Posts tagged Tumbleweed
Conversation with Daniel Molloy of Tumbleweed Bicycle Company
August 14, 2023 2:41pm
by
rob
Earlier this year I enjoyed following the pics posted on Instagram by Dan AKA goathead_sower from his trip to Taiwan (you can check out Dan's BikeList profile here). Turns out Dan works for the ultra cool brand Tumbleweed. Dan introduced me to Daniel Molloy, Tumbleweed’s founder, who kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions about the brand and their trip. You can read the questions and answers below!
For those not familiar with Tumbleweed, there is some basic info on their about page. Their bikes have also been covered extensively by The Radavist.
I remember seeing the first yellow Tumbleweed frame back in 2014 and have followed and admired them from afar ever since.
What are some of the main things you have learned about the bike business in the nine years since you started Tumbleweed in 2014? And how much has the market changed since you started?
I started Tumbleweed simply because I was obsessed with bikes and bike touring, wanted to put my name on products that I was proud of, and doing things that bigger companies weren't focusing on. My obsession at the time (and currently) was expedition mountain bike touring. I had already been a bike mechanic for a long time, ridden the GDMBR as well as the Manali-Leh route in India, and a section of the Carretera Austral in Chile and Argentina. I had spent quite a bit of time in Germany studying abroad and riding bikes, and loved the types of trekking bikes that are so popular over there. They definitely had a strong influence on our brand, as did my time working at Rivendell in California.
When I was designing the Prospector, I honestly didn't think the business would take off. I just wanted to put a bike out into the world that I was proud of, a no compromise expedition bike. My fallback plan if it didn't work out was to stay working as a bike mechanic and have a lifetime supply of my dream bike. I thought I knew quite a bit about the bike industry after working in shops for over a decade, but starting my own brand made me quickly realize that I knew absolutely nothing. When I look back now I'm amazed that we even made it. I had no money at all, worked my full time job as a bike mechanic in the day, and took a second job at night in a catering kitchen doing food prep to scrape together a few hundred dollars at a time to hit the financial milestones that I needed to hit to keep the project moving forward. My first production run of frames got delivered to the house I lived at in Oakland, California with 4 roommates. A semi truck pulled up on our street with a 20 foot shipping container, and we filled up our garage with frame boxes. I would build wheels and bikes every night after working at the bike shop all day. I was completely exhausted but it was an amazing time in my life.
Mountain bike touring and Bikepacking has obviously gotten much more popular in the last decade, which has been lucky for us. But I always saw Tumbleweed as a very niche brand, and we were going to keep our focus no matter what the rest of the market is doing. We have stuck to that plan and have grown steadily and organically, we don't have any investors and we only put out products that are best in class. I'm obsessed with quality, and I wouldn't sell anything that I am not personally excited about. That's part of the reason we are still so small, my primary purpose for the brand isn't to sell out, become huge or join the race to the bottom, we just want to make the best products possible and offer a solid value proposition even though our margins are lower than a lot of other companies.
Can you tell us more about the process of working with a company based overseas in a country like Taiwan?
Lead times seem to be collectively longer than you might expect. There are long development stages that involve signing off on final CAD renderings of a handlebar or rack, getting items finished and shipped for testing by us on our bikes. The Stargazer was two years in development before the final production model was ready, and thankfully supplier backlogs have been much less of an issue. We work with a company who essentially helps us coordinate and manage different projects with different factories, ensure QC, and maintain communication which is essential. So you have an idea, you draw it up, have an engineer work with you to refine that idea into their production model, produce some prototypes - which can be incredibly expensive - before you can sign off on a ready-to-sell production model.
What is the typical timeline between placing a large order from Taiwan and receiving the frames stateside?
We can have a run of frames booked in the production line and on the freighter in something like 3-4 months now, whereas a few years ago certain items we would have to book a year in advance, or longer. Sometimes clearing American customs and the final shipping leg can be a bit unpredictable, but we're talking plus or minus one or two weeks instead of several months.
What frame prep and QA do you do after receiving the frames?
