A behind the scenes look at the challenges, the triumphs and the frustrations. From “far-fetched idea” to first customer sale - the first 17 months in quotes and pictures.
 | We’d talked about launching our own bike brand since we were kids but when we laid out everything that we’d be walking away from as racers it was truly terrifying. We launched on Dan’s birthday from the Athy Racing HQ. We kept everything secret until the last minute so getting it all out there was insane.—Gee Atherton |
| Additive manufacturing made it possible for us to implement significant frame improvements between races but it also allowed us to bring those learnings into production weeks rather than years after those races.—Ed Haythornthwaite |
| Our frames are constructed using titanium lugs joined to proprietary carbon tubing. The process is entirely digital and requires very little tooling so the lugs tailored in CAD can be built to order and individually customized.—Ben Farmer, Atherton Bikes CEO |
| Within a couple of months Atherton Bikes went from being this cool but far-fetched idea to a really scary reality as more pieces slotted into place. That’s typical of how we work together as a family – Athy comes up with huge plans then I’ll work through the details and Rach brings the fire!—Gee Atherton |
| I’m part of this because I believe in the technology and I believe in the people. I was pretty brutal those first months, I pissed them off, but it’s hard to get a new product to market in a form that people are actually going to want to buy. We didn’t have a big influx of funding but I believe that struggle made the company stronger.—Piers Linney, Chairman |
| We got a great team in place, now all we had to do was build a World Cup bike in a couple of months. At the same time we were building a 150mm trail bike that we’d all be stoked to ride. We gave both models equal weighting, key learnings from the trail bike later being incorporated into the team’s race bikes.—Dan Brown, Chief Marketing Officer |
| Going into a World Cup you’re looking for 10ths of seconds and we were starting from the ground up, we tested 1000s of variables, our trackside checklist was 100 items long. It took every bit of our combined experience and every part of the engineer’s knowledge.—Gee |
| Away from racing London Bike Show was a huge boost, people were genuinely fascinated by the process and excited by what we were doing, hanging out, coming back again later to talk more...—Dan Atherton |
| Rach’s first win at Fort William was a definite high point. It's hard to convey the enormity of late nights and long days on a challenging budget, the fun test sessions, the endless Whatsapps, workflow clashes, clashes of opinion (a lot!) and the sheer drive to create better bikes… a World Cup win in front of a home crowd made it all worthwhile.—Dan Brown |
| Getting a race bike dialled to win is Such a long process, winning a World Cup on a 4 month old prototype was an improbable dream. The bike I rode in Maribor was awesome but it wasn’t perfect, I’d gone too long with it, the stiffness wasn’t right, I was learning and making changes every day.—Rachel Atherton |
| Even at Fort William, I took off the more linear suspension hardware that the crew had worked so hard to 3D print and bond in 5 days for me, and went back to the original set up for my race run. It felt amazing to win for the team but they all said that the hard work was just starting…—Rachel |
| One of the biggest challenges in that first season was to optimise the stiffness characteristics of the frame. A level of flex in certain areas of the frame can give positive performance in certain track conditions, but too much flex can give a negative performance and make the frame feel unpredictable.—Rob Gow, Head Designer |
| The application of Additive Manufacturing allowed the team to make a series of small, iterative steps working in between the World Cup rounds. Detailed feedback from the riders would be matched with lab testing so that all design modifications were informed by both.—Rob Gow |
| At the same time the riders were doing a lot of work with Dave Weagle to tune in the suspension kinematic. The DW6 suspension system allows us to completely change the suspension design from the back end with the front end remaining constant so there is a really quick turnaround.—Rob Gow |
| Written down like this it seems like all forward progress but that’s not how it was! Taking steps back was always worth it. Halfway through the season we shared our reservations about stiffness with key media guys, it really drove home that none of us were willing to launch a product that wasn’t 110% dialled, so we kept working.—Rachel Atherton |
