CANE CREEK JOURNAL
Dive in as we share new product announcements, innovations, and more from our adventures.
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"What brought you here to Western North Carolina?""Work.""Really? What type of work do you do?""I work at a company that makes quality bike parts. The company is Cane Creek, and we've had a factory...
Being Frank: Not As Good As It Looks
Surely any one of my riding mates will attest that I am pretty particular about my bikes. Before ever being a professional product guy, I was a gearhead. For me, bikes and bike parts are no less a ...
Being Frank: Is any idea really new?
Exihibit 1: Twenty-five years ago I was driving through French farmland when out of the blue my better half directed me to immediately pull over at a barn on the side of the road.
Being Frank: Riding (Gravel) For Fun
A few years ago I met a new neighbor, and in the course of getting to know each other it was soon revealed that he was a cyclist. Inevitably this led us into my shop to dive deeper into all things ...
Being Frank: Pound-For-Pound Product Champ?
At Cane Creek we like to say that product is #1. I have worked for a company that was the best at marketing, another that had the best sales team, and a third that prided itself on its engineering...
Being Frank - The Product Stork
Brent Graves - CEO & President December 2024 I have been asked a time or two-hundred about how we come up with product ideas. I respond by talking about how a good product m...
Being Frank: Seeking the Unknown at Bike Shops
Brent Graves - CEO & President December 2023 “Customers are not asking for your product.” That’s what a shop said to us recently. It is disappointing and frustrating to hea...
Being Frank: Corduroy Riding In Marin
Brent Graves - CEO & President June 2024 Right before we launched the all-new V-Link full suspension bike at Diamondback in 1995, I convinced my boss that my product manager and I should tak...
Behind the World’s First Gravel Fork: Invert Development Story
As a Product Manager, one of my main responsibilities is to identify opportunities. This can happen in numerous ways: from attending races or group rides, to doing hours of market research, and spe...
Being Frank: Warranty Versus Guarantee
March 2024 There is a common misunderstanding between a product warranty and a product guarantee. For consumer products, including bicycles and parts, a warranty states that the product ...
Being Frank: Form and Function
February 2024 I was in a discussion recently about the difference between what we say and what we do. The topic was what bicycle dealers tell us they will buy and what they actually do bu...
Being Frank: Back To The Reverse Arch
Brent Graves - CEO & President August 2023 While visiting the bike shop section of an REI store in the San Fernando Valley back in 2000, I found myself dumbfounded while s...
Brent Graves - CEO & President June 2023 After some weightier topics of recent Being Frank blogs, let us shift gears to a lighter topic; maybe even toss in some irreverence...
Being Frank: Product Integrity
Brent Graves - CEO & President May 2023 We are not perfect, nor will we ever be. The same goes for our products. But we are committed to learning and being the best we can...
Brent Graves - CEO & President Being Frank: Smooth As Silk February 2023 In 2018 we introduced a seat post that was designed to make one’s road bike more forgiving or comp...
Being Frank: What’s The Rider Benefit?
Brent Graves - CEO & President August 2022 What’s best for the rider? This is a very simple question that a product manager should always be striving to answer. However, tha...
Being Frank: The History Of Cane Creek Cycling Components
May 2022 Who brought to market the threadless headset that revolutionized bike design in 1992 and continues to this day? What company once produced the original Rock Shox RS1, the first widely avai...
Being Frank: Product Management Axioms
I’ve talked around Product Management (PM) several times in the past. Last November I shared some products that we did not bring to market and why. In December 2019 I explained why we decided to ge...
Being Frank: How To Get The Best Job In The World
For many years I have been asked how to get a job in the bike industry, which I consider to be the best job in the world. True, it might not be the best for everyone, but if one is enamored with cy...
Being Frank: What Could Have Been
Brent Graves - CEO & President For obvious reasons you usually only hear about the products that we have to sell. However, there are products that never make it to the market. While we cannot ...
Being Frank: Where Are The Bikes?
Brent Graves- President and CEO From first-time buyers to cycling enthusiasts the last year-and-a-half has been frustrating for those looking to buy a new bike or parts. But you may not really know...
Over thirty years I have worked for a number of companies in the bike industry, and while none were perfect, all had good intentions to deliver products riders would appreciate. It is common, consu...
Time seems to uncover the truth. As days roll into years, more facts surface to eventually overcome uninformed opinions, misinformation, and stupidity. Sometimes it takes many years, but time has l...
Being Frank: Not Only for Shaggy-Haired Enduro Riders
Our name is Cane Creek Cycling Components, though we are almost always referred to as just “Cane Creek”. However, our full name is important in that “cycling” refers to not just one or two cycling ...
