Inside Adam Miller’s head-turning Revel relaunch

If you follow the bike industry, you probably saw the news earlier this year that Revel was shutting down. It caught a lot of people off guard, including customers, fans, and even some insiders. But just a few months later, Adam announced he was buying the brand back and relaunching Revel with a new vision. So today, we’re going to talk about that journey—why Revel is going direct-to-consumer, what Adam learned during his time away from the company, and why he believes now is the right time to double down on building bikes again.

• Why bring Revel back now, especially given the challenges facing the bike industry?
• What were you doing between stepping away from Revel and deciding to buy the brand back?
• Why move to a direct-to-consumer model with the relaunch?
• What’s wrong with the traditional dealer/distributor model for selling bikes?
• What financing options are available for building and growing a bike company today?
• How do you see smaller brands like Revel competing with the big players in the industry?
• What makes Revel different from other bike brands, especially in such a competitive market
• What’s one thing you’re doing differently this time around based on your past experience?

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Automated transcript

Jeff Barber 0:00
Hey everybody, welcome to the Singletracks podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Barber, and today I’m talking with Adam Miller, founder and now re-founder of Revel Bikes. If you follow the bike industry, you probably saw the news earlier this year that revel was shutting down. Caught a lot of people off guard, including customers, fans and even some insiders. But just a few months later, Adam announced he was buying the brand back and relaunching revel with a new vision. So today we’re going to talk about that journey, why revel is going direct to consumer, what Adam learned during his time away from the company, and why he believes now is the right time to double down on building bikes again. Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Miller 0:37
Thanks, Jeff. Good to be here.

Jeff Barber 0:40
So let’s start with the sort of obvious question, why did you decide to get back into the bike business?

Adam Miller 0:48
Totally Well, I think at the end of the day, I really like bikes, so that’s probably what it all boils down to. But from a more practical business side, I sold. I started revel. We grew the business we were we grew much faster than I ever expected, which was really exciting, really rewarding. We got a lot of people all over the world excited about bikes after we launched the products in 2019 we spent several years before that developing them, and we were growing so quickly. By some metrics, I think we are considered like the fastest growing mountain bike company ever, I guess.

Jeff Barber 1:23
Yeah, wow. Why do you think that is? I mean, what was it about, about the brand that let you grow that quickly, or made it so popular with people so quickly?

Adam Miller 1:33
Yeah, I think it was a combination of a lot of things. But I really reflected on that a lot and tried to figure out the right answer to that question. And I don’t think it’s an easy one. You know, we we have a lot of neat things with the design of the bikes. The first two bikes we launched, like, boom. They were amazing. We got incredible product reviews. We ended up winning a lot of kind of industry awards or magazine shootouts or whatever, in the US and in magazines in Europe and whatnot, which was really rewarding and exciting. We put so much effort into creating those products, and I knew I liked them, but you know, to see how much customers in the overall bike industry liked those bikes and appreciated the products, but then also the brand and our customer service and everything, we really tried to do everything right, and it just led to something that clicked with the bike industry when we launched those products. And then, of course, the timing with 2020 2021, what was going on with covid and higher demand for bikes. We certainly got fortunate with, with that sort of wave as well. But yeah, in 2019 when we launched, we sold like, four times more bikes than I planned on. And that was before the pandemic. That was in a, you know, there was nothing special going on in the overall bank industry at that point, our products just clicked, yeah, which was really fun to see. But then I was building the business. And I won’t go into all the backstory of that, because there’s, you know, some other podcasts out there with some of the, like, total history of the brand. But kind of the quick version is we were building the business. We were growing really fast. Customers love the bikes. We’re selling bikes everywhere. We were saying no every day to people that wanted to buy our bikes. For like, two years, people wanted to buy the bikes, and we’re like, we literally can’t sell you more. We’ve already sold 10 times more than we expected this year. And I was trying to taper that growth and temper that growth, which is tough to do when you’ve, you know, spent many years investing, going into lots of debt, then building a company, and then seeing the kind of successes and happy customers from them. Yeah. So I ended up, I ended up selling the business at the end of 2021 to a private equity firm. At the time, it was the right thing to do. I was able to, you know, do a lot more at the business. I sold the company, and my intent was not to leave. I was going to keep a portion of ownership and then stay on. So I kept things really kind of secret. I figured people don’t want to hear about what goes on with ownership structure and cap table on a business. You know what matters is the bikes, not all that stuff background. So kept it all on the down low, and just thought, hey, now we have a lot more capital. We have a lot more financing. We have the ability to keep making all these great bikes and do more, and be able to offer customers even better service. And through that process, it worked really well for the first few months, and then fairly quickly, I realized that I did not see eye to eye with the private equity company that was running it. We had built the business really based on so much passion and and kind of that intangible stuff, of like, we really care about certain things and a lot of that, it’s not a unique story. But, you know, private equity firms don’t always share that same, that same passion and run businesses more based on of, you know, financial statements rather than what matters to customers. And so that led to led to a few challenges, and I ended up stepping down as CEO in 2023 I was able to hire a replacement CEO for myself, which is a fun story that’s probably a little weird me. Yeah, a little a little weird, but honestly, honestly, I kind of liked it, because I was ready to say, Hey, I love this business. Love this brand. And love these bikes, but I am not jiving with how the company’s being operated right now. So let me, let me help facilitate me stepping away. But it was the hardest decision I ever made to step away from the company. I started, yeah, and then fast forward a little bit. I took a bit of time away from the company, and I got a call the night before the news went public. I heard about it the night before they said, Hey, we’re closing the company. Not working anymore. We’re closing it. And so from the kind of brand success, business success that we had to things are so bad that they decided to close the company was was really tough to hear. And at that point, I decided, I’ll do anything I possibly can to buy this business back. Try again.

