Blog - No22 Founders

Lewis: How did you two meet?

Bryce: I used to date Mike’s sister, then Mike and I started riding bikes together and then kind of fell into this together.

Lewis: I know both of you guys have some background in cycling prior to starting No. 22 - what did that look like for you?

Mike: On my end, I grew up working in bike shops, it was my first job and really only job for many years. I worked at a handful of bike shops before university and then all the way through and then after, so grew up wrenching on bikes and selling bikes. It’s just the best to be able to chat bikes all day, I just absolutely love it.

Bryce: I had no prior cycling background, I had a design background but I had no bikes whatsoever, so this was my first venture into the bike industry.

Lewis: Interesting! Okay, and so on that note, I heard that you had some past in law?

Bryce: Yeah so I did a degree in business and law. Definitely always had entrepreneurship on the mind.

Lewis: So you were thinking about working maybe not in the industry but running/building something for a long time.

 
Bryce: yeah I was working in really modern, residential mostly architecture for a time.

Lewis: Would you say each of these backgrounds influences your space in the bike industry?

Mike: Since we’re such a small business, a lot of us at No. 22 have to wear a lot of hats. Bryce’s background has a large influence on the look of the bikes and design elements with how our bikes are built.

Lewis: You were saying you recently built out an Aurora for yourself, which is a really cool design.

Bryce:  It’s just sort of a cliche with architects in black and minimalism, so just distilled to a speedy looking bike. For my vibe I just like super clean lines.

Lewis: The first bike I saw from you guys next to the, you know, the Chris King show which is where I really sort of saw the brand in person for the first time was that Aurora that you guys have on your website and that like emerald green vibrant color way.

 
Mike: Some people would walk by and they’d say that's the nicest bike I’ve ever seen in my life. We were like, wow, that’s pretty cool! Bryce: That's the first book we showed the new integrated cockpit.

Lewis: Working in the industry you don't see a bike where you’re like wow, that is incredible, all that often. There’s really cool stuff especially here and like in kind of higher end. You can see just insane bikes all the time. You kind of get a little worn in on it.  

Bryce: The bikes that we got here and the bikes we bring to trade shows, they're like this the developed product that we can do all day every day. And that's kind of what we do - they're meant to be written all day every day. They're like, this is the bike. This is supposed to be your primary bike. And I think what's so interesting is that you go to these trade shows and it was like the Philly Bike Expo is a perfect example. And we walked the show and it's like the bikes you see there are amazing. And I'm sure we haven't had a chance to explore Made yet.

 
Lewis: Yeah, like it was phenomenal. And that's a small selection.

 
Mike: Right. And I think that's like it's so fun. You go and you see the creativity. And it's all really, really clever ways to crack the same puzzle. Yeah, it's really, really neat. And I think it's cool that, yeah, you say it like it's the bike that kind of catches your attention and you get the same cool reaction. They're really special in our space, but they're not these crazy exotic. Like there's not a bunch of frills and there's not a bunch of insanity happening.

Lewis: Yeah. I guess on that too, you have a bunch of different bikes in your lineup...I can't say the same of a lot of other small batch, custom fabricators. I mean, everything from like the old King, little wing, you know, or like all over the case. How did you guys with your not-massive depth in cycling and bike design prior to No. 22 and your experience working in a shop but not maybe fabricating yourself come up with like geometries that actually work really well?

 
Bryce: It's a good question. I think a lot of it was precedent, like predicated on what we liked in geometry and bikes that we had ridden and what we thought made for good riding bikes. And also our team, like Scott Hawk, who's our director of operations in the factory, who was head frame designer at Serotta. He's got a great sense of bike geometry. He is an exceptional bike designer. Yeah. I think, in our earliest days, before we connected with our production team, we were largely drawing on precedent. Like, what did we like? What did we not like? What would we like to try? What would we like to progress the challenge a little bit? And we kind of, I feel like we struck gold a little bit with our first launch of models. They weren’t bikes that were insanely progressive, in terms of geometry. But we wanted bikes that were like really fun to descend on. It's really fun to climb on. It's really fun to just, like, go ride aggressively. But it's not so hyper-aggressive that when you sneeze, you end up in a ditch. There's a nice balance that we try to hit. And so I think we started with that footing, and then, yeah, we brought Scott into the team, and we really were able to move our geometry and bike design to a much more progressive level. And also, at that same time, we brought production into house, which meant we could build bikes ourselves.

