wouldn’t be able to create a brand, bring some new technologies to it and build a story around it. That would really resonate in the cycling community because if you go into any of the big bike shops right now, it’s just a sea of sameness. It’s picking a color of red, black and white carbon fiber bike was altegra dig on it and it sat there wasn’t that way in the past. And uh, just, it’s, it’s really sad what’s happened to the mining industry. Why now I’ve been working on this for a number of years and trying to come up with a business plan and trying to come up with the money to be able to start this from zero.
Allied: 05:50 And it was a lot money to do it all the machinery to find the talent to be able to develop and to have an operational burn for a few years before you can launch that product and market. It’s several, several million dollars to do that if you’re going to do it with the product that you can be proud of and why now is because, uh, one of the luckiest things that happened to was unfortunate for guru is when that factory went into bankruptcy, there was most of the machinery necessary for us to be able to in that one month. Along with it came a little bit of talent, a little bit of Ip that helped us close the gap on the operational burden. Somebody didn’t have to sit there and burn money for two years. We could burn money only for a year. So that was a little bit of the love counter.
Allied: 06:37 And then from my side it was a little bit. So Tony, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the whole story, but Tony and I, we didn’t start this together. Tony sort of found me as I was exiting specialized, but we had, we really had a very similar. It was the same vision. That’s why it all kind of has, has worked out because uh, but tony was coming at it from one end and I was coming at it from the other. I had spent, like I said, my whole career and specialized and we had gone through this period of sort of discovery with composites and making composites in Asia. That was really exciting. And then we sort of got to a point where it was pretty, it was getting pretty hard to innovate. Like it was getting really hard. The factories were pushing back a lot and there were, you know, everybody was essentially doing the same thing, just like Tony was saying and you started to realize that your biggest opportunities were in process improvement, but you didn’t control the process.
Allied: 07:24 You had nothing to do with the process, so you would push and push and push and try to get these factories to change and to evolve. And it was like steering a cruise ship. I mean, it was really tough. Uh, and so on a trip over there and I was with a friend and basically was like, this just, this is not working like we’ve been. We’ve been trying to do this for five years, that we’ve gotten nowhere. This is crazy. Why are we, why are we spending our time traveling back and forth to accomplish very little India? It was just like, no, we can, I believe we can do this. I believe we can do this competitively here. And literally like two weeks later Tony called me and then now that was that. You’ve done the hard part.
Allied: 08:03 I had some of the investors line just bought a factory. Anybody that knew anything about how to run their factories and then we found each other,
Allied: 08:13 you want to move to Arkansas and I’m like, where’s Arkansas?
Dan: 08:17 But actually that’s a really great segue into one of the next question. So it’s interesting that both of you kind of came from a different brand background. What has been the biggest challenge of, we call it calling it a brand revival? Um, maybe a new brand identification, but what’s been the biggest challenge for you guys, you know, in taking what you’ve learned from Guru and specialized and putting that together with the identity that is allied. What’s been the biggest challenge of establishing that brand from the two that you came from
Allied: 08:53 top on? That we. All we did was we bought the machine. So the product that we’ve developed here is completely ours. Sandra did a hundred percent. So really the only, the only link to guru that we have is the machinery. And then one employee, Olivier, who was one of their production managers who we got a 10, one piece of it comes down here and come to work. It’s all saying this updated working. My background was that oral bay up I ran were band North America for 15 years prior to this, so, and I came just from pure sales and marketing and a little bit of practical steps.
Allied: 09:27 Yeah. I don’t know if there’s a ton more to add to that other than I think that there’s, I don’t know if there’s a little bit of all your experience that follows you through your career. I guess you can, you can just leave it behind. So there is some of the things, the, uh, don’t know, philosophies behind how I thought about bikes at specialized still carry through to the philosophies that we use theory that the geometry and if you, you’ve written the tarmac versus one of the Alpha. They have a similar, I guess DNA I would, I would say, but I think it’s, it’s different when you’re, when you’re doing it all yourself. I think that this brand more than anything is about doing everything under one roof. Doing the best you can, making the best decisions that you can when you have to make a decision. And I think that’s that transparency and that willingness to kind of spend to be able to do it the right way is, is what we hope is separating us from, from the rest of the industry.
Dan: 10:19 That. And also your openness. How has been the public reaction to what we’ve been calling showing your work, you know, you guys are very, very open about every step of the process, almost secret sauces and what prepregs are using and where you source things. But how has been, has been that reaction from the, from the public.