Jeff Barber 5:49
Yeah, yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, it’s, it seems challenging though. I mean, obviously it was kind of, it was your baby, and so it’s understandable that you’d be like, I want to jump back in and do this. But I mean, in the meantime, like so many other bike brands were struggling, and still are struggling. Like, was that a concern or a thought that you had? Like, man, the industry is just kind of like broken right now. Like, what? What made you think that this, this is a good idea to get back into it?

Adam Miller 6:18
Yeah, I’d say the industry is certainly broken right now. You know, businesses always have ups and downs, and economies and industries have have high points and low points. I think what happened over the last few years was certainly about the highest of the high in the bike industry to not the lowest of the low right right now. So there’s no denying that lots of companies have struggled. That being said, this was way beyond a business decision when I saw the company that I put so much time into, but so many people that I’m really close friends with, that I’ve become really close friends with through the process. They put so much time and effort and passion into this business when it closed. I mean, I’ve got more people reaching out to me than I ever have in my life or anything. It was, it was devastating, like it was truly such a it made me realize how many people this business had affected in really, really, really good ways, whether that’s the employees that were able to have a really fun job and, you know, great benefits and a fun lifestyle here in our mountain town and Carbondale, are our employees in Taiwan, or all the vendors and factories that we worked really closely with that, you know, I’ve gotten to know a lot of their families, and, you know, not to mention the 10s of 1000s of customers that were riding so it was far beyond a business decision. It was, hey, this is something that has affected so many people in such a good way. It we I can’t let it go away, and let’s take this as a chance to build the best possible company ever, not the biggest company. I don’t want that that’s the best possible company. And yeah, are things tough right now, and it’s a bad time in the industry, totally. But if we are nimble and lean and smart and creative like we have been multiple times in the past as I’ve started a few different companies, and our team has started, has been a part of that startup culture. Everything is a everything is a temporary issue. At the end of the day, we’ll come around and we’ll be just fine. We’ll be ready for it.

Jeff Barber 8:15
=Yeah, interesting, right? I mean, you make a good point that if, if you believe that this is kind of the bottom, then you’ve got nowhere to go but up. So maybe this is a really great time to be getting into the bike industry.

Adam Miller 8:28
I hope so. And if it’s not the bottom, things get, you know, things will probably, they always slow down in the winter, even if we, you know, sell internationally and sell. But you know, my expectations are managed, and I’ve set expectations for our team that are it’s like, hey, it’s not about sales numbers. We don’t have revenue goals this year. We have customer service goals and we have brand building goals and product development goals, because chasing something like revenue is is as long as we do a great job and we offer great service. I truly believe the business side comes after that, and we can do that, and we have the, you know, I guess the financial backing, or whatever you want to say, the the business side to sort of back that up, of, hey, we’re here to build this company back to where it was at one point, and what I know it can be again, and if that means there’s a few more ups and downs, or, you know, speed bumps along the way with the overall bike industry, that’s that’s just fine.