Lewis: That's really fun, too. But, I mean, also, if you're looking at titanium bikes kind of across the board, and let me back up a little bit, too, which is the question I skipped earlier: Why titanium?

Bryce: That’s why we started the company actually was just for that material. When I was starting road bike racing in the early late 90s, titanium is like a material du jour. So I started riding it on that, and that was right before carbon took off, right? Titanium is really hard to work with, carbon fiber was easy to produce, mass-produce it, so the big companies got behind that, really pushed it, and that's been the story ever since. And so I tried about, I don't know, like every fancy carbon bike over the years, trying to find something that felt as good as titanium bikes. You know, I had Cervelos, BMC's, titanium, etc. And then I was working as an architect still. This is like, when Mike and I, before we started the company, I built a track bike out of titanium, designed it, and had it made for me. Because it would probably be something that wouldn’t be trash in the winters in Toronto, so it doesn’t rust. I got back the materials, and I was like, "Holy shit, this is really cool." Like, I forgot how amazing this material was. And then about that time, Mike was just finishing articling at a big corporate law firm, and he was supposed to go back as an associate, but had planned a ride for the west coast over to the east coast of Canada, and needed a bike for that. And so I said we should do something with titanium, so we had a bike made for him with the same material as mine. It's not that we kind of wanted to start a bike company, per se, as we wanted to start a titanium bike company, so that's where it kind of came from.

 
Mike: At that time, which feels like a long time ago, but was not all that long ago, we found that titanium was really…most of the Thai bikes were very legacy titanium bikes, where, like, Thai had this reputation of being a really springy, whippy, comfortable material. It's really fun for endurance bikes, really comfortable over long rides, but those are all kind of euphemisms for bikes that ride, like, they’re 1985. And, you know, they had really small diameter tubes, they weren't really performance-oriented, and I think that's the opening that we really built our brand around, which was like, "Hey, this material is amazing, but no one is trying to progress with it." And I certainly shouldn't say no one, but it was definitely not, as it is today, like, something that you'd want to go race on. Yeah. So that was the opening.

Lewis: Oh, definitely, yeah. And with that, coming from the design background and riding for both of you guys, it's very different looking, titanium bikes, and we're talking about kind of progressing the image and the feeling of it. How have you come to your philosophy of design? How do you come across your tube shaping and structure? I mean, obviously you're working with pretty advanced additive manufacturing, but where do you come with that balance of, like, why not just round tubes?

 
Bryce: We want to make the best bikes we can, and that's not just straight tubes, right? Like, manipulated tubes are going to be stiffer, and make for a better, more contemporary riding bike. The additive manufacturing, all the stuff we take and do in-house, we're just trying to make the best bikes we can, and we're always molding them and trying to improve them, so we're looking at ways to do that through different ways of manipulating tubing, different ways of producing the parts. So, it's always just striving for improving the product, and I think, maybe sometimes to our detriment, I think, overall to our benefit, is some other brands just don't do that. They just want to get bikes out the door and take the path of least resistance and have somebody else worry about the supply chain issues and quality control of each individual little part, and just buy stuff off the shelf and make it a la carte easy for themselves. And that's just not something that we've ever been really interested in, we think that’d be kind of boring. It’s a double-edge sword, but the risk and the complexity is worth it for a really good product, and I think making bikes that are really intrinsically No. 22 are really unique to what we're up to.

 
Mike: I think there's real value to it. Because we're controlling so much of the design of the bike and all the little elements, we really get to optimize those pieces. So, our dropouts were designed specifically for the way that we fabricate bikes, they're designed specifically for the models that we're going to use them in, and then we have a range of sizes of just those dropouts that we can...So, yeah, it really lets us focus, and I think that's evident in a lot of the pieces. The brake bridges on the bike are not just a simple tube of metal, it's like our fourth iteration of refining the brake bridge over the years of making it just a little bit more tapered, a little bit more detailed, a little bit more beautiful, and structure really still has that same benefit. And so, yeah, I think it's definitely the hard path. And, you know, from 10 feet away, a lot of titanium bikes look the same, but what we really love about ours is that the closer you get, the more you realize that every single touchpoint on that bike has been really intricately designed and optimized and thought about. And I think that's the piece I love, is that you're going to be washing your bike six months after you bought it, and you're going to notice a detail that maybe you've never seen before, and you probably didn't know about even when you bought the bike. It's not like a sales feature, it's, you know, a little touchpoint that reminds you that someone has intimately cared and loved at crafting this bike.

