BYO, feature builds, and a new Hope

The biggest reason to get good hubs is that they last a long time without any performance loss (a statement that sadly becomes increasingly difficult to say about myself). They also build better wheels (fortunately, also personally true!). So it stands to reason that when you have a good set of hubs but the rims they'd partnered with have worn out/been crashed/become unfashionable/become tiresome to look at/etc, you want to reuse those hubs in a new build. We're here to help with that. It's a thing we've always done, but now we're adding it as a product category within standard builds.

We've explained our pricing a bunch of times so I won't go into that all over again, but hubs are generally the highest margin of the wheel build components. This means that BYO hub builds might seem a little less of a great deal than our standard "we supply all the parts" builds, but the pricing is quite good and quite simply we don't feel that we can make it better without compromising our ability to make money. I know people love to have their wheels worked on by people who have passion and blah blah blah but we're not trustafarians and we have a passion for not being homeless, so get paid we must. At this point you should trust that we're doing what we can there.

We also like to do feature builds when we can, the last big one of which was based on Kinlin TL23 650b rims, I9 hubs (just like the one shown above) and Race spokes. We got the rims and spokes at just north of "they fell off the truck" price and made a feature build out of them, which was really well received and a bunch of people got super nice wheels for one heck of a bargain. We've got a few of those up our sleeve in the coming weeks.

Last, we've gotten on board pretty hard with Hope hubs lately. Boutique hubs at slightly more than OEM hub prices, very well built, every axle/drive train option you could want, and pretty colors. Love it. They'll get worked into their own build categories over time (it's a pain in the butt doing that, and drudging web site work is something for which we have no passion at all, so if you're impatient for a set just get in touch).

That's it, back to the grind stone.