Factor Bikes

Every bike brand talks about speed. And performance. And comfort. But sometimes, a story stands out, one that, when you look closely, completely blows you away. A case in point: Factor bikes. To the uninitiated, Factor is simply a performance bike brand, clearly fast, stylish, one that wins races and gets great reviews. And that’s all true, but there’s much more going on behind the scenes and under the skin. So much so that we think of Factor as more akin to a custom, small-batch bike brand than a ‘mass-market’ offering. Here’s why.

Factor bikes are built solely for performance, not to hit a cost or to satisfy a market segment. When we spoke with Mike Mcginn, Factor’s Senior Industrial Designer, he told us that he’d never once had to fight his corner over a more expensive way of building a frame. If an idea leads to more performance, they just do it. That’s why Factor’s Rob Gitelis, a revered and deeply respected figure in the bicycle industry who has led the brand since 2012, is quoted as saying that were Factor another brand, the brand’s blazingly-quick OSTRO would be a $10k frameset. This isn’t apples and pears. It’s apples and exclamation points.

Factor makes everything in-house and controls all aspects of design, development, and production. When Rob picked up the reins, he brought with him not only unmatched experience designing and making some of the world’s best bikes but also his own factory in Taiwan. And that’s key. Rob and his distributed team (Mike is based in Canada, for example) are free to try out ideas, iterate quickly, and develop solutions outside of market seasonality.