Factor CEO Rob Gitelis on the Brand's Unique Approach
We caught up with the CEO of Factor Bikes, Rob Gitelis, to find out about the brand's singular pursuit of performance, and why every ride should be an experience.
January 11, 2025
visibility
STORY
Tracing a Line
Forced to introduce himself on pain of fixing a puncture, Pete from creative agency WBD, the brand that built the new Regroup site, traces a line back to his connection with Pegoretti, a new addition to Regroup.
I've been asked to introduce myself. "Tell the people, Pete!" joked Adam, Regroup's owner, when he suggested that explaining the new, sometimes u-dropping voice on Regroup's journal might be a good idea. "Although, when you tell them you're a Brit, we'll probably go out of business." Adam is drier than toast.
I’m not accustomed to being front of house, so I decided it would make more sense to introduce myself through the lens of another entity, a business, a family and my friends at Officina Dario Pegoretti in Verona, Italy, with whom my career has been and continues to be, inextricably linked.
Fans of fated trysts will know of Verona as the setting for Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. It’s a beautiful place boasting a medieval old town and a huge 1st-century Roman amphitheater that resembles nothing more than a sheer stone wave teetering on the verge of crashing down and submerging the many shops, cafes and cobbled streets that sit in its shadow.
Since 2018, when Pegoretti lost Dario, its founder, I’ve been going to Verona regularly. I was there only last week. Over the last seven years, it’s shaped my career more than anything else. When I started my creative agency, WBD, Pegoretti was my first client. Although back in 2018, when I flew to Verona, tasked by my friend Cristina and now co-CEO to get a new site off the ground in the immediate aftermath of Dario’s passing, I didn’t think of them as a client. They needed my help, so I went.
That was a strange time. If you know anything about the iconoclast that was Dario Pegoretti, you’ll know how revered he was in life. He’d become divine to large sections of the cycling community, which didn’t bode well for the brand without him behind the blue flame. People get touchy when you mess with their idols and, worse, reveal them for what they are – fallible, flawed and grumpy when they don’t have their morning espresso. My unenviable task was to take the name over the door and show that Pegoretti was, in reality, a workshop of artisans working under one man. That man might change, but the artisans and the cycle of skills that stretched back to the era of Da Vinci and beyond would remain.
"People get touchy when you mess with their idols and, worse, reveal them for what they are - fallible, flawed and grumpy when they don't have their morning espresso. My unenviable task was to take the name over the door and show that Pegoretti was in reality a workshop of artisans working under one man."
PETER HARRINGTON
When I walked through the doors of Pegoretti’s ‘Bottega’, fresh off the plane from Portland, Oregon, where my family and I lived at the time, I discovered that Dario had been building a new site, but it wasn’t live. I saw his designs and read his words, but he wasn’t there anymore. Without the luxury of time, I had to interpret his work, stay true to his vision and get the site live, all within a couple of days, or face the cycling community writing us off as gone, as so many did at the time.
Emotions were running high. Pietro, Dario’s trusted lieutenant and quiet genius, Andrea, an astoundingly creative young ex-cycling pro and man of even fewer words, and Cristina, Dario’s best friend and former CEO of Brooks England, there to help his team, were at a crossroads. Could the brand survive the passing of its namesake? Most said no. Cristina and Pietro didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought. Pegoretti would survive because it was a family. And it did survive. And in the years that followed, it thrived.
So began my relationship with Pegoretti, a daub of paint that became an unbroken line, bringing new clients who revered Pegoretti to those who didn’t know but who traced the line and then understood. In other words, any momentum we have as an agency is because of the people and place that is Pegoretti.
And that brings me to Regroup and another family. Adam contacted me last year, and we spoke at length. I liked him immediately and hoped we’d work together. That call kicked off a redesign project for the Regroup site that you see now, and once that was complete, we kept on rolling.
In Regroup and Adam, his team and family, I see the same sense of pride, hard work and fun that Pegoretti brings to every frame, the same desire to make something great, the willingness to give it everything, and the wisdom to remember what matters and keep it fun.
You’ll just have to forgive me the occasional British spelling and references to tea.
ARTISTS IN ARIZONA
If you’ve browsed our Regroup Custom pages recently, you’ll have seen a new addition – Officina Pegoretti. In a world of circles, connecting both brands feels like the most natural thing, a meeting of Italophiles and builders of beautiful, high-spec custom bikes with the lifelong students of American blues, jazz, art and pop culture at Pegoretti.
If you would like to talk through a custom Pegoretti bike build, Regroup is the place to call or visit. And if you saw the recent Pegoretti x Silca Instagram post, now is the perfect time to kickstart your dream steel bike build, as you can now commission a Pegoretti frame painted in the brand’s freeform, entirely improvised ‘Ciavete’ artwork and for an upcharge, receive a matching Silca Hiro pump.
One for the road, one for home.
FEATURED BRAND
PEGORETTI
Steel with a side of outlandish creativity - get to know this iconic brand and discover why Pegoretti frames and artwork have a cult following in the cycling community.
