Adam's Power-Pink Factor OSTRO VAM
Adam from Regroup waxes lyrical about the wonders of Factor and its Ostro VAM road bike.
December 27, 2024
visibilityINTERVIEW
"Don't you want to make the best bike?"
"I was always building bikes, mostly race bikes," explains Factor's CEO, Rob Gitelis, as we settle in between screens to talk about his career, Factor and the wider industry. "I started with race bikes in Asia before anybody thought about making bikes here. At the time, there was a perception that you would end up with a lesser product if it were made in Taiwan, but when I got my first customer, Gruppo, a company that included the Cinelli, Columbus and 3T brands, we showed them that they could make a high quality product here - a better product then they made in-house, or sub-contracted to somewhere else in Italy."
Getting the chance to talk to Rob is a bit of a thrill. Factor is on the rise, a brand widely recognized for stellar design, engineering and tight-knit, cutting-edge production. There are custom bike makers and stock bike makers, and while Factor is one of the latter, we think it deserves a new category. Why? Because it creates like a custom bike brand, with the freedom, immediacy and agility of its own factory in, of course, Taiwan. And it’s nimble in other ways, with a small, streamlined, globally distributed team that allows Factor to offer a premium off-the-shelf bike for a price that defies direct comparison.
But Rob is neither Italian nor Taiwanese. He’s American. So how did his relationship with Taiwan begin? It turns out, through another relationship. “I came to Taiwan to spend some time with my girlfriend, who I had met when I was a professional bike racer,” he says. “And it was kind of like when one thing leads to another and another. I ended up racing the Tour of Taiwan and helped my teammate win it. And later, I went to work for the very first carbon fiber vendor – probably the first in the world – a company called Advanced Composites. That was in 1997.”
Visiting a girlfriend is one thing, but deciding to start a career in a new country in a fledgling part of the bike industry sounds like a serious commitment. What led him to take that path? “Years earlier, I’d had one of those Trek bonded frames,” he begins, “and I kind of thought it was interesting technology. Also, the company was going to make high-end road products, which is what I knew about – well, as much as anyone did in 1997!” he laughs. “Anyway, I accepted the job and went about helping them build a bike program. For context, they were the world’s largest golf club maker, so they knew carbon fiber but not bikes, geometry and all the rest. I worked there for a few years, and that company went on to launch on the Taiwan stock market.”
Then Profile Design, maker of the Profile aero bars we know today, called and asked Rob to help them elevate their offering with production in Taiwan. “When I was asked if a company in Taiwan could make better products than a brand was already making, I always said yes,” Rob says, laughing again. “I may have invented fake it till you make it.” Joking aside, he must have had the confidence Taiwan could deliver. “Oh yes, always,” he admits. “Although even driving to factories back then was a problem – there was no Google Maps. But yeah, for Profile, we ported their production, and the program was very successful, and it led me to start my own company, PMG, in 2001. In many ways, what I’m doing now at Factor is really a subset of PMG.”
I’m curious to learn how Rob became so good at making race bikes. Was it while racing himself, studying? “Not really,” he says. “Everything was evolutionary. I also learned from great people, like Phil White and Gerard Vroomen, the founders of Cervélo, who were another client of mine.” He pauses for a moment. “I don’t know if I ever knew how to reach the end result,” he admits, “and maybe never have. But I’ve always followed requirements, stiffness, comfort, alignment – key principles of a racing bike that are so important, yet were often missed when brands started building bikes in Taiwan.”
Presumably, without a Rob, a brand’s offering could really have gone south with a move to Asia. “Oh, for sure,” he says. “At Cervélo, for example, I was considered a third boss, although I wasn’t a shareholder. I was one of the only people in the company who could speak back to the owners and tell them that something wasn’t a good idea. The experience I had in the industry, in that place, allowed me that.”
It seems that Rob had a unique view of what was coming down the road and an understanding of where the bike business was heading. Would he consider that a fair assessment? “Well, I think I was just good at seeing that there was an opportunity coming and deciding to get in early,” he admits. “I didn’t know it would lead to a lifetime in the bike industry.”
