25Seven

Obstacles Are Opportunities

Throughout the past week we had one of our distributors—ES Korea—visiting Seven Cycles.  ES Korea sells more Sevens than any other distributor.  They visit us a couple times each year to work with us on business development.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’re amazing.  I could write a long list reasons they’re amazing; today I’ll post just one.

The tougher the world gets, the smarter, more thoughtful, and harder they work.  And the more closely they partner with Seven.  Rather than shutting down—psychologically—or looking for reasons that life’s tough, they step up and out of their space of expertise.

By way of example, if one considers the US economy to be in a spot of difficulty, the South Korean economy is in freefall.  The South Korean Won has been devalued—relative to the US dollar—by more than 40% in the past six months.  This is a crazy change, and it makes it very difficult to sell high-end products—Sevens, for example—in South Korea right now.

In this type of economic freefall—we’ve seen it before in other countries with which we work—there are only a few strategic stances a company can take:

• Give up and find another business
• Hunker down and wait out the turmoil
• Take some big, “bet the company” risks—a Hail Mary or two—and keep your fingers crossed
• Get creative and forge a new path

Which direction did our distributor choose?

Special Edition: Lights Out

A couple months ago Zac Daab of Cascade Bicycle Studio--one of Seven Cycles' retailers--requested a special paint scheme for a project on which he was developing.  He is a serious cyclocross racer and was working with Seattle's season opener--Star Crossed--and wanted to come up with a special bike for that event.

The race occurs after dark each year and Zac had a great tie in idea:  design a glow in the dark bike.  We had previously done glow in the dark bikes only a few times over the past decade, so we were excited to work on this with Zac.  GITD paint is tricky to do well and durably.

See it GITD after the jump...

The Nature Of Enthusiasm

Paul Kaczorowski of 3rd Nature--one or Seven's retailers--posted on his blog about his recent visit and experience with Seven Cycles.  I met Paul and Michael McTigue--one of 3rd nature's founders--for the first time a couple weeks ago at Seven's Immersion.  I immediately saw that Paul has a youthful enthusiasm and an openness that is really unusual.  His candor was disarming and sincere; he asked a lot of questions that many of our retailers think about but are affraid to ask.

Paul's enthusiasm and energy really was infectious; at the end of the very intense 2-days, I finally got a chance to thank Paul and Michael for their participation.  I was pretty wiped out after the event but after about 2 minutes of interacting with Paul and I was ready for another two days of talking bikes!  We spoke for about 20-30 minutes and it was great; I came away feeling that Paul and Michael really heard what Seven was trying to communicate and it was really gratifying.  

Paul's positive excitement also comes through in his blog.  The ground he covers in his post is fairly shocking--he definitely took notes during his visit to Seven.  It's difficult to pick just one quote, but here's a brief excerpt:

"It may surprise you to learn that we [3rd Nature] can build a custom Seven in steel for $3000 including components and wheels. A custom ti Seven can be had for as little at $3500. So, for less than most of the production bikes we carry, you could have a fully custom and customized bicycle that will fit and ride better than anything else. Why wouldn’t you? Well, I did actually have someone call and ask, “What makes me think that I know how a bike should feel better than Ernesto Colnago?” Which struck me as rather odd. The way I look at it, what makes Ernesto Colnago think he knows how I want my bike to feel?"

Now I'm energized to get back to work!

Do You 'Lock Out' Or 'Rock Out'?

Words Fail

This week Seven’s South Korean distributor—E.S. Korea—visited our factory for a two day meeting.  They make this pilgrimage annually and it is always an interesting time.  They visit on their way home from the yearly industry tradeshow.  Of course, we are always scrambling and only partially coherent when we return from the show--this year was a bit different because I was the only one recovering from the trade show.  It’s the busiest time of year at a very busy company; at least, that’s my excuse for being incoherent.

This combination of exhaustion and craziness may be one of the reasons that it has taken until past couple visits for me to realize just how incredible it is what they have done:

Nishikigoi 錦鯉

Recently Dean Rogers, a new customer of Seven Cycles, wrote a great overview of his experience purchasing a Seven.  He worked with River City Bicycles--one of Seven's first retailers--and Dean details the process on his blog Koifish.  Dean does a great job of concisely describing the process through which each Seven customer goes.

One of the elements of the process he describes is the unique relationship between each customer, the retailer, and Seven.  Oftentimes, not surprisingly, when we work with a new retailer, the shop owners are concerned about this unusual three-way relationship.  There is no reason to be concerned--we aren't going to steal the customer, sell directly, or cause trouble for the retailer.  Dean explains:  

"Without ever cutting the bike shop out of the process, [Seven] established a direct and personal connection with the customer, and provided a mechanism for staying connected until the frame was ready.  Many bicycle manufacturers actively avoid customer contact and rely on the bike shop to be the interface.  The contrast in approach couldn’t be clearer." 

So, thanks Dean, for having faith in Seven.  Thanks, also to Brian of River City for pointing Dean in our direction.  There are a lot of good bikes out there and I know that Seven's take more commitment to sell than most brands.

Growing Business Through Trust

One of my memorable meetings so far at Interbike this year was my meeting with Zac Daab, founder of Cascade Bicycle Studio.  It was a great meetings for a lot of reasons--Zac is smart, thoughtful, hardworking, creative, driven, and an all around very sincere person--so every conversation I have with him yields interesting outcomes.  

In the case of our meeting at Interbike, the projects on which we are working--more on that in another post--reminded me of one of the main reasons I love working with Zac:  his seeming implicit and explicit trust in Seven.

Halfway Home

Still at the Interbike trade show.  This morning I had a great breakfast meeting with Signature Cycles--one of the retailers with which we work.  We covered a lot of ground and have a list of interesting projects to develop and implement.  One of the many interesting comments I took away from the meeting was regarding Seven's factory.  

Two of the Signature folks visited Seven a couple years ago and had an extensive tour of our factory--they asked a lot of questions and clearly understand manufacturing quite well.

Fast forward to Seven's Factory Immersion from a few weeks ago.  Again, some folks from Signature traveled to participate in our two day event.  We were fortunate that one of the people had been on their first visit to Seven.

This person complimented our production team on their numerous and significant improvements over the past two years.  The basic feeling was that we had evolved the production space from a craft style production space to a true manufacturing space--from a dirty, dusty, disheveled space to a transformed clean, well set up, well designed, easy to use, single piece flow production process.

Beginning the 2009 Season

Last week we held our first major Seven Cycles retailer event:  the Seven Factory Immersion.  It went really well and we got a lot accomplished--if you'd like, you can read about it here.  Many of our favorite retailers attended.  One of our favorites or our favorite retailers--HubBub--also attended.  Diane wrote a much too flattering post on their blog about the Seven event.  Here post begins:

"Just returned from Boston Tuesday night after an INTENSE two days with all the folks at Seven Cycles."  --HubBub's emphasis...

Sounds ominous; you'll have to read their post to find out what happened...

We have already started planning our next Immersion--I believe we are calling it a Minimmersion^tm--and we haven't even caught our breath from the first event.