“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
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. “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.
> “You have to dig in for the next three to five years”: What lies ahead for a struggling bike industry in 2024? Gitelis checking out a new bike with four-time Tour de France winner and business partner Chris Froome “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.