Extensive QC is performed at the factory by the fabrication team and independently by a QC specialist from our trading company, but we keep a close eye on the frames as they come out of the box. We haven't faced any structural issues, as the factory we work with for frame production has aerospace grade tolerances on top of decades of experience. When sending a customer a frameset, we chase and face the bottom bracket shell, ream and face the headtube, and we'll tap rack mounts to prevent any paint buildup from making a rack installation difficult or frustrating. We also mill the fork to remove excess paint to allow for precision fit of the headset crown race.
What were the major highlights and learnings from your last trip?
There's a popular conception that much of overseas bike building is automated; in fact every process we saw in touring the factories was performed by hand by experienced welders and machinists. The radius of most welds is simply too tight for a robot to operate, much less economically. The one robot we did see was working with larger aluminum platform racks and it was doing a portion of the welding so even in that case there was a trained person working to complete the rack as well as operate the robot. All of our suppliers are family owned factories; we would sit across from the factory owner who might be in their 50s or 60s, and their children were in the meetings and often already in administrative or accounting positions. There was also an impressive number of women both working on the factory floor as well as managing projects. In the US, framebuilding is much more of a cottage industry artisanal trade whereas in Taiwan it's simply highly skilled labor. In Cjell Mone's article about a similar trip, he mentioned learning a lot from the welders he eventually used for his Taiwanese line of frames and said they were working twice as well in half the time.
Are you still seeing supply chain issues related to Covid?
Fortunately almost all of the supply chain and logistics issues related to COVID are behind us now. There are still a handful of suppliers who are difficult to get inventory from, but I think that's mainly a function of us selling very specific niche parts.
Have you ever considered making frames in the USA?
If it was possible to produce a frame of higher quality somewhere else, we would do it.There's simply a level of sophistication, consistency and quality that our fabrication shop in Taiwan is capable of that makes them unique. They draw and heat treat their own custom tubing in house as well as CNC machine all of their small parts, miter tubing, all of the processes from start to finish under one roof. We pay more for our frames than other small companies producing metal bikes, but the quality is unmatched. One benefit of being primarily a direct to consumer business is that we can really go high end on our products and take a lower product margin to deliver great value to our customers. We are charging the same or slightly more than other companies that are having their frames built in more mainstream fabrication shops that outsource a lot of the production steps like mitering the tubes, ordering standard tubesets from one of the big suppliers, ordering dropouts and small parts from open source catalogs, etc. Ordering bulk tubesets causes a lot more dents in tubing when it gets transported to the frame shops, they do a lot of putty work filling dents before the frames get painted. We could produce a $5k frame in the US that wouldn't even begin to approach the level that our framesets are currently at, and overall value is still extremely important to us. We could certainly charge more for our frames in particular, but being competitive and operating a financially sustainable business is always a balance against what the market will bear.
Will you continue to focus primarily on bikepacking?
I've always designed bikes and parts that I'm passionate about and that have been lacking in the mainstream market, and Tumbleweed as a brand has always had a very narrow focus on off road touring specific products. I can't say that this is all we will ever be known for, but I admire bikes and gear that are tough and reliable and capable, and this seems to be an area that most big bike companies have tended to ignore--focusing mainly on performance or racing oriented bikes, with maybe one touring bike as a line item to fill out a broad product line. When you look at most touring bikes from big companies, you can tell that they definitely didn't obsess over the functional and practical details as they relate to real world expedition use. One of the most fun projects I did early on was designing our Rohloff Prospector dropouts with Anna Schwinn. Little things like speccing the size and position of the rack and fender mounts made me so happy, making sure that they were the widest part of the rear triangle to prevent any interference with the seatstays, and using an M6 rack boss to allow a stronger fastener and support more weight from the rack and gear. It's little details like that which we obsess over (and that most people will never notice), and that's one of the things that sets us apart as a brand.
Any big plans you can share for 2023 and beyond?
We have several new products that we are working on, some parts and a couple new bike models that we are excited about. I just got back from riding the Torino-Nice Rally on my Stargazer Ti, which was a much needed reset from having my head down at the shop for the last three years, and it feels great to have the creative juices flowing. We have two employees now, Dan and Walt, and they are both doing a great job at running the day to day operations of the shop and giving me the space to focus more on product development and dealer relations. Honestly 2023 feels like a reset year, we are doing great work and putting out quality products, and 2024 should see quite a few new product launches and hopefully building on our small but dedicated dealer network here in the US and especially internationally.