Jeff Barber 9:30
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you mentioned, you know, hearing from all these people when the news came out. And one of the things I always wonder about is, like, you know, you hear from all these people all of a sudden who are like, Oh my gosh, I love your brand and I love your bikes, and I’m so sad. Like, did you at any point where you, like, wonder, like, Where were you got like, why didn’t you guys buy more bikes? Or, like, I don’t know. It’s kind of like, you know, you go to somebody’s funeral and people say all the nice things, and you’re like, wait. Like that would have been great if you’d told the person that you know before they were gone. Was there any of that that you looked looked at it and said, I’m surprised. I didn’t know you guys loved us so much.

Adam Miller 10:11
Yeah, for sure. And it’s funny, you mentioned funeral. It did feel like a funeral, in a sense. And it sounds funny because it’s just some bikes, but no, it’s bikes that impacted so many people, and it felt like a funeral totally. And some people on our team definitely feel that way too. I had been fully away from the company for a little over a year, but had, you know, kind of stepped down a good bit before that and so. And I purposely, you know, that was a really tough decision for me to leave the company initially. Yeah, I purposely, really, kind of, I guess, kind of hit out a little bit. I rode my bike a lot, and I thought a lot about the next business I was going to get into, because I get excited for that. But, you know, yeah, a lot of people reached out. A lot of retailers reached out with nothing but kind words. So happy we’re back all or, you know, so sad that we were gone, and then when the news came out, so happy we’re back, yeah. And so, yeah, certainly, there was some of that. Well, where were you guys before? But I, actually, I don’t fault anybody for that. You know that as a whole, over the last couple years, customers could buy bikes for very low prices. If you’re looking for a new bike, you can find, you know, bike from big companies, big companies, small companies, medium sized bike brands, all of our competitors for very good prices and loyalty is one thing, and people that are a fan of our brand is one thing. But at the end of the day, if you can buy a similar bike that’s pretty darn good for two or $3,000 less, like, that’s what people are going to do. And and I think it’s easy for to be in the industry and to kind of have our head and head in the sand, or get a little stubborn about things and say, well, people should be buying stuff from us because we’re great and, and that’s as I stepped away from the company, I was able to reflect on that stuff a lot. And just because we’re great and we love our bikes, and the bikes are phenomenal, and a lot of other people like them, it’s a crazy world out there, and and understanding how people think about what bikes they want to buy and why they want to buy them, is something that I I did a lot of in our team now. We’re we’re really keeping that forefront of our mind, and that’s where a lot of our business model changes happen. At the end of the day, the the business model for a lot of bike companies, for for revel for competitors that are our size, and for a lot bigger bike companies, no one’s been making money for the last few years. Yeah. And so that’s a time to say, hey, let’s, let’s change. We can’t just keep doing the same thing. Let’s, let’s try something different. And at the end of the day, bikes are too expensive, and I know what it costs to make bikes. And just coming back into this business after a year, year and a half of being away and seeing the costs, the costs are way higher than they were even a year ago. So if it costs the business more money to make a bike, but consumers are willing to pay less for that same bike, something needs to change, and that’s what we’re here for. Let’s we’ll change things around and make it work for the people who are riding the bikes. That’s what matters at the end of the day.

Jeff Barber 13:04
Yeah, yeah. Well, it sounds like so that year that you were away from the company you were you were thinking about this. I mean, imagine maybe you had, like, a non compete or something. But were you at that time thinking like, I’m gonna start another bike company someday?

Adam Miller 13:18
Yeah, it was interesting, because I was like, I mean, I sold the business right before I turned 30. I don’t like talking about the age thing too much, but if I look back on it a little bit, like, I was pretty young when I sold the business, and I sold the business and, like, didn’t even celebrate, and all things considered, it was a phenomenal outcome for everybody involved. We’re able to give employees surprise, big bonuses, increase pay, give better for one case, give better health care with mental health counseling included. Like, we did everything I would want to do for a company. We kept our company raft, you know, all the all this fun stuff I was able to give my shareholders, you know, great returns. It was a really successful outcome from a business sales standpoint. And we literally didn’t even celebrate. It was like, hey, that deal closed on Thursday, and back at work Friday and just head down. How can we build this thing up? Yeah, and I got pretty caught up in in all of that, and the business changed really quickly. All of a sudden, I had a board of directors. I was leading board meetings seemingly all the time. We had department presentations almost daily. Just a lot of kind of meetings and presentations and and data analytics, which is all really great stuff. But I think the business kind of jumped too far into that. Instead of saying, hey, what? Here’s what made us special. How do we foster that and then add in a little bit of this stuff to help sort of scale and grow the business? Yeah, so it’s a good learning time. But then I, when I, when I left the company for a few months, I rode my bike a lot, and I, you. I traveled a lot, and it was like, I didn’t expect to be at that age in my life with nothing to do and purposely being able to take a lot of time off. It’s like, I feel lucky. I feel really lucky. I joined several different business groups, and I joined like I kind of, I love bikes, and through loving bikes, I’ve come to just really be fascinated by the business side of things. I think it’s kind of a fun.