Allied: 10:40 I think it’s the magic that’s been building our brand. We get inundated with emails, contact for people that just love what we’re doing and appreciate the openness and the honesty. You know, it’s just amazing that a lot of this contents never really been shown before. And the sad fact is most of the companies out there, I can’t show it because they don’t have. So for us, one on one of our early thoughts and launching the brand was not to be another brand that was doing, you know, sexy photo shoots on the Pacific coast highway, but staff dirty fingers and the factory showing exactly how it happens and being the most transparent company possibly. And we try to share a lot of that with our consumers. You know, if somebody has a bike in process in here, we like to send photos every once in awhile to him to show him as we’re laying up to show it. As we’re bonding, as we’re painting it, they love it. That’s something that our biggest competitors will never be in.
Dan: 11:33 Do you think that that also has to do with company? I mean you’ve suggested that they not doing it in the state so they don’t have access to it, but does that also these bigger bucks companies trying to hide their processes from one another?
Allied: 11:46 Hydroprocessing trying to hide the fact that don’t have that on somebody else’s kitchen. Super sexy. You know, how many European product launch and just have you seen that take place on? The painters were all done me more of those.
Allied: 12:02 I think there is a bit of hiding there. There’s people, people like to hold onto their Ip, right? They like to say, this is my big thing, whatever, but the joke of it is in the factory side it does not exist because these factories, I mean when you go to them, there’s several brands being produced. The engineers who are producing these processes are working across the brands, not just working for one, so they’re not really holding onto it that way. I think maybe what track was doing in Waterloo, they were probably keeping a wrap on that for that purpose. I think are kind of feel for that is the transparency is going to win, is going to win people over and what we’re doing the the the big. The hardest thing about doing it is just putting one foot in front of the other every single day and making sure your process is dialed in and it’s not the sort of. There is no crazy secret sauce. It’s literally just doing every piece of the work the proper way. One step in front of the other every single time. So I think that’s the difference. You didn’t feel like we had to hide it. There may be a time when we come up with something crazy where we don’t want to show a hundred percent, but that time is not now
Shawn: 13:02 what I’ve grown to appreciate that you guys show as well as take under our own title here as well as kind of blending, you know, carbon. Every piece is hand laid. I don’t think most people know that and that’s just as much craftsmanship with every single ply when you’re laying to 300 pieces up and you know, Kinda you have this high tech product, but if you don’t have good people laying everything kind of perfectly over and over, you know, to create that nice finished product.
Allied: 13:27 Yeah, it’s a lot of hand labor.
Dan: 13:32 We always like to call it the love story of craft and technology and we think that has a nice little touch to it. But yeah, that’s exactly what it is. Another question we kind of touching on it. What’s the biggest. You said every, you know, every day is just taking the steps. Let’s one of the biggest hurdles of production. What are some of those challenges that you see day to day?
Allied: 13:54 A lot of intensive job training and retaining those people. That’s been one of the biggest challenges here. Or got a really good core staff. We’ve gotten really good process in place. So if we lose 100 on big deal, but as we were getting started and that was, that was really hard, tough piece. We’re probably according to [inaudible] people in second shift at some point this year in a laterally. We’re in a state where we have access to a really good labor pool in Arkansas is there’s a lot of clean linen, hardworking, you know, reasonably priced labor here so we can scale
Allied: 14:29 without a doubt. Anytime you put 30 persecute people together, they’re down to be some issues. We experienced some of those and, but like Tony said, we have a really great core crew now. We have leadership in every department that sort of grew into that department, which is awesome. And, uh, I think the biggest challenge is, you know, you put as much quality checks in place to make sure that you, everything goes out the door is the same, but you have to, sometimes you have to make mistakes in order to catch the quality problems. So, you know, just going through the processes have been making those mistakes, making sure you have checks in place. Yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a process, been really exhausting. I mean we would, we just, we worked ourselves to the bone trying to make sure that we were producing good product every day and we’re finally at a point, you know, I would say it’s been, it’s been several months now, but that we’re producing really high quality product every single day and it can very consistently and good quantities and good quantities. Yeah. But the first time last year was brutal. Oh God. It was just,
Allied: 15:25 I’ve never experienced work like that ever. I’d thought I’d worked her before, but no, I hadn’t,
Allied: 15:32 no, exactly the same. Never, never have I am. I worked so hard. Is that the first part of last year? And paint. Paint stuff?