Thank you Daniel for the amazing answers!
For those not familiar with Tumbleweed, there is some basic info on their about page. Their bikes have also been covered extensively by The Radavist.
I remember seeing the first yellow Tumbleweed frame back in 2014 and have followed and admired them from afar ever since.
What are some of the main things you have learned about the bike business in the nine years since you started Tumbleweed in 2014? And how much has the market changed since you started?
I started Tumbleweed simply because I was obsessed with bikes and bike touring, wanted to put my name on products that I was proud of, and doing things that bigger companies weren't focusing on. My obsession at the time (and currently) was expedition mountain bike touring. I had already been a bike mechanic for a long time, ridden the GDMBR as well as the Manali-Leh route in India, and a section of the Carretera Austral in Chile and Argentina. I had spent quite a bit of time in Germany studying abroad and riding bikes, and loved the types of trekking bikes that are so popular over there. They definitely had a strong influence on our brand, as did my time working at Rivendell in California.
When I was designing the Prospector, I honestly didn't think the business would take off. I just wanted to put a bike out into the world that I was proud of, a no compromise expedition bike. My fallback plan if it didn't work out was to stay working as a bike mechanic and have a lifetime supply of my dream bike. I thought I knew quite a bit about the bike industry after working in shops for over a decade, but starting my own brand made me quickly realize that I knew absolutely nothing. When I look back now I'm amazed that we even made it. I had no money at all, worked my full time job as a bike mechanic in the day, and took a second job at night in a catering kitchen doing food prep to scrape together a few hundred dollars at a time to hit the financial milestones that I needed to hit to keep the project moving forward. My first production run of frames got delivered to the house I lived at in Oakland, California with 4 roommates. A semi truck pulled up on our street with a 20 foot shipping container, and we filled up our garage with frame boxes. I would build wheels and bikes every night after working at the bike shop all day. I was completely exhausted but it was an amazing time in my life.
Mountain bike touring and Bikepacking has obviously gotten much more popular in the last decade, which has been lucky for us. But I always saw Tumbleweed as a very niche brand, and we were going to keep our focus no matter what the rest of the market is doing. We have stuck to that plan and have grown steadily and organically, we don't have any investors and we only put out products that are best in class. I'm obsessed with quality, and I wouldn't sell anything that I am not personally excited about. That's part of the reason we are still so small, my primary purpose for the brand isn't to sell out, become huge or join the race to the bottom, we just want to make the best products possible and offer a solid value proposition even though our margins are lower than a lot of other companies.
Can you tell us more about the process of working with a company based overseas in a country like Taiwan?
Lead times seem to be collectively longer than you might expect. There are long development stages that involve signing off on final CAD renderings of a handlebar or rack, getting items finished and shipped for testing by us on our bikes. The Stargazer was two years in development before the final production model was ready, and thankfully supplier backlogs have been much less of an issue. We work with a company who essentially helps us coordinate and manage different projects with different factories, ensure QC, and maintain communication which is essential. So you have an idea, you draw it up, have an engineer work with you to refine that idea into their production model, produce some prototypes - which can be incredibly expensive - before you can sign off on a ready-to-sell production model.
What is the typical timeline between placing a large order from Taiwan and receiving the frames stateside?
We can have a run of frames booked in the production line and on the freighter in something like 3-4 months now, whereas a few years ago certain items we would have to book a year in advance, or longer. Sometimes clearing American customs and the final shipping leg can be a bit unpredictable, but we're talking plus or minus one or two weeks instead of several months.
What frame prep and QA do you do after receiving the frames?
Extensive QC is performed at the factory by the fabrication team and independently by a QC specialist from our trading company, but we keep a close eye on the frames as they come out of the box. We haven't faced any structural issues, as the factory we work with for frame production has aerospace grade tolerances on top of decades of experience. When sending a customer a frameset, we chase and face the bottom bracket shell, ream and face the headtube, and we'll tap rack mounts to prevent any paint buildup from making a rack installation difficult or frustrating. We also mill the fork to remove excess paint to allow for precision fit of the headset crown race.
