Back to the Alps to catch up with production

January is deathly quiet. So, it’s become a bit of a tradition to get out to see our builders, catch up with Ben in Montgenevre and take a few days to check and schedule pre-spring production, plan, think and get some air back home in the mountains. I usually use the time to pick up some frames too, and whilst it’s always a lot of rushing around and driving, it usually still feels like a bit of a break. 

Not so this year, as we decided to cram a little more into the trip… 

Parts supply dogged us last year. And whilst those issues have largely subsided—and with production now rolling nicely—the chaos did impact us, and half a dozen frames ordered last year got held up.

It wasn’t just covid. Although I did get it on four separate occasions, I’m just not that important anymore, and me being sick doesn’t stop production. The bigger issues were caused by some serious curve balls. First, we tragically lost a friend and one of our main suppliers to a short-term illness, and then, our fork supplier ran into difficulty around Brexit. Resolving that took months of being told one thing then another. Then eventually, they all but stopped supply of some key components leaving us with no option but to find alternative parts. 

Thanks, Brexit. 

But, with some effort, patience, and presumably some luck, we managed to work through and fix those issues without major design changes, and by October had all the front-end parts we needed. The supplier came through with the forks, which meant we could find a solution to the top cup and bearing interface so the replacements could all work seamlessly together. Building work could start again. 

To get caught back up, we’ve been moving mountains, and I’m pleased to see we’re winning again. With good parts supply in stock and ready to go—including groupsets and finishing kit—and a new paint facility at our Surrey workshop coming online in February (which will nearly double capacity), we’re back on track for a good 2023. Thanks to the whole team who’ve mucked in and gone the extra mile to manage all that at once—and to all the customers who’ve hung in there. 

Another Alps-based project that took more bandwidth than we’d hoped was building our new website. Ben and his team have been working tirelessly on that from their Briancon offices. 

They’re building us a new customer ‘bike builder’ interface for the public to play with, and whilst we do now have good stock of all relevant groupsets, last year the situation wasn’t that simple. Try as we might, we couldn’t get one of every make and model of groupset into the workshop on the same week as a photographer, so the bike builder project—which initially relied on studio photos of every part—stalled. 

So, a new solution had to be found. Cue Luke Kilpatrick, who stepped in to provide detailed vector drawings of all the main parts. He did an awesome job, and the final outcome will be better for it, and having reviewed Ben’s amazing work too, will finally launch as part of a new website in February. 

Whilst I was out there with Ben, we took two days to go through the website project, and although I’d seen visuals of it previously, this was the first time I’d been able to go through it in detail with him face to face, and oh my goodness, it’s going to be worth the wait.

We welcomed some visitors to the mountains, too: Jack and Kate Lennie from the popular podcast We Are Makers. They flew in for a weekend to shoot some video and interview me about the place where Spoon Customs started, helping us share our story with their listeners. We sat down on a Sunday afternoon in the snow-covered village of Les Albert at the foot of Col Du Montgenevre and chatted for ages, with the eventual podcast running to almost three hours. It’s out now on all the usual platforms, so search ‘We Are Makers’ if you’d like to have a listen. It’s the longest conversation we’ve ever had about the business in that way, and I found it extremely cathartic. 

We also made the ambitious, and perhaps foolhardy, decision to put together a new film about Izoard whilst I was out there. That could have taken two weeks on its own, but we crammed it into three days instead, and produced a really lovely film about riding in one of our favourite places. Col D’Izoard is super important to us, and we know it holds a lot of mystery for some of our customers, and as a result, I’ve been desperate to share it in more detail with you for years. 

It was also an opportunity to test our off-road bikes—and some new kit we’re riding and soon ranging from POC Sports—in a more challenging environment, so we went for it.  

Andrew Richardson came out to direct it, with Carlos Ortola on follow cam and drones and Helen Boast supporting on stills. Ben Hodson is pretty handy with a camera himself, and he and I usually manage this kind of project, but after a tough year for him in his world, I thought it would be great to have him star in the film, and actually cycle the route with me.

We built up a Gravel bike with the parts I had lying around—half a GRX group and some leftover Super Record EPS—and borrowed a customer's bike for Ben in the shape of Garry’s Reynolds 953 Spoon Customs mountain bike, which we built for him last year.

The trouble, as some of you might have twigged, is that Col D’Izoard—a high alpine mountain pass which tops out at over 2330m—is closed and covered in snow in January, with daytime temperatures dropping to almost -20. 

The resulting film will be out next month, shared with newsletter subscribers first, so sign up for updates, and don’t miss out. Even if, like us, you think Col D’Izoard is one of your favourite climbs and you’ve ridden your bike up it plenty of times, you will have never seen the climb from this perspective before…

Thanks to POC Sports, &SONS Clothing, Damsons, TailFin, Douk Snow, Go-Montgenevre, Snow Cab, and Never Say Die Bourbon for their help and support in making the film happen. 

And finally, for customers expecting bikes ahead of spring, I’ll be in touch with your schedule this week or early next, as soon as I’ve updated the team on last week’s work. Suffice to say, your frame is now in stock or moving up the queue, fast, and I’ll be in touch directly with a detailed update this week. 

Keep an eye out for our new bike builder toys and a new website in February, too.

Now back to the workshop to paint the new workshop Unit Sam’s been building out whilst we’ve been away…

Thanks to Never Say Die Bourbon, who helped make our film Mountain Pass, about adventures back home on the mountain, possible.