Dan: 15:44 we’ll just take five minutes every now and then go and look through our painter next window just to see what he’s doing and marvel, we do everything as a water base, so we’re doing, you know, everything that we repair is all custom mixed in hand match and all that stuff and why I’m watching nick do that stuff is, is brilliant. You guys have really, really, really great paint jobs on your frames to all of the, you know, the gold chrome looking know the big flakes. Yeah, they’re really, really nice.
Shawn: 16:14 That’s an amazing how hard pain is. That was the hardest things we grew up out here.
Allied: 16:19 It’s funny, you know, we spent so much, I didn’t know anything about paypal and I got into this. We spent so much time building a composite process and we had it really well dialed and then eight was the like ended up being charged.
Dan: 16:39 Where did you. Did you, were you guys pulling from an automotive or a, you know, an aquatic. Are you pulling vote painters down there? Are you pulling in people from the automotive industry? Did you source some bike painters
Allied: 16:53 a year and a half ago? We bought cycle aren’t in San Diego.
Shawn: 16:56 Oh, that’s right. Oh yeah.
Allied: 16:58 Haven’t been down there painting bikes for 40 years. That’s where we got a lot of our equipment and a lot of them know how and then the team that we built in some out, mostly from automotive in motorcycle, motorcycle, painter, so it can be maybe a little bit of the car herbs in that. Yeah, but now we’ve got it under control, but we’ve been through a lot of painters to paint some of the biggest characters I’ve ever met in your life.
Shawn: 17:24 So they’re all characters.
Allied: 17:26 Yeah, there’s not characters in the fun way though. When you spend most of your day to day.
Shawn: 17:32 We always joke that every. Now that you’ve been paying with the mask off again,
Shawn: 17:41 Like let’s go and Oh, you’re actually not supposed to clean the brushes with your mouth anymore. Ah, yeah.
Shawn: 17:51 Tubes are just man painting bikes are hard. Is just. Yeah, no two ways about it. We always joke we had. It’s so much easier to paint quarter panels are hoods.
Dan: 18:01 the next question we were touching on process a little bit, I’m sure the PA and you guys suggested it as well that the past, you know, six months a year have been continuous improvement, but what is the future of that like how are you aiming to improve your process in the next six months? In the next year? In the next two years?
Allied: 18:21 Yeah. There’s a bunch of stuff. So you know when you start something from scratch, you take all the best decisions you can and try to make sure that you’re building this process to be sustainable and I think we did a pretty decent job of that, but you know, there’s a lot of lessons learned when you go to the next platform as a platform is dialed in or processes good. I think we’re, you know, we’ve got nice products and we’re just calling that good now, but the next platform that we’re developing, we’re making some changes, some stuff to help out and lay up some stuff to help with the joints. I think joints or big, it’s more of a visual deal for us than anything else. So we’ve got some ideas cooking to have seamless joints to make them perf so they don’t require as much ain’t finish. I think that really that is what it comes down to. His little hand finishing leading into pain as possible right now. That’s not true on Alpha, on our joints. We have to spend a decent amount of time making sure they look really smooth, beautiful and nice. That’s really one of the big ones. And then there’s also some lay up the stuff that we’re doing on the next, some bladder stuff and some lab stuff. Just constantly trying to get you home.
Shawn: 19:28 He’s trying to eliminate as much as possible.
Allied: 19:32 Yeah. And I think that that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. So it. And that’s, I think the biggest thing when you look at wet sanding, it’s uh, most of our, the steps in our process, our measurable, very easily measurable. They take this amount of time, it’s this amount of material. It’s very clean and easy and you can sort of build and plan around it. But when you start to get into wet saying and being, you’re like, oh, this one took me 15 minutes, just one took me two and a half hours. What if someone was hurting? You know? And it’s like, ah. So trying to find areas like that and either removing them or make them as easy to plan as possible is the, is what we’re going for first.
Dan: 20:10 That’s really interesting. We’re actually been trying to do the exact same thing. I don’t think. I mean, I’m sure you must hear it all the time. Like people see the final product and are all, oh wow, you know, this is an amazing bike. Everything is so smooth and beautiful. You said it. They don’t realize that sometimes to do pull apart that might be four inches. Takes two and a half hours. So we’re, we’re also trying to, you know, perform better layups. More smoothness is we’ve just want to get bikes out the door more quickly as well. That’s really interesting. So moving on to the next question, are you guys using a repair system? Your bikes, are you going to be planning on providing, you know, repairs for your customers if that ever comes up or are you guys going to be.