What were the major highlights and learnings from your last trip?
There's a popular conception that much of overseas bike building is automated; in fact every process we saw in touring the factories was performed by hand by experienced welders and machinists. The radius of most welds is simply too tight for a robot to operate, much less economically. The one robot we did see was working with larger aluminum platform racks and it was doing a portion of the welding so even in that case there was a trained person working to complete the rack as well as operate the robot. All of our suppliers are family owned factories; we would sit across from the factory owner who might be in their 50s or 60s, and their children were in the meetings and often already in administrative or accounting positions. There was also an impressive number of women both working on the factory floor as well as managing projects. In the US, framebuilding is much more of a cottage industry artisanal trade whereas in Taiwan it's simply highly skilled labor. In Cjell Mone's article about a similar trip, he mentioned learning a lot from the welders he eventually used for his Taiwanese line of frames and said they were working twice as well in half the time.
Are you still seeing supply chain issues related to Covid?
Fortunately almost all of the supply chain and logistics issues related to COVID are behind us now. There are still a handful of suppliers who are difficult to get inventory from, but I think that's mainly a function of us selling very specific niche parts.
Have you ever considered making frames in the USA?
If it was possible to produce a frame of higher quality somewhere else, we would do it.There's simply a level of sophistication, consistency and quality that our fabrication shop in Taiwan is capable of that makes them unique. They draw and heat treat their own custom tubing in house as well as CNC machine all of their small parts, miter tubing, all of the processes from start to finish under one roof. We pay more for our frames than other small companies producing metal bikes, but the quality is unmatched. One benefit of being primarily a direct to consumer business is that we can really go high end on our products and take a lower product margin to deliver great value to our customers. We are charging the same or slightly more than other companies that are having their frames built in more mainstream fabrication shops that outsource a lot of the production steps like mitering the tubes, ordering standard tubesets from one of the big suppliers, ordering dropouts and small parts from open source catalogs, etc. Ordering bulk tubesets causes a lot more dents in tubing when it gets transported to the frame shops, they do a lot of putty work filling dents before the frames get painted. We could produce a $5k frame in the US that wouldn't even begin to approach the level that our framesets are currently at, and overall value is still extremely important to us. We could certainly charge more for our frames in particular, but being competitive and operating a financially sustainable business is always a balance against what the market will bear.
Will you continue to focus primarily on bikepacking?
I've always designed bikes and parts that I'm passionate about and that have been lacking in the mainstream market, and Tumbleweed as a brand has always had a very narrow focus on off road touring specific products. I can't say that this is all we will ever be known for, but I admire bikes and gear that are tough and reliable and capable, and this seems to be an area that most big bike companies have tended to ignore--focusing mainly on performance or racing oriented bikes, with maybe one touring bike as a line item to fill out a broad product line. When you look at most touring bikes from big companies, you can tell that they definitely didn't obsess over the functional and practical details as they relate to real world expedition use. One of the most fun projects I did early on was designing our Rohloff Prospector dropouts with Anna Schwinn. Little things like speccing the size and position of the rack and fender mounts made me so happy, making sure that they were the widest part of the rear triangle to prevent any interference with the seatstays, and using an M6 rack boss to allow a stronger fastener and support more weight from the rack and gear. It's little details like that which we obsess over (and that most people will never notice), and that's one of the things that sets us apart as a brand.
Any big plans you can share for 2023 and beyond?
We have several new products that we are working on, some parts and a couple new bike models that we are excited about. I just got back from riding the Torino-Nice Rally on my Stargazer Ti, which was a much needed reset from having my head down at the shop for the last three years, and it feels great to have the creative juices flowing. We have two employees now, Dan and Walt, and they are both doing a great job at running the day to day operations of the shop and giving me the space to focus more on product development and dealer relations. Honestly 2023 feels like a reset year, we are doing great work and putting out quality products, and 2024 should see quite a few new product launches and hopefully building on our small but dedicated dealer network here in the US and especially internationally.
Thank you Daniel for the amazing answers!