| EFBE in Germany are recognised as world leaders in bicycle frame testing. We took Gee and Charlie’s frames there mid-season and tested them as far as the equipment would go, exceeding some specific load cases we had in mind. The tests confirmed that the frames were as good as the day that they came off the bonding jig – despite hard use at three World Cups.—Ben Farmer |
| We actually got through our first season ever without breaking a frame, but of course I broke myself at Les Gets! Suddenly I felt totally useless. It was hard to step back from testing and let the others get on with it, but that is the beauty of Atherton bikes, everyone rides and understands how the bike should feel - this is boss man Dan Brown in action.—Rachel |
| It was amazing to see Mille step up to take the Junior win at Val di Sole. To support new talent is definitely one of the founding principles of Atherton Bikes, it’s almost more emotional seeing other riders racing the bikes!—Rachel |
| Val di Sole was a pivotal moment for Charlie too, moving up to 11th in Finals but he felt like he was struggling to make some of the turns so for Round 7 at Lenzerheide (in 5 days time!) he asked if he could try a shorter front end.—Dan Brown |
| Monday morning rider briefing – Monday afternoon CAD data to Renishaw where build data was loaded on to the multi-laser RenAM 500Q machine. It takes the AM machine about 16 hours to make a lug set for one bike, melting each of the Ti6Al4V slices in 60 micrometre layers so by Tuesday lunchtime the lugs were out of the machine.—Dan Brown |
| Wednesday, the lugs are heat treated, removed from the build plate then bearing seats were machined, threads cut and inspected.—Dan Brown |
| Thursday morning Ed assembled the frame. Ideally we'd leave it in the jig for the adhesive to cure but not this time! We accelerated the curing with heater mats but we weren’t able to factor in cooling time, I flew to Zurich with the frame still warm! The race team mechanics were straight on to assembly and by Friday 10.15 am Charlie joined Group A practise, qualifying 24th and moving up to 21st in Finals.
For me, achieving this turnaround is one of the best illustrations of both the versatility of Additive Manufacturing and the workings of the Atherton Bike team.—Dan Brown |
| Away from the racetrack we were facing the huge challenge of moving to full production. Luckily several of the team have a background in manufacturing from aerospace and F1 so it wasn’t hard for us to adapt our experience…a bike is actually a relatively simple product!—Ed Haythornthwaite |
| We took the bikes back to EFBE for the final pre-market certification testing so now we have two great bikes production ready which we’re marketing now as our #firstfifty. Making the first build slots available to those who’ve followed our story and signed up to the newsletter feels more legit than putting out some huge launch and risking not being able to keep up with demand – we are in this for the long haul.—Dan |
| We delivered our first bikes to customers a few weeks ago. Covid-19 has definitely slowed down our supply chain but everyone is in the same boat. Our silver lining is that the postponement of the race season has given us an unprecedented opportunity to focus on developing Atherton Bikes. We’ve spent the last three months building frames and bikes solo from multiple locations; we're pretty much back in the factory now with social distancing in place and a real fire for the next stage in our company's growth.—Gee |
We still have some availability for our
#firstfifty build slots. More about the bikes here:
http://tiny.cc/athertonbikes, for detailed information including spec and prices sign up to our mailing list.
Images: Sven Martin, Moonhead Media and team phones!
What I don't get, is the business plan?
I'm not trying to be over cynical, but where's the "money-in" part? It just looks like all money-out
1. Greater %profit margin (10% is very large for traditional publicly traded bike companies. Chapter2 (direct sale road frames only) has been24%)
2. Shorter time to get return on investment . Manufacturing runs are booked 2years ahead. And moulds may take years to “payoff/pay for themselves “
R&d done today can be sold tomorrow (fashionable hta can be released today , not in 2 years time.
3 Less capital required as dont have to pay for thousands of bikes that you haven’t sold yet
4 new competing 3d printers are meant to greatly reduce price this year.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit
'But where's the MONEY??'
They now have 200 printers. So 3d printing is scalable, you just need more printers. And you don't need 10 times as many people to run 10 times as many machines.
