SACRAMENTO, CA (BRAIN) Mar 1, 07:51 MT— SRAM employees on Wednesday delivered some of the company's first new-generation Red road groups to builders eager to put the parts on bikes for the upcoming North American Handmade Bicycle Show here.
Some builders last month complained when it appeared the new parts would not be available in time for their big show.
But SRAM's Ed Nasjleti and Ariel Knauff visited hotels in the Sacramento area dropping off two dozen groups that were among the first to come off production lines.
“We’ve got tools and if builders need help getting the new Red on bikes, we are going to help that happen,” said Knauff, SRAM’s domestic OEM account manager.
The new Red was slated to hit the market after NAHBS. The company said the timing was not intended to be any slight towards custom builders, it was just that timing was the earliest the company could deliver the revised group to the market. When SRAM launched the group in Majorca in February to media outlets, editors were not riding production components, but hand-fitted prototypes, SRAM said.
“When you have editors riding the components, people think you are pulling product from a huge box. But we weren’t, we were not in production yet so the components on the media bikes were preproduction samples,” said Nasjleti, SRAM’s North American market representative.
Nevertheless, SRAM executives say they realized the timing was complicating things for custom builders, so it grabbed the first groups from production and air freighted them to Sacramento’s City Bicycle Works. Nasjleti and Knauff flew to town to help builders get ready for the show.
