We recently made it down to Waterloo, Wisconsin to Trek Bicycles to begin our bike collaboration and while there, we got a firsthand look at Trek’s inner workings. Everything from the design studio to Project One to the manufacturing floor was at the mercy of our camera. While we couldn’t show you everything, here’s a look at what went down and what we saw on day one. There will be more developments on our collaboration in the coming weeks.
Hit the jump for the rest of the story…
From the first moment you walk in the door, you know whose house it is. Each of the bikes Lance Armstrong personally rode to victory at each Tour de France adorns the main area. On the adjacent wall are the bikes of fellow Trek rider Alberto Contador (one of only five people to win all three grand tours as well as the youngest to do so), who was quoted after his 2009 Tour de France victory as saying “I have never had admiration for him [as a person] and I never will.” Incidentally, there were 3 bikes on the Contador side (2007 Tour de France, Giro d’Italia 2008 and Vuelta a España 2008) and 7 bikes on the Armstrong side.
In someways, Trek is a typical corporate office, in other ways, it’s not. Yes, there are cubicles and industrial carpeting but everybody at Trek has at least one bike sitting outside their office or cubicle and admit to having more than a handful at home.
These two were our favorites, one inspired by WWII fighter planes and the other with airbrushed cobwebs. From there, we started to get a glimpse of what was possible for our project.
Entering the design studio with one of our two hosts, Eric Bjorling. Like most designers, the Trek designers also prefer to work in the dark. Having arrived at around lunch, we also noticed that the healthy lifestyle is really apart of the culture there. It seemed like everybody was coming back from a run, ride, yoga class or cafeteria with salad and water. Incidentally, that web design area below, used to be the office gym.
We were able to see 3 of Lance Armstrong’s personal bikes that either didn’t make it in time or didn’t make the cut to be part of the Project Stages collection for the 2009 Tour de France. The one on up top was seen @lancearmstrong’s twitpic.com/j2az3 a few weeks later after we got to play with it. 1274 represents the amount of days Lance was in retirement for, during which 27.5 million people died of cancer. The white UNITE bike, featured in the bottom right of the previous batch of photos, featuring the fists of solidarity didn’t make the cut. The yellow was ready to go for the Tour, but arrived a little too late.
Up in the Industrial Design loft, our other host, Sam, showed off the first ever Trek District concept bike to us along with the designer himself, Mike Leighton. We fell in love with the District right from the get go and seeing the very first concept bike further solidified that love. While admiring it stationary on a desk, the simple chrome and black color scheme and offset wheels just made it look like the fastest city bike we’d ever seen. We also checked out our raw parts for our build – Aerospokes, District frames and lots of carbon.
We got to see Mike Leighton’s personal bike, the prototype of the first carbon fibre District. On the right, the Bishop, a prototype electric bike dressed up as a vintage motorcycle, complete with gauges, chrome and really subtle detailing like scull icons on the bar ends.
Every Trek product is tried, tested, and compared with their competitors and every batch of frames produced by Trek is cataloged and stored for warranty purposes. If you’ve ever sent your bike back to Trek, your model is compared with one here and if it’s a manufacturing defect, you get a brand new frame of equal value in return. That day, they had just shipped out a brand new pricey carbon fibre frame for one rider’s 10-year-old carbon fibre frame.
The paint area for Trek’s custom bike program – Project One. The same group that paint Lance Armstrong’s bike paint your bike for the right price. It was tough to navigate this place without bumping into freshly painted frames.We’re lucky enough to have these same people doing all the custom paint on our bikes and can’t wait to see how our paint schemes turn out.
We got a quick pep talk from Eric Lynn, Creative Group Director at Trek (pictured top left) on our project before starting to think up concepts. Then after a long day of working, we checked into The Mission Hill Inn, Trek’s own bed & breakfast in Madison, WI. We worked late into the night continuing to think of concepts, color schemes, parts and everything in between.
Stay tuned for our follow up story with Day II of the build.
For more pictures, peep our Flickr stream.
For daily updates on the project, add us to Twitter.
Another big thanks to Eric, Sam, Mike and Eric!
Maura says: 
dhog 
Brian F 
haha!
Rachel E 
Dan B 
renaldo 