Its the development of an already existing business and product, not the creation of a new one, add another year or so on minimum if they had started from scratch and all of the headaches and costs that go along the way.
Sorry for taking what you said to imply something it didn't, im a bad boy.
Now careful you don't read that and assume I'm calling you an internet troll!
Also, whether you love or hate the Athertons, you can’t deny they are the most successful racing family ever. They probably know a thing or two about geo and developing a bike.
Evil Bikes are produced in Asian factories, just like 95% of the carbon MTB industry. When they do a product update, they write up some sort of details and specs on the new bikes and send them over to Pinkbike who does a release. Maybe they make a video with their products in it. I mean, compared to other brands, I'd say Evil is similarly treated, but with less new products being released, they just don't have the media to present. Look at brands like Giant - one of the largest - when was the last time you saw an article about a Giant race team, or even any of their products? Last I can think of is when the Reign 29 was released. I can't even think of any videos that had Giant products in it.
Aside from Evil introducing a new frame every year - what else is there? Yea, they might design some interesting stuff, but its nothing groundbreaking in our industry. The Delta link is kinda old news these days.
Furthermore, Atherton Bike Co is probably really pushing these articles, and probably being VERY open about what's going inside their company because they need to generate hype to sell any of their products.
From what I know of Evil products, there isn't much hype necessary, they sell pretty well without it.
The real question is is it worth it to have even more pivots and bearings (more weight, maintenance and more expensive production) as opposed to a standard 4-bar layout.
www.pinkbike.com/news/robot-bike-co-r160-custom-review-2016.html
From what I read, they can change a layout on Monday, race it at a World Cup on Sunday and let their client base know they've proofed out a running change to the linkage and/or frame layout; take customer orders immediately with ground up redesigned bits going out to the consumer in a matter of weeks.
Or...with the DW6, I'm guessing Weagle has a formula he's supplied Atherton (because one of the big things Dave works into his suspension designs is the center of the rider's mass as it correlates to the angles of the bike) where if a customer wants to order a really long, odd reach bike like Cathro, they make the front triangle reach to that customer's specs and DW's formula lets them know what changes have to happen to make the rear triangle & linkage mate to the rider's balance point at that point.
The old Ridemonkey Iron Horse Sunday thread was insanely comprehensive & the way he works very specific traits into a bike that compensate for the rider & their positioning are more thoroughly thought out and planned than any other designer.
Bikes being developed by racers is a huge advantage. Other companies are welding together great geo bikes (or at least what is fashionable) but with no consideration given to flex because they don't have 3 Pro riders dialing in this important attribute, that most of us weekend warriors don't have the ability to experiment with.
Also while you do get advanced production techniques and lower volume costs, bespoke is much harder due to that volume.
Starling cycles is a good example of that compromise
I have build number 9/50 on the way and can’t wait to ride this bike!
For example, would a traditional, aluminium, welded frame be any slower to turn around, to change within reason, to 'keep ahead of trends'? I would say not if you are making in-house.
The key to your point is just making in-house, not really the manufacturing method, a bike frame is a pretty simple thing to make if that's what you are setup to do, e.g. I bet a company like Nicolai could have a proto designed and in physical form on trails within a week if they really wanted to and it shared the common form of their production lineup (In the same way the Atherton frame would need to with sus design and tube sizing etc)
If you are talking about carbon-only frames though, then yes, they are pretty unique.
As I say, the main thing here is doing work in-house, not sending it all out, it isnt so much the production method - if you were setup to make custom geo alloy frames you could easily have one ready within a week, including heat treat if you did that in house like Intense did.
It is kind of funny though because my buddy has a specialized road bike built very similar to the atherton bikes, only his is about 25 years old (with questionable integrity in the glued joins)
Not sure how long the Athertons plan to remain in elite racing for (as competitiors themselves, not the brand). I understand that this project has been something they've been dreaming of for years. But i also assume it's part of their post-racing career plan. Although Rachel was still very much still at the top of her game before injury took her out of the season last year.
