“A lot of it was caused by greed”: Factor’s CEO on navigating “self-inflicted” bike industry chaos, Chris Froome’s set-up complaints, trickle-down track tech, and why rim brakes are never coming back

It’s fair to say there aren’t too many bike brand bosses who would look back on the last few turbulent years for the industry and describe them as “solid”.

But while cycling brands around the world have struggled to weather the post-Covid storms, for Factor CEO Rob Gitelis, the 2020s have seen steady growth based on its in-house manufacturing capabilities and a “stable, business as usual” approach, which has enabled the brand to cement its position as one of the leading premium bike manufacturers – while winning a few grand tour stages and the odd Olympic gold medal along the way.

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In a wide-ranging discussion with the road.cc Podcast, Gitelis traces his varied history in the bike industry, from racer to in-demand manufacturer, his journey to Factor, and offers his own forthright take on what’s gone wrong for the bike industry in recent years.

A racing cyclist in his younger days, Miami-born Rob moved to Taiwan after racing there in the mid-1990s, working in the country’s fledgling carbon fibre bike manufacturing industry, before setting up his own company and becoming one of the biggest contract manufacturers in the world, building bikes for an array of famous brands, including Cervélo, Canyon, 3T, Santa Cruz, and Scott.

In the early 2010s, he started working with what became Factor – then an experimental off-shoot of motorsports operation bf1systems – building the radical Vis Vires, one of the first road bikes with a £10,000 price tag, over a decade ago.

> Whatever happened to the Factor Vis Vires? Check out this radical £10k superbike released a decade ago

He eventually took over the brand from British founder John Bailey a few years later, and was soon reaching the heady heights of the WorldTour, securing a podium place courtesy of AG2R’s Romain Bardet at the 2017 Tour de France – despite, he says, having only sold around 80 bikes at that point.

Speaking to road.cc, Rob dissects the company’s growth since that baptism of fire, and how he’s managed to keep it on an upward trajectory – winning grand tour stages and Olympic medals along the way – as the rest of the industry has suffered.

“We’ve been growing you know the brand ever since, including coming out of Covid, which has been kind of unusual in our industry at the moment, where a lot of brands have seen some pretty big drop-offs,” he tells the podcast.

“We’ve continued to grow at a very nice rate since 2021. I think an important part of the narrative behind Factor is we make our own bikes. We don’t buy our bikes from anyone else. They’re made in two factories that we own, we control, and that’s including our wheels, handlebars, stems, and seat posts, as well as the frames.

“So essentially we rely on about four partners, whether it be SRAM, Shimano, Selle Italia for saddles, and maybe one or two other partners – unlike most bicycle companies that have a supply chain that that is very, very deep, with 50, 60 suppliers.

“Our supply chain on the other hand is very, very simple. So when the pandemic first started, everybody was like, ‘oh my gosh, the sky is falling’. And the way I looked at it was, I’ve never made an employee redundant in my life ever, and I wasn’t going to start now.”

> “You have to dig in for the next three to five years”: What lies ahead for a struggling bike industry in 2024?

He continues: “And so I just told everybody, well, we’ve already paid for the material. We’ve already paid the rent. I’m already going to keep paying your salary. Well, just keep making bikes.

“And even though we really didn’t have any demand, we just kept making bikes. While all of the other factories were getting shut down because they had no orders, all of the brands were cancelling their orders, all of the factories were sending their workers home, or their workers were getting jobs elsewhere.

“And then all of a sudden, this switch flipped where there was a very strong demand for bikes. No bike companies had any bikes. No factories were ready to start producing bikes and it became just this really big whiplash effect – when for us, it was just very stable, just business as usual.”

Gitelis checking out a new bike with four-time Tour de France winner and business partner Chris Froome

Reflecting more generally on why the industry has experienced so much turmoil in recent years, Gitelis is typically forthright in his assessment of where mistakes were made.

“I hate to say it, but I think a lot of the predicament was caused by greed,” he says. “I think that people thought that the pandemic was in some way a validation of the great work they had always been doing.

“And now all of a sudden people want to ride bikes and it has nothing to do with the pandemic. And I’m like, you’re pretty crazy if you think that, but a lot of people did take it that way. Like it was a validation of ‘how great our business is’. So, then they’re like, ‘order as much as you can. Cause we can sell anything we can’.

“And you know every bicycle shop was placing orders to every brand that they could, whoever delivered first, they were excited so then they could sell it. But there was never the actual long-term vision of what happens when this stops and how hard is it to turn off the faucet.

“So a lot of people just turned off the faucet too late. And then they end up with 70, 80,000 bicycles. I spoke to a helmet company that says on particular models, they have enough for the next 50 years.

“It’s kind of crazy where people got this wrong and I just find it all to be self-inflicted.”

(Zac Williams/SWpix.com)

Elsewhere on the podcast, Gitelis turns his attention to the project that dominated much of the past two years – Factor’s gold medal-winning track bike.

After tasting Olympic success with the Australian men’s team pursuit squad, beating the British team in a dramatic, scintillating final, Rob reveals that Factor’s new Hanzo Track bike may have made the Aussies go a whopping three seconds faster in Paris, and reveals the groundbreaking aero tech we saw on display on the boards could soon be trickling down to a road bike near you soon.

> Not so marginal losses: Chris Froome reveals recent bike set-up was “centimetres” apart from Team Sky days due to “oversight”

He also chats about that Chris Froome bike set-up saga (and why he’s happy for the four-time Tour winner and Factor investor to offer some constructive criticism), his partnership with Israel-Premier Tech and the controversy surrounding the team, and – gulp – the inevitable rise of disc brakes.

“I think that everybody’s warmed to disc brakes. I remember Baden Cooke was like ‘we don’t need those, they’re ugly’. And Baden rides disc brakes every day now,” he says of his business partner and former pro Cooke.

“We’re never going back. All of you diehards wanting your rim brakes back, it’s just not going to happen.”

Sorry, rim brake enthusiasts, that sounds pretty definitive to me.

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