Allied: 21:03 We don’t want to do the work that you guys are doing there, but we would definitely want to take it and I like people and keep our bikes on the road as long as possible.
Shawn: 21:11 That’s awesome. Yeah. That was looking at your videos of designing your labs for seed stage damage and top tube and for crowds. That’s pretty awesome to see that because obviously we know those parts break a lot across every models.
Allied: 21:25 It’s not good for our care businessman somebody who runs her bag and you never and pass our repair corners pretty empty.
Dan: 21:25 We see so many people driving their bikes into their garage. It’s kind of amazing. Really. It’s like one or two. Almost every month we get repair requests for it. It’s
Allied: 21:57 roof rack is a liability. Not everybody’s just absent minded enough to do it. It only takes once. Nobody can say that.
Shawn: 22:07 We always say there’s those that have and those that will
Allied: 22:11 and if not it’ll be about, you touched on that a little bit. We sponsor a race team, so the, our, one of our founders, one of the initial investors is doug sale. He is just a total bike racing nerd and he’s got a team intelligentsia racing [inaudible] and uh, so these guys race these bikes like crazy all year and they crashed a lot because they’re doing, you know, credits and stuff and we had some of the bikes back for refinishing and one of the guys had crashed clearly early on in the season and he had a handlebar striking the side of the top, do you know, totally the hallmark of that kind of failure. And he had written the bike for six months after sustaining the initial damage and pray the carbon was totally cracked through, but the [inaudible] was holding the two together so we could, you know, you didn’t crash or the bike didn’t separate. So that was, that was pretty nice. Pretty exciting.
Shawn: 23:05 That’s pretty fun stuff. We experimented with it over the last couple of years. You’ve never really done a lot with it, but it is, it’s fun to play with and break and snap and see how it, you know, kind of work. It’s really back to what you said originally earlier on about composites. Just kind of give me this such a wide open palette to just make so many cool new products together. Do you have any questions or comments for us in general?
Allied: 23:28 I’m not in your business a little bit. You guys for awhile. Why aren’t you guys there?
Shawn: 23:35 Um, you know, it’s funny, I’ve been asked that a lot. I’ve been in the same. My background’s in composite engineering as well and I started about nine years ago. I, you know, I don’t know, it’s just, it’s, you kind of mentioned before there was a lot, a lot of the products out there were kind of homogenous and you know, I build all my own bikes just for myself, but you know, it’s a whole different business model. We’re really happy sticking with service only, you know, we don’t selling bikes is, it’s not easy. It’s not straight forward. And we’d like the service side. Big thing we’ve grown is ultrasound inspection, I’ve been doing a lot of that in the last couple years and we’re trying to continually put out new, I guess information around it and we’re going to be hopefully publishing some white peer review white papers later this year. I’m not a lot of information for the bike industry on, you know, not disruptive technologies, but you know, we’re trying to change that. We did a lot of investment into some new machines to do that and staff as well.
Shawn: 24:32 Uh, in the summer we have eight, so a little smaller than 42, but yeah, everything, you know, just like you guys really everything is still hand on and hand labor. So yeah, it’s a lot of processing and even just communication with customers and you know, we’re trying to get more information out there in general. One of the thing I’ve always wanted to do is kind of, you know, like this podcast and have you guys on is talk more about what carbon is. Most people that, you know, they don’t have a really strong idea or background that it’s, that it’s even a fiber at all,
Allied: 25:04 a little nerdy. These Asian manufacturers are producing their own residence systems. Do you guys ever have any issues or have to source different residents in order to be able to get them to, to work and a stick?
Shawn: 25:22 Um, we do a lot of pre processing as far as just like trying to change the surface energy. We will prep quite a bit differently and when we blend our stuff in and we haven’t had any direct issues, you know, if anything, a brand that’s branded a, we don’t touch anything that’s unbranded or questionable. Um, but yet we’ve seen so much variation, especially now more than ever. It’s like more of these factories are mixing up their own stuff and hitting lower price points. That is honestly some real urge to simplify it. And it’s frustrating obviously to work on some of these newer bikes that are cheaper. Some of you know, some of the top and flagship models are know they’re pretty cool. They’re well laid, but some of these lower ones are, uh, are a mess. That’s one thing we’re doing with ultrasound is trying to actually use a dual transducer system to actually investigate and determine the quality of the resident in this in particular parts on the bike and measure that we can actually measure the young’s Modulus, the stiffness of our particular area through ultrasound by using a variations of sound propagation.