Jeff Barber 15:27
It’s a challenge, for sure. It’s a puzzle.

Adam Miller 15:29
A puzzle is the right way to put it. And so I thrive on the business side. So I joined these business groups. I joined a few kind of, like classes for, like, modern AI stuff in business, I sort of trying to, like, think about, hey, I’m going to do another business. I thought it might be out of the bike world, but how can I learn as much about all this stuff? Which was wonderful. It was this great kind of, like, I call it, like, my gap year at the same time, I was working through some challenges with the private equity firm. I left on great terms. Then a few months after that, kind of a lot of the standard private equity games came out, and so I was, I kept on kind of being dragged back into these not so fun situations and talking to lawyers more than I more than I wanted to about not not so fun things. So that was kind of a bit of a negative over that whole year. And and, you know, I really didn’t communicate with the team at rebel or with anybody on the leadership team or private equity side for quite a while on there, which was which was not fun, but really gave me another great lesson of to set up a successful business, the people behind it matter. I mean, it sounds cliche, but it couldn’t possibly be more true. And especially the people that you take money from matter quite a bit. And so that that was a big lesson. And so I knew so through that time, okay, I took a lot of time off. I biked a lot. I traveled a lot, like I just, I love traveling the bike. My bike business has always been like a way to for me to travel and meet great people all over the world through bikes. And that’s like the coolest reward to me, so that I was, like, traveling, but not, like, with a reason of like, Hey, I’m gonna sell bikes, or ride bikes with people, or make bikes, but it was super fun. But there’s only so much of that you can do. And my I was starting to get ready for the next, you know, what am I gonna do for my next business? And had a few ideas. Looked all around I kept coming back to bikes, like, I know the bike industry well, and it’s so rewarding at the end of the day, we get to, like, facilitate people riding bikes, which to me, is my most fun part of my day is when I’m riding a bike. And so I work in this industry and help facilitate more people doing that in some way that gets me excited. So I actually ended up buying like 20 different domain names for my next bike company. Thinking about it, I didn’t really know what it was gonna be, but I was like, All right, I’m gonna do another bike company, but I did have a non compete so that forced me to kind of chill out a little bit. So then when I heard the news about rebel closing, well, none of the names I came up with I liked as much as rebels. Interesting. I heard about rebel, no, it’s I like that name. Yeah, I like that name. And then when the company closed, I mean, it was like, it was like, the biggest gut punch, emotional slam I’ve ever experienced. But I thought, well, one regardless of whatever I wanted to do with with my life or my next business, there’s no way I want the company that I started to go that way. So I figured there has to be a way that I can jump in and try to get this thing back. But it was very fortunate that also mentally, I was like, I’m ready to start another bike company. I just need to wait for my non compete to go up and boom, here maybe I could buy this back. And it was a crazy process to buy it back. It was not that straightforward, but I’m pleased to say it worked out, and I got the company back, and now it feels like, I feel like that’s like ancient history, even though, right.

Jeff Barber 19:09
I mean, it was surprisingly, it seems quick from the outside, but I’m sure to you, it felt agonizing and took forever. But yeah, so talking about the relaunch and what things look like this time around. You know, one of the biggest changes that I’ve noticed from the outside is a focus on direct to consumer sales. So I’m curious what made you decide to move away from the more traditional sort of dealer model for your bike brand?

