What Does It Take To Start Your Own Bike Brand?

Last week I received an email from Laurens Curteis who is the driving force behind a relatively new bike brand in the UK called Maxim Bikes. He sent over this great little article about something that most of you will of never even considered... What does it take to start your own bike brand? It certainly makes for a pretty interesting read!
Take it away Laurens!

Like all great things in life Maxim Bikes developed from an idea, an idea inspired by the love of a sport. The first time I saw a mountain bike being used properly (i.e. hammered down a steep technical track) was in my early teens. One of my friends had a house in a little hamlet called Hirnant in North Wales. This name might not stand out to a lot of you but it’s the home of one of the steepest, roughest, and most technical downhill tracks that I have ever come across; aptly named “The Bank”, and built by none other than Dan Atherton. To my young easily corrupted eyes, seeing the Atherton brothers hammering these bikes right to the edge of their capabilities was the equivalent of seeing an astronaut re-enter orbit and landing in my own backyard. I soaked it up like a sponge. Needless to say, the following Christmas a mountain bike was on my list for Santa. The seed was planted and from that moment on, my life, at times without my knowledge, has been carved around my love for this sport.

My first conscious, realistic thought of starting my own brand of frames was in 2011. At the time, I had been negotiating with a number of different bike frame companies about working for them as a UK importer and distributor. This process was helpful as it made me realise that this was definitely the industry for me but it did not satisfy my creative streak. This is when Ryan and I banged our heads together and realised that what we really wanted to do was develop our own brand of mountain bike frames. We put a business plan together and fortunately were approached by an investor with the same vision – the wheels were set in motion.

The next step was finding a factory that could deliver quality, a short lead time and one that we could develop a working relationship with. We visited factories in mainland Europe and countless more in the Far East. Once we were confident that we had found the right match for our vision, we set to work developing our product range. Downhill, All-mountain and Dirt Jumping are our favourite genres of biking by a long way, so opting for a three frame range was an easy decision to make. Ryan then got to work building up designs in collaboration with the engineers in our factory. We also collaborated with many racers here in the UK and zeroed in on the key factors that they looked for in a frame.

Once we had decided on the basic designs, some prototypes were made and we began testing them right away. We were fortunate to be able to test our frames all through the summer race season. Our team riders were able to come back to us after each race with feedback and small changes were made. Towards the tail-end of the 2012 race season we were confident that we were getting near to putting our frames into production.

It was around this time that we began getting feedback on our choice of name. Our first choice for a company name was Curteis Cycles – a natural choice since my surname is “Curteis”. Understandably people were confusing our company name with the long-established Curtis Bikes based in the South of England. This left us in a predicament; it was a choice between writing off all of our already purchased merchandise (including a rather beautiful race gazebo) and completely re-branding, or continuing with the same (similar) company name. In the end we realised it would cause too much confusion having two British-based brands of frames with such similar names. Maxim Bikes was formed.

So in August of 2012, we were confident that we had our final prototypes, a company name and a direction. The next step was to start introducing ourselves to the general population. We booked ourselves in to The Cycle Show held at the NEC in Birmingham. I can safely say August and September were the most stressful few months I’d had in a long time. I ended up writing off a holiday to the South of France due to the amount of preparation required for the trade fair. Ryan took control of designing frame graphics and constructing the trade fair stand while I tackled marketing and all the red tape surrounding setting up a stand at the show. It was all worth it though, as we had a brilliant week at the NEC, meeting some great people and receiving lots of positive feedback from industry experts.

With the frames in production, all that was left for 2012 was to decide how best to sell our frames: to go through a distributor network like the majority of frame manufacturers or to sell directly to consumers. We decided on the latter option as this better fitted our vision and we could see the many advantages that this would have for both ourselves and, more importantly, for the customer. Our e-commerce store, www.maximbikes.com, was set up at the end of 2012.

By this point in 2013, we look back with pride at how far we have come from that initial idea and what we have achieved since then. We look forward to fully introducing our bikes to the UK at the start of next month!

This certainly isn't the last you'll hear from Maxim Bikes! Stay tuned for a full review on their awesome Maxim Maya downhill bike from Angus in the near future...