The shop's Pandora machine (aka my old phone) has been playing an awful lot of Talking Heads lately, keeping the flow going and not letting me forget what a jaw-droppingly good record is "Speaking in Tongues." Alternately, I might have used "Cities" for the title, but this title better evokes how I feel about where we are - physically and metaphorically - which is that I love it.
Everyone's probably sick of me blathering about sailing stuff with the Volvo race having been here, but it was a fun circus to have in town. Even if I did make one of the boats hit a rock on Saturday (you can catch a glimpse of my white hat under the cockpit dodger of my friend's boat in this video - and we actually played no part in their rock finding, it's just become a fun joke). But now it's gone and life is back to normal, which means building wheels.
The Nimbus Ti has already been a bigger hit than we thought it would be. We still get a lot of questions about how dumbed down it is versus a T11, which is natural and understandable. Of course the answer is none, except that the T11 comes in colors and has perhaps a more refined looking hub shell.
The benefits to us, and thus to you, of our newfound ability to build wheels in series production are huge. When we established the Nimbus Ti wheel set pricing, we knew it would be a challenge for us. The market is competitive, and you have a lot of choices. Basically, our pricing statement was "if we manage this as well as we can, this is the absolute lowest price that lets us make what we need to make in order to have a sustainable business." It takes a lot of work and focus, but we look at what's available for what price and know that our option is the best, period.
Physically, the shift to the new HQ has been transformative as well. There is still a bit of tuning to be done in order to better match the space to our operations, but in general the space itself and the location are so pleasing and energizing that it's somewhat shocking. The added bonus is that there is a bounty of pro sailors around who are always happy to pick up a day's work helping out with various projects. Whether that's building a new rim storage rack or making boxes and running shipping labels, or even learning to lace wheels, a nearly infinite supply of the world's most resourceful and competent people at the ready is just unfair.
We've always prided ourselves on our responsiveness to contacts of all sorts, and still are. We had a chance to check ourselves recently in addressing a concern a customer had about whether the wheels he wanted would fit into his frame. I called and emailed the company that made his bike, and three days later have heard nothing. Fortunately, a friend owns the same bike that this customer owns, and that friend owns a set of Rails, so a quick confirmation text allowed us to circumvent what's unfortunately an all-too-common case of unresponsiveness. We are ALWAYS happy to help people figure out what's going to work and work best for them. We are less happy to entertain chiselers who want to tell us we're being unreasonable for not letting them get custom wheels at Nimbus Ti prices. Those non-productive conversations are maybe the most nefarious time threat we face, so while the guy in question may have been a little salty when I asked him to please look elsewhere, it's simply a case of us keeping our focus on what's important and what's working out so well for us. We won't be rude, but we are teaching ourselves to be more time aware in these situations.
I'm over the word limit, it looks like a beautiful morning, and it's time to go ride. Have an awesome day.