Adam Miller 19:38
Yeah, we’re mainly DTC focused right now. We do have a small frame only program for shops and then worldwide cycler, who’s been a partner of ours since the very beginning, they’ve sold a lot of bikes for us. They’ve done a lot of really great kind of content and videos around those bikes. We do have kind of a program with them where customers can buy complete bikes through them, and we’ll drop ship that. So that’s sort of a we’re experimenting with that program to see if we want to expand it. The idea is we will do any anything to get the end customer a bike at a super fair, reasonable price. So the DTC model just made all the sense in the world bike shops. And I’ll preface this with I got into the bike industry officially by working, starting working in a bike shop when I was 14 years old, okay, wow, several bike shops. Absolutely love shops. It’s what set my whole career trajectory on the way it is. And I feel really fortunate to have spent time in bike shops and but it’s changed.

Jeff Barber 20:36
Yeah. I mean, that was, that was 15-20, years ago, right? So, yeah, bike shops are not the same anymore.

Adam Miller 20:42
They’re not the same. And I think, as a whole, if we want to bring more people into the sport and get more trails to ride, which means more companies making money to donate money to those trails to ride, and, you know, more races going on and and all of that stuff, we need successful, strong businesses at every at every point, I think, historically, the bike industry is very anti business, because people go ride their bike to escape work, not to think about business or the economy or whatever. But at this point, I I believe strongly that every and this is the case for anything, but every business needs to make money. They don’t need to be super greedy and make out of money, but they need to be successful in order to invest money in innovation, whether that’s new bikes or lower priced bikes, or donations to trail building or sponsoring High School bike racing or whatever it might be. And so if we have this whole like, we’re just here for bikes, and you know, business doesn’t matter, that mentality won’t work. So building a successful company is step one, and from there, we can then use that success to make the bike industry better. And so bike shops, bike brands, we’re not making money for the last few years. For the most part. There’s a few exceptions in there, obviously, but the general model wasn’t working too well, especially as a smaller sized brand like us, which I think, being a small brand, we have a ton of competitive advantages. We could be more nimble, more creative, try new things, work much faster, develop products more quickly with less bureaucracy. We have so many good things being a smaller company, but the things we don’t have are the what some of the big brands have, kind of the big three or big four brands from a retail standpoint, either they own their own retail shops. That was kind of big tactic from specialized track and some of the other big brands was buying retail stores to control those or being large enough to say, Hey, your store needs to sell a certain percentage of products just from our company in order to get a better margin or better payment terms, which is totally fine if you’re a big business and you can do that, I believe that you absolutely should. That’s, that’s everybody’s, you know, capitalists, right, right there. But what it does is, you know, if a shop is required to sell 85% or 90% of of their products from a certain brand, that makes it really difficult for them to buy products from a brand like rebel and put them on their sales floor and then sell them, because if they sell too many rebels, they’re going to make less money, or they’re going to get in trouble from these other brands. Right? Interesting and those programs, I’m oversimplifying it, and there’s nuances to all of them, but as a whole, that concept makes it challenging for revel or any other bike brand, and kind of that small to medium size to compete with the larger brands in a bike shop. And then the other side of that is payment terms. A lot of bike shops can, you know, buy bikes from the big, bigger brands and not pay for them for three months or six months or nine months, or even, I saw things going up to a year during kind of the crazy inventory thing, and a company like us, there’s no way I, you know, I couldn’t take out 10 second mortgages on my house to be able to provide the cash to do that, and so all that to say, one mentality is to say, oh, it’s really tough for a small brand because we can’t compete with that. But that’s no fun, because we’re never gonna be able to compete with that. So why not say, Hey, what are we really good at? And let’s focus on that. And if that means us being in bike shops isn’t a great business model. Time to change. And so now we’re DTC focused. We’re able to drop the prices on our bikes by two, three, up to $4,000, per bike, so the end customer gets, I mean, truly, the best quality bike we can go into that. But the investments we made and where we make the bikes, how we make them, the type of carbon we use the way we assemble the frames. The rebel bikes are the best, the best quality at a price that’s significantly lower than some of our competitors. And to me, that’s a win for a customer. A customer can get a phenomenal bike at a more reasonable price. They can work directly with us as the brand we’re going to be. Able to answer all their questions. If they have any issues, we’re gonna be able to take care of them. Now we have the we have a facility in Taiwan, so we have the global logistics capability, so we can ship bikes all over the world, which we’ve already been doing just the last month or so, and maybe that’s a whole bike, or maybe a customer in New Zealand or Israel, because it’s just happened, needs a derailleur hanger for a bike. We can ship them that derailleur hanger from Taiwan to wherever they are in the world in less than a week, and have the global logistics. We have the communication capabilities, and so to me, that’s the best way to set up a modern brand in the new kind of world, to try to best serve customers with awesome bikes, reasonable prices, fast shipping times.