Anyway, my point is that it would be incredible for the Athertons to get more podiums and perhaps another WC overall title for Rachel on their bikes. Aside from racing, it seems the Athertons have got a lot vested in this project and i'd like to see them succeed - commercially as well as competetively. For all the slick marketing and advertising out there, there is no better advert (nor indisputable retort to critics and naysayers) for a bike than "It wins" and "It wins better than everyone else's bike". Seeing a bike win, and being able to put a #1 sticker on the bike or in your advertising, probably slashes the amount of years required building market awareness or whatever by a huge amount. Look how big YT went when Gwinn was winning with the Tues.
On a slightly related note:
As a big fan of Nukeproof, i'm curious if anybody started taking more of an interest in them after Sam Hill won the EWS (i'm thining more specifically their bikes but i'd also be interested in the same about their components too). Particularly outside of the UK/internationally. Can any of our international commentators enlighten me?
Bikes sell either they have winning athletes or not.
My understanding is that most frame/model designs have a set minimum lifespan (as in how long they will sell a current model for) due to the amount of money that goes into designing and manufacturing it.
If Atherton Bikes can change the fundamentals of a bike with a few taps of a keyboard, they can be permanently up to date with current trends and what works or doesn't.
At least that's my understanding of it.
Also, the racing pedigree of the Athertons will likely be a USP for some. As the Motorbike racing saying goes - "Win on Sunday. Sell on Monday"
Have you seen how many kids Sam Hill has?
While Japan, Korea, Singapore and Twain are decent countries. The same cannot be said for China, Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Thailand, India to name a few. I’d love to boycott China and these lesser nations that don’t offer freedom speech and political belief. Made any where but China is real. I’d love it if we could get off our China addiction and tell Xi Jinping to go suck his on roaster.
We delivered our first bikes to customers a few weeks ago. Covid-19 has definitely slowed down our supply chain but everyone is in the same boat. Our silver lining is that the postponement of the race season has given us an unprecedented opportunity to focus on developing Atherton Bikes. We’ve spent the last three months building frames and bikes solo from multiple locations; we're pretty much back in the factory now with social distancing in place and a real fire for the next stage in our company's growth.—Gee
We still have some availability for our #firstfifty build slots. More about the bikes here: tiny.cc/athertonbikes, for detailed information including spec and prices sign up to our mailing list.
Oh yea last paragraph :-)
This is pink bike - look at the pictures and head straight to the comments, and ask silly questions!
From the beginning would start with Robot bikes?
But to use your analogy, it would be like Trek developing the session, an athlete buying the company, tweaking the geometry and stiffness, putting their name on the downtube and then not even giving a nod to Trek for starting it all off.
Please don't see this as trying to take away from all of the hard work and efforts the Atherton's have done to tweak all of the aspects of these bikes to their liking. I'm just trying to say that maybe an acknowledgement of Robot bike co. for spending years developing the manufacturing technique and susspension design would be a little more respectful.
" it would be like Trek developing the session, an athlete buying the company, tweaking the geometry and stiffness, putting their name on the downtube and then not even giving a nod to Trek for starting it all off."
You pretty much just described any company that has ever changed ownership and or names. This is just the way of the world I think. I don't get the hate for Atherton bikes or their story, I hope they do really well and they probably don't give a shit what any of us think.
My only issue is the start of the article which almost reads as if it came out of nowhere, and the start of the project was when they launched it on Dan's birthday, when realistically there'd been many more prototypes and iterations before then, they just didn't say Atherton on the side of them.
Always dug the Robot Bike Co vibes.
Now put me down for a low, long, slack short travel 29er.
Bringing the mass production of high end frames back to Europe and Northern America will be relevant. And just like with steel, a custom-made frame for one customer is as easy as the normal frame.
Pretty sure that in a few years from now, some of us will design our lugs on CAD, sent the file to print somewhere local or overseas, and then to the local machinist. Bond or weld the way you like it and bob's your uncle!
If not, it's extremely over priced.