Shawn: 26:26 So that’s another thing we’re trying to figure out is, you know, we love like basically we just do a lot of forensic science and reverse engineering, you know, we work on a couple of thousand bikes a year of everybody, so it’s always interesting to see who’s changing who is different and why. Yeah. What do you, what’s your guys qc testing procedures you using any kind
Dan: 26:45 of NDT, you know, thermography or pen thermography and penetrant dialogue with ultrasound are our kind of main trifecta of what we do have an NDT process.
Allied: 26:58 There’s, we do a little bit andy teachers, mostly quality stuff, random pulling and to check stiffness. We also were doing. There’s kind of built in every step and everybody will say that sounds Corny, but it is true. So we’re, we, we way kids we way molded parts. Um, there’s a visual inspection that comes after molding for a bunch of different things. Um, there we would pluck it out 10 percent, so they’re a QC at every single phase of the process. And so the person doing that process is actually a customer to the process beforehand and then they go through sort of a list of things, quality things, and then we pull just under 10 percent to do a handful of stiffness tests on to make sure that everything is as it should be. And it’s actually one of the things I’m pretty proud of the RS, different variabilities, so small and it’s because our layout process is really, really great. So it wasn’t uncommon. It’s not uncommon from a major manufacturer to get five, seven percent stip this variation in a frame and the same size. And we’re seeing sub one percent cross.
Allied: 28:09 just it per side. So it’s really, it’s really great. Um, as far as ultrasonic, our production manager in composites, he came from a lab technician backgrounds. He was working for a dissolved Falcon jet and he would do, he would do all of the [inaudible] stuff on, you know, holes and wings and stuff like that. So he’s trained and he has his own equipment. So we played around with some of that and develop a mint but not in the, uh, in production.
Shawn: 28:42 We have to reverse engineer and another tool to help us get there.
Allied: 28:49 Know it’s great for damage mapping because digitally you can’t tell how much of your residence is damaged. It’s possible.
Dan: 28:55 We’ve got a couple more questions for you guys. Um, the last serious question we have for you guys is what does the future hold? What is, what’s the next big step for y’all? New frames or I don’t know if you wanted them to be one that you don’t have to, but you know, mountain bike frames come in super, super light, super light. Twenty nine, Zee. Bye.
Allied: 29:20 Future’s bright for us. I mean we’re, we’re here to build this as big as possible. This next year will be have a foundational year for us. We’re just to a point where after 2018 we’ll have to start looking for our second facility, big cap expenditures, but we’re going to scale this as big as the market will allow us to do so, you know, we’ve got more product coming. You’ll see, you know, one or two some new things from miss every year. Probably would be a while before you see us an Mtb, but we certainly had lots of interesting conversations about it over the last six to 12 months. So we’re going to continue to make a lot of noise
Allied: 30:05 I tried last year I went to nabs with three or four blanks and I put them in people’s hands. The people that I thought would really appreciate it, most of them looked at me like I was crazy. You know, I, I, I’ve, I’ve thought for awhile there needs to be an American made composite for, for all the incredibly awesome American made steel and titanium frames. Maybe, you know, go going back to nab this year and maybe some of those people come back and talk to us. We’re certainly open to it, you know, we have our first, you know, potential client coming together right now for it, but we would like to do more of that. For us it’s more who the partners are because the last thing we need is an order for a thousand ports that would just devastate this in here.
Allied: 30:52 Right now. We recently, we basically just make four to match frames. When we build frame sets per day, everything is mapped out to do just that. So if we had to add staff and tooling could be able to support that, but we did always kind of think that that would be a possibility. I think when a frame manufacturer we are frame manufacturer think there hasn’t been the purchase of board from us because we’re sort of in a competitive space, potentially an envious in a sort of a safe space where most of these people, because they’re not competing directly, so I can sort of understand. I can sort of understand why in some ways and other ways, you know, we are the only true American made option, so why not
Allied: 31:33 at some point we might try to craft a brand around that to be a solutions provider for that, for that opportunity,
Allied: 31:41 but we haven’t really pushed it because to be honest, we just now have reached the point where we’re capable of doing something like that.