ROB GITELIS
He talks a little about ending his racing career prematurely rather than go past a natural point and risk missing out on the next step, a life away from the bike – there’s an irony in that – and mentions a recent chat with his friend, Mark Cavendish. “I’m always making fun of bike riders, even Mark, recently, when they talk about retirement. And I’m like, ‘So what, you’re not going to work anymore?’ And, of course, what they really mean is that their racing career is coming to an end. What comes next is work of a different sort, but still work. There’s no retirement, mate!”
It feels like a good moment to ask about Factor and when that opportunity first appeared on Rob’s horizon. “Well, I had PMG for over ten years,” he explains. “I split the company with my old business partner and started a new company called EM2, and it was around that time I got a call from BF1, asking me to help commercialize the Vis Vires. I’d seen the Factor 001 a few years earlier, as everybody had, and when I saw the Vis, I realized it would be a really difficult bike to make, but at that time in my career, I looked for that sort of challenge – the harder the better.” Even though the Vis Vires was a limited-run bike? “Yes, even then. We made 100 or so, and although the opportunity/cost was a little off, I saw it as a chance to push the factory and ourselves.”
A couple of years later, Rob wanted to start his own bike brand and approached BF1 to do a deal, which was open to Rob taking the brand forward under the Factor name. Given his experience and contacts, did he feel confident about the road ahead? “I think I underestimated how hard it would be to create a sales channel and bring the brand to market,” he admits. “I knew we had an excellent product designer. I knew that we had a factory that could support us, but I didn’t realize how hard it would be to start a brand and have people buy our bikes.” Because he was always on the other side of the fence? “Exactly. And you know, I thought the sales part was the easy side. It turns out there’s no easy way anywhere in the business.”
Luckily for Rob, some Asian companies knew him as the guy behind the scenes of the industry. As he tells it, it was easier to get started there with the early adopters, rather than the traditional bicycle distribution channels in other parts of the world. Does he remember a moment when he felt things started to open up? “Well, as the story goes, nine months after starting the brand, we sponsored AG2R and Romain Bardet got 3rd place at the Tour de France that year, and I thought that would be a windfall of people wanting to buy our bikes. It wasn’t. We sponsored the team again the next year and got 2nd place at Paris-Roubaix. Again, not the windfall we expected, but I think we were starting to get the brand awareness.”
Fittingly for Rob’s career, what moved the needle was a bike: the Factor O2 VAM. “It was the first true production bike at sub-700g raced at the Tour de France,” he says. “I felt like that was the turning point for us and the models that followed, particularly the Ostro that came a couple of years after the O2.” I get the sense that Rob still feels like the brand is a work in progress. Is that the case? “Isn’t everything always?” he replies. “I do feel that where we are right now, we’ve got our feet under us and can do some fun things.”
I mention to Rob that his intimate knowledge of production and life in Taiwan must give Factor a natural advantage, so to speak, compared to brands that off-shore from Europe to Asia, without feet on the ground or a factory of their own. “Well, those brands send their people to the factories, and they think they have a good understanding or even a great understanding of how things work. I would say they have an understanding. In my case, I’ve been doing it longer than anyone else, living there and I would say that I don’t always have the best understanding!” Surely he’s being modest. “Not really. I’m well accepted in the community, but there are always challenges.”
Long after it’s designed and built, when the bike is finished, greased, prepped and ready for its first ride, what does Rob want a Factor to feel like? In other words, what makes a great racing bike? “I want every ride to feel like an experience,” he replies. “I want it to feel like the bike is a rocket ship, and I’m excited to get on it. Maybe it’s like the first time someone drives a premium sportscar. I’m looking to do the same for the bicycle.”
Does he ever get frustrated with the industry’s boilerplate-speak – carbon, stiffness, performance and so forth? “It’s difficult to cut through,” he says. “But here’s a story to illustrate how Factor might be different. When a big company bought the brand of one of my previous clients, I went to them and told them that for fifty dollars on the material cost, we could make the bike 20% better. They didn’t want to know. So I challenged them and asked if they didn’t want to make the best bike, and they replied that they wanted to make the best bike for that price. That’s not Factor.”
Rob then tells another tale about a big brand whose built and painted frame price from their far-east factory back to the brand is less than the base material cost of the ‘comparative’ Factor model. We’ll keep the name to ourselves – rest assured, you won’t find it at Regroup.
“I’ve built four or five factories over the years,” Rob explains. “I know the costs of everything, and I decided long ago that I’d never build to a price. I always want to make the best bike, whatever it takes.”