Sometimes (most times?) in life things don’t work out as we think they should. This goes for products as well. While we certainly don’t have a crystal ball at Cane Creek, our historical sales data,...
Being Frank: Misnomers and Misunderstandings
Brent Graves-CEO & President Cycling, particularly road racing and increasingly mountain biking, is full of misnomers and misunderstandings. Some are humorous but others can cause headaches. M...
Brent Graves - President & CEO The strong demand for road bikes during the first decade of this century started tapering around 2012, and that led to a weakening of bicycle sales that culminate...
Being Frank: Smoother is Better
Brent Graves - President & CEO At the outset I will admit that the following may sound a bit like a sales pitch, and that would be the antithesis to the intent of these blogs. However, I’d argu...
Being Frank: The Center of the Bicycle Industry
Brent Graves - President & CEO An island in the Pacific that is about half the size of South Carolina and home to twenty-four million people is the center of the bicycle industry. While central...
Being Frank: To Hellbender With Bottom Brackets
We like to say that we do the products that we want to do, the way that we want to do them. But that is not the full story because we also strive to ensure that each of our products has a reason to...
Being Frank: Bama and Bond in the Alps
Brent Graves - President & CEO Last month I mentioned some epic rides, and regardless of the type of riding you do, I bet you have had some epic rides as well. It seems most of us use similar e...
Being Frank: Mechanical Empathy
Brent Graves - President and CEO Nearly two decades ago I met a guy that introduced me to a concept that I had thought about but never distilled into a conscious methodology and attitude. The conce...
Successful organizations, whether they be company, sports team, or military unit, have a DNA that permeates every aspect of their attitude and behavior. That DNA is critical for several reasons. Fi...
Being Frank - Where is it Made?
The question of where a product is made is more important to some than others and seems to be less important to many than it was in the past. Certainly the world feels smaller these days with the a...
We were excited about the eeSilk seat post when we introduced it. We believed it provided a compliance benefit that rivaled more complicated bicycle frame designs. This meant someone could expand t...
Being Frank - My Cane Creek Favorites
Favorites, everyone has them. Craft beer, James Bond actor, MotoGP racer, burger joint, and even offspring (but parents can’t admit that) -- everyone has favorites. While all of the Cane Creek prod...
Years ago as a young product manager I learned that there are three big mistakes that can limit, hurt, or kill a new product: price, spec, and quality. A pricing mistake can be addressed quickly, a...
Being Frank: COVID-19 Impact on Cane Creek
COVID-19 has likely impacted everyone to some degree, and while it has impacted Cane Creek, things could be a lot worse. I’ll try and spare you the CEO-speak that is intended to project how morally...
Being Frank - Unconditional Joy and Wonder
Like most everyone, I am consumed by the uncertainty and anxiety being caused by the coronavirus pandemic. So I have decided to force myself for a few minutes to focus on something that brings me u...
Being Frank - What's in a name?
Marketing and politics are considered dirty disciplines by many, but they can be used for positive results – well sometimes. However, what follows is my rant on how Marketing and its managers can b...
Being Frank: More Is Not Always Better
I will admit that I am predisposed to want more of a good thing. If one piece of homemade chocolate pie is good, three pieces should be better. If a four-hour road ride in the mountains is good, th...
There have been a lot of great bicycle parts over the last 30-40 years, and I have had the good fortune to ride many of them. Even among the great parts, some stood out even more for me. Sometimes ...
Being Frank - Developing Product
I am not aware of set product development process for the bicycle industry, though the companies I’ve worked for and with do follow the same basic concept. Some companies have a more regimented and...
I find it fascinating that the human race seems to equate utopia with sitting on our ass. The deeply rooted belief is that the less we have to do physically, the better off we are. Thus in utopia w...
Being Frank - Those Responsible for Me Being Here
One never really knows the actual beginning, but a yellow Huffy with a banana seat in 1970 seems to be about right. Before that anything with wheels had my attention, but after that bicycles were c...
Being Frank - Invisible Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy can hide in plain sight, and it can indirectly cost us even if we don’t know that it is doing so. We all have known people to say one thing and then do another. The reality is that no one...
Whether it is riders stopping by after railing trails in the Pisgah National Forest or cruising the Blue Ridge Parkway, visiting vendors, meetings with bank executives, or media coming in for an in...
Being Frank - Sweet and Not Sweet Wings
In the mid-nineties I got wind of a super cool product. At the time cranks were either forged (good) or cast aluminum (usually acceptable) from Japanese suppliers Shimano or Sugino. Then the CNC mi...
Brent Graves, President and CEO I have a watch that I really like. It was not expensive, it does not tell time better than other watches, nor does it make a big fashion statement. But one detail of...