Shawn: 31:48 That’s a whole nother side.
Allied: 31:50 Yeah. Yeah, and we’re not competitive. People were where we love the industry. We love everybody in the industry. We want to be everybody’s friend.
Shawn: 31:57 Are you guys displaying anything at nabs coming up?
Allied: 32:00 Yeah, we’ll be back. This will be our second year in the first. The first time Don Walker didn’t want to let us in because he thought we were too big or not adding salt to do good for now
Allied: 32:17 but you let us in and we’re all good now, so we want to stay part of that community as long as. As long as we can.
Shawn: 32:26 That’s very. That’s a very navs conversations. You’re like, everybody’s had that experience. All those. It’s just part of the trials to get in. Must must go through.
Dan: 32:41 That’s the last of the serious questions that we’ve got for you guys. We’ve got a couple lighthearted once a. One of the ones that we’d like to ask everybody that we’ve talked to, we’re huge fans of chips around here and we want to know you all’s favorite brand chips. Is there a local Arkansas brand that sticks out?
Allied: 33:05 We were trying to ask the hard questions.
Dan: 33:11 Ooh. They come into everything. Flavor. He sold.
Allied: 33:27 This is a tough one. There’s the Hawaiian brand. They make the Maui onions.
Shawn: 33:31 Yeah. Sweet. Maui onion.
Allied: 33:33 Those are delicious. Those corn chips, they make an Austin that are flavored switch tasks.
Allied: 33:38 Oh Man, my homie. Oh, what did. What are those things called? They’re going a little soy sauce.
Allied: 33:46 Their grandma seem out of town and buy like 10 bags.
Allied: 33:50 it’s a corn chip flavored with soy sauce.
Allied: 33:56 Last week when they come in, these clear bags. Crouch.
Dan: 34:01 It sounds like a fancy, fancy, free. So next, kind of a little bit more lighthearted question. What’s. What’s your guys favorite carbon bike of all time other than yours? Obviously you can’t say that before yours. Carbon bike of all time.
Allied: 34:22 or favorite bike or favorite? Favorite Book of all time.
Shawn: 34:26 So we personally owned. Yes.
Allied: 34:31 Gave her bike of mine.
Allied: 34:34 My favorite bike. I’m personally, other than an ally is my rent Derosa who I bought it from them in Italy on a trip in the eighties and you know, flat out chrome foreground was still today. If anybody was able to stop and carpet beetles. Just one of those kinds of things.
Shawn: 34:58 Yeah, those are gorgeous.
Allied: 34:59 Ah Man. I always loved my tarmacs all. Most of them probably like the [inaudible] was my favorite. That was like the coolest one when it came out because it was too big lead and I think I have. I had this a Schwinn homegrown when I was in high school and it was a bass boat blue and it was so sweet and that bike is held a place in my heart that nobody ever has.
Dan: 35:25 What’s your phone? What’s your favorite bike? All time saying your own is a cop-out answer. I might say I had a say I had a,
Shawn: 35:39 the SL2 as well, and it was Kinda like my first major bike getting away from some lower ends up and man, I rode that thing, abused it and raised it and honestly the handling on it was one, probably one of my favorite handling bikes, like the handling paint job. I had the Gerald Steiner addition and uh, you know, without an actual specialized cranks on that bike, just handled so nice.
Allied: 36:03 Interesting story about two was really the first like true race bike from specialized. The real one that the is actually wanting to race. Previous to that I’m specialized in, picked up quick. We’re supplying them with a tarmac and they absolutely hated that bike. They hated everything about it and they just bashed it over and over again. And so we worked incredibly hard to try to figure out what was going on because does this elbow great bike? Um, so we’ve spent a ton of time researching and designed and did lay out for the two. And it was the biggest leap that we think that anybody really had ever done in carbon bikes from bike to bike. It wasn’t [inaudible] and um, and it showed, it was still, I think the thing holds up today. It’s still awesome
Shawn: 37:03 what’s possible when that bike alone I was and I was floored, Dan. They got a bunch of old.