Lewis: So, last point. I just noticed this on the bikes, and I've really enjoyed it. Number six components. Number six for carbon, right? I love that, by the way. So, what's kind of the background there? Like, you were talking about, like, kind of running manufacturing in line, so you can see quality control, you can see everything, and you know exactly what you're dealing with. Why not work with, like, a more established carbon component brand, rather than just doing your own? Again, it's like, it's what I said about, like, round-tubing versus, like, the complex shapes you've been using. Like, why make it harder on yourself?

 
Bryce: Yeah, I guess that's what we thought would make the best riding bikes were with forks that were not in the market, in terms of the number of offsets, and the tire clearance, so-- And I think the first time we did it was, like, when flat mount coming out, and we couldn't get flat mount. Like, we did flat mount forks before ENVE did— you know, it was just again about finding the best solution to the issues of the bikes, and that was taking it out on ourselves, which was, like, no small feat. It was--it remains to be, we always say, another “forking” problem. Like, of course, it's a series of, like, numerous issues and just complexities. One of the hardest parts of the bike to make is a carbon fork. Like, it's super tough, super tough to make. So, yeah, it was just, like, we wanted our bikes to ride a certain way. We wanted a certain tire clearance for a bike that has certain axle-to-crown clearance. So the only conceivable way of doing it properly was for us to take that on and do it ourselves. Number Six Composites came from the fact that we--it's a small industry, you know? We don't feel like--sure, it's competitive, but it's sort of all the small builders gets the big sort of multinational conglomerate bike companies, right? So we like to help out other small builders as well. So we put it under the number six banner. We supply to other builders as well, like Firefly, Bastion, Equilibrium, a lot of other builders we’ve been helping out too, we think it's a better product and a lot of them do as well. So, yeah. It's just pouring out of our idea of just making things as uniquely 22 and exactly what we wanted from our bikes, and it kind of just was pouring over that.

Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think the Genesis was exactly that. I think what we found is when we were looking for forks-- I mean, the fork really drives a lot of the design of the bike, and if you have to buy that fork from an aftermarket manufacturer, they're only going to offer it often with one brake or one axle to crown height or one configuration, and then that dictates what your bike is from there. And so we really found we might have five criteria in a fork, and with any different aftermarket manufacturer, you'd only be able to check three of those boxes. They would be a different three from every manufacturer, but it's like we could never solve the puzzle that we wanted. And so, yeah, we developed our own forks, and I think we found kind of surprising success with selling to other builders.

Lewis: I know you guys both come from a riding background. We all have inspirational bikes, like bikes you've ridden on in the past, you're like, "Oh my God, this is crazy." What's your top? Prior to being a No. 22, what is the bike that made you think, "Man, I want to make this. I want to make this a brand. I want to commit to this."

 
Bryce: Yeah. For me, it was probably like the guy that got me into cycling ended up being a provincial hill climb champ, etc. He just absolutely dropped me every ride. He took me out on it, just beat the shit out of me other road. He had a Litespeed Palmares that I actually inherited from him. That was my first serious titanium bike. That one, it sticks to my mind that I always thought was the pinnacle. That was my experience with the muscle memory, with titanium, it still stuck in my head. It was rekindled when I built titanium track bike.

Mike: I guess mine, there's been a lot of bikes, but I think the one that jumps to mind and the one that is the bike that I wish I never sold - I grew up as a freeride kid, working in shops, very much to fuel the freeride habit. The first paycheck I had, I handed back to the shop and bought a set of Race Face turbine cranks because they were yellow and they looked wild. After a few years, I finally bought a Rocky Mountain Reaper, which was a freeride hardtail. They made a special edition that had flames on it. It was just absolutely outrageous. It was a ridiculous bike. I wasn't very good at riding it, but it was my favorite freeride hardtail. Honestly, it wasn't that memorable as far as the way that bike rode. But that was the lost object and that was what I just absolutely adored. So yeah, that Rocky Mountain Reaper with flames.