Shand Cycles

[GrantM]

Having just started a small family, stuff like that was important.

Hi Steven, welcome to getting smoked out!
Tell us a bit more about your family, background,
and where you love riding and where you grew up,
that kind of stuff.

I love Scotland, beautiful place to travel,
especially when it's not raining...

-g

[Too Tall]

Steven, I'm just starting to appreciate your work. Thanks for taking time to speak out on Smoked Out this is such and honor.

I've got questions but will hold my peace a bit.

Lovely and considerate work.

stooshie-overview.jpg

[chasea]

Thanks for the introduction. I'm happy you've been able to turn frame building into a full time gig.

As for the UK market, how have the changes come about from your POV? Have they come around to you, you to them, a little bit of both; and how so?

Best,

Chase

[edelbikes]

Hi Steven !
From what I understood, you're now doing the paint internally ? Is it something that Russ brought to the team ?
How do you split the work between you two ?

Francois

[shand]

Hi Steven !
From what I understood, you're now doing the paint internally ? Is it something that Russ brought to the team ?
How do you split the work between you two ?

Francois

Francois,

good to hear from you.

Yes, you're correct we are now doing all our own paint in-house. This was a pretty big step for us but it was something I think we knew we were going to do at some point.

It's made a huge difference for use both financially and in terms of control over the final product. Lots of people told us not to do it and it was something that was better outsourced but I was getting frustrated with the additional time (and expense) we needed to allocate for painting. There's nothing worse than being a on schedule delivering a frame to the customer, dropping the frame at the painter to find he's 2 weeks behind on his schedule.

Yes, Russ has brought that skill into the business which has been really great in terms of getting things in place and operational quickly.

The work splits between the 2 of us pretty easily actually. The frame designs and actual building is something I do. Russ handles the paint and finishing side of things. Away from the actual manufacturing, Russ handles most of the brand/media/promotion stuff we do. It all works pretty well without us having to try to hard to define roles.

Cheers

Steven

[ron l edmiston]

steven, great to meet you..

love your graphic logo --- the "hare.."

chasing the hare & climbing the high wall by l ray --- drawing ronnie back to some fond memories in scotland, can't talk about "lassie come home.." here on velo..
your gallery, highland cross ride, paint & work shop, tip the scales on the marketing high/top end..

hope to meet you in person -- maybe mile high..

ronnie with a smile

[ABiCi]

Hi Steven,

I was actually thinking of asking you a question earlier in the week before your Smoked Out thread was started, and it also relates to your logo of the hare - just wondering what the story behind it is? In particular I was wondering if there was any relation between the hare and the whippet from Friday Night Lights #180, considering the historical relationship between the two? My wife and I have a whippet and just adopted an ex-racing greyhound, so I have become very sensitive to sighthound sightings!

Cheers,

Rob

[shand]

As for the UK market, how have the changes come about from your POV? Have they come around to you, you to them, a little bit of both; and how so?

Hi Chase,

well I can only really talk about my view of the UK market. I've seen over the past 3-5 years a gradual shift in the customers perceptions of what they're buying when they order a handbuilt frame.
For a long time in this country, if you wanted a quality bike, you went to a big bike shop, got measured for one of their models and came back a few days/weeks weeks later to pick it up. These were all handbuilt, normally in, the shop, a workshop upstairs or in the basement. Some shops would farm it out to local builders. At the high end of the market, almost all bikes were handmade. Not because the rider was buying into the handmade scene but because that's how bikes were built through the 50s and 60s. There was no huge import market then. The way most of those bikes were built then were not what we would consider handbuilt today. They were built fast and economically. It was a pretty competitive market and prices were low.

There were quite a few bigger brands operating out of factories rather than shops but mostly these were producing utility cycles rather than frames for the discerning racing cyclist. Again the prices were low. As the demand for bicycles fell, the number of specialist shops with their own builders also dwindled. There are still a few (retail) shops in the UK that build frames and they (from my discussions) seem to be seeing something of an upturn in trade over the past couple of years.

This seems like a longwinded non-answer to your question!

Ok the point is that handbuilt frames have not historically been seen as a premium product here in the UK. The perception was (and still is, although it's getting better) that old retired guys in sheds are the UK framebuilders. Banging together frames with technology from the 1900s. I had one potential customer call me to ask for a frame and was genuinely confused that I was more expensive than a Chinese/Taiwanese frame since they had to pay to get that one here all the way from Asia and mine was just round the corner.

To answer your question (eventually) I have had nothing to do with the changes in perception. Unless me banging on in forums about how unless people start to charge realistic prices for their work, there won't be a UK handbuilt community. The changes seem to have come from a lot more widespread coverage of events like NAHBS here in the UK. Also people are not just looking in magazines local to their country for bike stuff anymore. They type 'handbult steel frame' into google and get bombarded with images of incredibly beautiful frames from all over the world. For the bike buying public, the world is shrinking into a single marketplace.

[shand]

Hi Steven, welcome to getting smoked out!
Tell us a bit more about your family, background,
and where you love riding and where you grew up,
that kind of stuff.

I love Scotland, beautiful place to travel,
especially when it's not raining...

-g

I grew up in a small town in the South of Scotland. Pretty normal middle class upbringing.
I did an interview quite recently and the journalist was pretty disappointed that I wasn't riding around as an 8 year old dreaming of winning the Tour de France. The truth is, for me, as well as most kids, the bike was just a way of messing around with your mates. I was never into racing as a kid. Although I did do a couple of BMX races. Living in a rural town, I used the bike as a way of getting around, longer trips to find better places to fish mostly.

I probably became aware of racing in about '85 or '86 (I was 15 or 16) but it was never something I aspired to. I enjoyed watching it and it probably motivated me to ride my bike more but I never raced until I left home and went to University. My first real taste of it was in about 1988 or '89 when some friends and I borrowed a van and we drove about 120 miles to watch a stage of the Kellogs Tour (a precursor to the Tour of Britain).

Having a young family now (3 and 6) has meant it's harder and harder to get out on the bike as much as I'd like. My wife's a distance runner which means we're always trying to negotiate time away from the family to get the miles in. As a result my riding tends to be fitted in when I can which means it's usually early morning and solo. I'd like to start racing again and might get involved with 'the cross scene this year after not having raced for at least 4 years. We'll see.