Dan: 37:09 Yeah, exactly. And it’s my first bike that I ever bought with my own money because I had a rock hopper in grade school and high school. And I was like, fine, you know, parents got it for me. It was awesome. Got me around. But I bought a single-speed Milwaukee bicycles company. Like the first one they made, you know, all steel inch tubing, one an eighth inch headset, a powder-coated orange. And at the time it was the only one they’re doing. And I wrote it like a real denim fixing kid with no helmet and no breaks somehow. Don’t know how I never crashed. And I still have it today and now it has a really, really tiny spinny deer and vendors.
Dan: 37:52 I’d say it’s the bike that also got me into serious cycling, so nice to hang on to it. And then one final question. If there’s one thing you could change about the bike industry, what would that be?
Allied: 38:10 I think if people made their own stuff.
Dan: 38:12 Yeah, that’s a great. That’s a great answer. I think every, not everybody. Lots of people that are consumers in the bike industry have absolutely no idea how difficult it is to make these things because you’re just so used to them performing great. And so we expect greatness from everything. So we don’t know how difficult they are to make great things. Uh, that’s an awesome answer.
Allied: 38:32 The IBD, this pre-season business model is exploded over the last 20 years when everybody, you know, to me, I kind of take that pre-season moment back in the back where all thfactories close and they used to be able to supply their business partner one, two, five, 10 bikes at the time, no problem because they had continual production, but when they closed all the factories in Asia and I started buying in bulk two years out, they got these really predatory business practice on the east and they started stuff. Those ibd is full of a lot more inventory than is healthy for any retail business to happen. So I look forward to preseason bicycle business dying quickly, you know, and for a smaller, healthier ibd to emerge that is much more service based then a then a financial relationship between them and their largest vendor.
Shawn: 39:28 That’s also really, really well said.
Allied: 39:31 I think Tony’s reading mean this. If you took a step back and look at this industry, this industry is still, it is not well and its voice and it’s. There’s a lot of things that led to them. I think one of the biggest ones, half of that, that are sort of poisoning in this industry right now that you don’t really get a feel for, unless you sort of take a step back and look at it and be like, Oh man, you can tie that back to it. That, back to that, back to it. And, and um, the whole industry is set up and push the maximum amount of inventory of Bernie on the smallest people in the entire process. At least at least gala. I mean he’s bike shops are not making, you know, what does the bike shop run it, you know, six, seven percent per year. I mean, it’s not good.
Allied: 40:17 Yeah, you got to do a hell of a lot of work for them.
Dan: 40:20 What about you? John? Boy For us is kind of the same thing of elevating kind of the service labor side of it. We’ve, we’ve been, we’ve joined up with his pro buys, well mechanic association where we’ve been traveling all over. We were in DC or we’re going to be in DC all next week just talking. We began at are both giving a presentation about kind of carbon in general too, about what 95 bike mechanics that all signed up for over three days. We’re just kind of elevated the knowledge base, you know, carbon is being an engineer. I get really frustrated and there’s so much marketing thrown around and that’s kind of where [inaudible] came from. I just got really frustrated with feeling like I was always part of a trial and error product cycle. So I wanted to come in and help change that. Obviously things have shifted a bit, but yet again, we always want to kind of educate and demystify some of these topics so that way when you read the words on a bike, they actually, you know, that they don’t make sense already. Um, or just know that you know so much. But it is just marketing and yeah, as you said earlier, getting away from the homogenous products that exist or knowing why something is and not
Shawn: 41:33 just adding bolts and features to a bike. We’re trying to redesign them to change. One thing I would change, it would begin to try and start to change the culture. I think that we’re in a shift right now. We’re moving more towards an open, inclusive, you know, less elitist type of mentality and it’s getting better. Um, I still think there’s a lot of sexism in the industry, you know, there’s a lot, you know, a lot of, a lot of cultural challenge still. I’d say it’s getting a lot better. Even in the past year, two years it’s gotten a lot better, but for me, I think we’d go a long way to go, so I would begin to start to change that myself as we always say that about tapes up the box for this episode. A thank you guys very, very much Tony and Sam for being here.
Dan: 42:26 We have in a really, really awesome time talking to you guys. We are so glad that you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s such an amazing product. Uh, we, like I said, thank you for coming on the show. We were very, very happy to spend foot pass our speaking with you guys, and if you have any questions for us, please feel free to reach out to us instagram, facebook, linkedin, email, using the hashtag carbon queries and we will get back to those questions in the next episode. That’s about all we got for today. Sean, what do we say about the president? Do it once in a while and actually listening to everybody.