Jeff Barber 25:44
So were you able to, was rebel able to kind of build up those logistics and that infrastructure because of the private equity? I mean, would you have been able to do that if you hadn’t taken on those investments?

Adam Miller 25:58
There was a lot of good things that came out of selling business to private equity and then having their desire to invest in those sorts of things in the beginning. So because of that, I was able to set up the facility in Taiwan. We were able to get more products developed in the best factory in the world in Vietnam. And then the way we have our full time staff members, quality control checking, every frame, every bolt, every rubber projector, every little part of it, all that leads up to, like a fantastic bike that is quiet and rides well and all that good stuff. Yeah, we invested in that in 2021 really, I started, but then after selling to the private equity firm, we were able to kind of pour some gas on the fire, as a lot of the finance guys like to say, and continue those investments. And then those investments take two or three or four years to actually be seen by the end consumer. So we’re in that period now, which is a reason to your earlier point of why get back in the bike industry now. Well, rebel set up. Really, really, really, well, yeah, because of this work we did several years ago.

Jeff Barber 27:06
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about how the frame to dealer program works. I know intense announced something that sounds similar, like, how does the Revel program work for consumers?

Adam Miller 27:19
Yeah, it’s really simple and straightforward, and we want to keep it that way for a while. The idea is, any bike shop anywhere, if they have a customer that wants a rebel, they can order one frame from us. We’re purposely we don’t want you to order more than two frames, because we don’t want to have a bunch of frames on the wall of a bike shop. That’s where we’ve seen issues happen before, whether a store has a certain number of colors and sizes in stock, and maybe someone walks in and they want to medium red, that’s so hard.

Jeff Barber 27:47
Oh my goodness, I can’t imagine being a shop owner, and, yeah, trying to order the right sizes and colors and all of that. And you’re always gonna have some that are really hard to sell 100%.

Adam Miller 28:01
And the reason it got so out of whack during covid Is everyone had to order that much because they might not be able to order them again. Yeah. Then it leads to, you know, customers ending up with a bike that might not be their top choice, and at the end of the day, that doesn’t help anybody.

Jeff Barber 28:15
Then they blame the brand, or they blame the shop, you know, like, oh, this bike’s not that good.

Adam Miller 28:22
Yep. And then, and that makes it difficult for other shops, because now you know, if one shop doesn’t have the exact right bike, then that customer can call another shop and see if they can find one, and it’s just kind of this inefficient system that doesn’t help anybody and becomes kind of a price war. And margins aren’t great anyway in the bike world. So then if you know someone’s like, Hey, I’ve had this bike here for three months, I better sell it to this customer at a 20% discount. They didn’t make any money, and then that doesn’t help anybody. So our dealer program is purposely limited. The margins are not huge because we dropped the price on our frames. You know, comparable frame from some of our other direct competitors might be 3800 or 4500 or $4,800 for some of these guys, yeah. And our our frame, which is the same, if not better, quality, is, is 2900 to $3,100 that’s prices that when I launched the business in 2019 that’s where those frame prices were. And the way to do that is to have this modern, direct to consumer business model. So there’s not a massive margin for for shops in there, but where shops can make make a few bucks, where they add a lot of value, is that custom build. So if a customer wants to pick out each of their parts, it’s a great way for the customer to have a great experience working with their local shop, and the shop to have a great experience not holding huge amounts of inventory, but building a custom bike for someone, which is, like, the coolest thing ever. Yeah. And so that’s how that program works, very simple, very straightforward. Any shop can be a part of it, but the idea is purposely not having high inventory, and that’s a mentality that, you know. A lot of like institutional finance or venture capital or private equity investors are very focused on either monthly numbers or quarterly numbers, and so there’s a lot of pressure to say, hey, we need to sell X amount of units or X amount of dollars before the end of the month. Well, what good does that do? Anybody that makes your monthly numbers look good? And people in a boardroom can sit around and look at these numbers that look good, but if a company, whether it was revel or tons of other bike companies in a similar situation, are pressuring stores to take more inventory, that makes your monthly numbers look good. It makes a sales manager feel good in a meeting, but it does not make the brand or the retail shop or the end customer happy and successful for the long term. So we’re trying to get away from that kind of a thing.

Jeff Barber 30:46
And it adds a lag, I guess, to to like your sales numbers, right? Because you sold it to the shop, and you’re like, cool, we sold it, but, like, a customer doesn’t have it, and so your your inventory is still out in the market, essentially. And if it, if it, if it doesn’t sell there, you can’t sell any more to that shop. So, yeah, I can see how that makes it really hard to really know how you’re doing in the forecast and all of that stuff. One quick question on the frame to dealer program. So assuming someone went into a shop and they got, like, their custom build. I I’m guessing it, it’ll cost in the end, it’ll cost a little bit more, right, than if you ordered like, a stock build, because the shop is adding on, are they adding on, like, service, like labor charge for, you know, building the bike up and and then maybe a little bit of margin on the components?

Adam Miller 31:36
And we say that that’s, that’s shop by shop. We’re not going to control the prices they sell custom bikes for that we do have, you know, strict MSRP policy, so keeping making sure, if the price on our website for a frame is $3,100 that’s the price that a store sells it for, yeah. Then when they custom build it, it’s, yeah. I mean, it’s normal for any shop to make, make a fair margin on each of those parts, and if they want to charge a build fee, like whatever they want to do, and that’s why we keep the program really small and just focused on if a customer would rather walk into their local shop and build that bike up with them. Phenomenal. We want to facilitate that. If they’d rather go online and buy the bike from us for Yeah, they probably it probably would be a little cheaper to get the stock build from us than to build that exact same part by buying all the pieces that retail that’s always been the case in the bike world, then they can do that too. And we kind of support either, either way.

Jeff Barber 32:28
Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, it makes sense that you pay a little bit more, but you’re getting exactly what you want, down to the, you know, the saddle and the grips and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, well, seems like a great, great model.

Adam Miller 32:42
Yeah, I’m glad to hear you say that. And we’ve, actually, we’ve gotten really good feedback from shops, even shops that sold a lot of rebels. I got a lot of calls I was really nervous early on, really, like, pissed off at us for being B to C. And I got a lot of calls that were very similar. Like, okay, so you guys are, you know, from from bike shops. You’re like, Oh, so you’re due to see now? And like, yeah, we have this program though, you know, you can still buy some frames. And everyone collectively was like, Yeah, that’s the right idea. This is the right decision.

Jeff Barber 33:11
Because they still, they don’t have to buy the bike until it’s sold, right? I mean, they do benefit as well, makes sense, totally. So, I mean, you kind of talked about the financing side of a bike business like revel, and, you know, private equity has, seems like it’s been a problem for a number of brands. Just recently, in the last year, we saw brands that, you know, took private equity and then ended up, you know, it now, working out the the investors were weren’t getting the return that they wanted. So, like, what financing options exist? Then, if you have a bike company, you want to start one, or you want to grow one, like, I imagine that’s hard to do.

Adam Miller 33:54
There’s not a lot right now, yeah, yeah,

Jeff Barber 33:58
Especially now, nobody wants to invest in that.

Adam Miller 34:02
I mean institutional finance, whether it’s venture capital or private equity or family office, they got super into the bike space. The buzzword was mobility, you know, e bikes and stuff. A few years ago, it was the hot investment because you rider, numbers were increasing, and they’ve still increased from 2019 levels. And so flood of money went in, the returns in general, didn’t happen like they expected, and that money is totally out, and now the hot ticket item is whatever, ai, ai, anything goes. And that’s fine. That’s also cyclical. But and some of the major banks that you know just provide lines of credit or whatever for bike companies, they’ve also pulled out of the bike industry because these big, big companies you know, the, if you know the with some Google searching on every major bike company, you can see the financial situation or. Or bailouts that they’ve needed, or restructurings that have needed to happen. The overall bike is challenging. And so banks see that, and they say, well, we’re not going to lend money to a company that falls into this category, right? And all that is understandable. Everybody in every business needs to make make a bit of money. And if they’re not making money, they need to change their plan. So the general, you know, private finance and bank finance has moved away from the bike industry. It’s not to say you can’t get a loan, but it’s much more difficult. Private money lending is very expensive. Interest rates are easily 15 to 20% so if you think about a profit margin a successful bike company might make, I don’t know, 10ish percent, maybe people are going to be mad that I even said that. But if you’re an investor, you’re losing money.

Jeff Barber 35:43
I guess, just on the financing alone. Oh, my goodness,

Adam Miller 35:48
Totally. And so we’re, we’re set up, and I, I plan to build this company for the long term, and not, definitely not do any kind of, you know, sell, sell quickly, for a certain amount of return. I don’t care about that. I care about making a successful business that is as sustainable, reasonable profit margins, so that we can build amazing bikes that we want to ride and share and share them with people. But with that, who I’m taking money from is very limited. It’s two close friends I’ve worked with. I worked with before, and the majority is myself. I was able to sell the business in 2021 I got part of my gap year was I got kind of into real estate and as maybe it’s a good, good business, and it was a, it was kind of fun.

Jeff Barber 36:29
Better business than bikes, I guess.

Adam Miller 36:31
At that time for sure, but not at all fun and rewarding for me personally, At least just we’re, much more self financed than than we’ve ever been, and will stay that way, and we’re set up well for the long haul. In that sense, puts us in a good position to be able to do what we want and not have pressures of outside finance, yeah, certain requirements. So I feel very fortunate there.

Jeff Barber 36:57
Yeah, that’s great. Is or was like supplier financing, a thing where you could, you know, get your bikes made, and you’d have payment terms. And I would imagine, assuming that was a thing, it’s probably harder to get Now, even the suppliers are, some of them are probably struggling.

Adam Miller 37:16
It is harder to get now, and it’s always been a thing, and it will become a thing again. I believe, you know each country is different. If you work with a Chinese supplier, they’re actually it’s actually a lot easier to get those terms because they have certain, like, government backed lending for businesses to be able to, they call it a factor purchase orders. So if a customer buys 100 bikes from them, they can get kind of like a bridge loan for 30 days or 60 days from a bank very easily in China to be able to provide payment terms to that customer. But with all the political stuff going on in different countries, you know, most carbon bikes are made in China, more so in Vietnam now, is with all that stuff over the last few years, a lot of those factories have moved to Vietnam, and then Taiwan is where the components come from, and so like interest rates in each of those countries are actually, Taiwan has very low interest rates. But again, the banks in those countries have seen businesses slow down, and so those factories getting financing to be able to offer payment terms is a little bit more challenging, but, but it’s not that big of a deal. You know, the for a company our size and our history, we’ve always been able to get pretty good payment terms. We meet with them face to face a lot, and we’ve always paid our bills on time. And, you know, all those, all that good stuff, but, but even really good payment terms might be 30 or 60 days, maybe a few extra days. And so by the time you make it’s not a lot. You put them in a container and you ship them to America, you’re basically paying for them around the same time they show up at your door, in a really good world, whereas now we’re paying for them a month or two before they show up.

Jeff Barber 38:56
Yeah, which is, I’m sure every little bit helps, but yeah, that’s not a lot,

Adam Miller 39:00
Totally, yeah, so it’s but all that can be accounted for and solved for with, you know, proper financial planning up front, which is something that I’m, I’m very confident we can do well and we can do reasonably, because we’re just being very practical about it. We’re not, we’re not trying to set crazy, ridiculous expectations, because we have, you know, outside investors that we need to please. We’re just saying, hey, what’s realistic to offer phenomenal customer service? And then how do we, how do we back into that from a financial standpoint? And right, really comfortable with.

Jeff Barber 39:29
Okay, yeah, it makes sense. So, you know, revel isn’t the biggest brand, but obviously, you’ve always had a really strong following. So what, in your words. What do you think sets rebel apart in a market that’s full of you know, honestly, very good bikes from a lot of brands.

Adam Miller 39:48
There’s a lot of really great bikes out there. I like riding. I like riding a lot of other bikes too. I mean, at the end of the day, we say, we make the bikes that we want to ride, and we’re happy other people want to ride them too. I. And and offer the best customer service in the industry. I think that’s a huge part of it, and something that we’re really focusing on again, you know, knowing how fun it is to ride a bike, if you want to get a bike by Thursday, because you’re going on a bike trip Friday, and you and you need a new bike, awesome. How are we going to facilitate that if you have a mechanical issue with your bike, and you need a certain part, because it might, you know, you have a bike trip this weekend. You know, how can we overnight ship you something to take care of you? Just those kind of basic things, of like, what would we want if, if, you know, if we’re buying a bike from someone, just try to facilitate that. So at the end of the day, I think phenomenal bikes, phenomenal, phenomenal riding bikes is the most important. And then the next most important is just backing that up with, Hey, let’s take care of everyone like we want our customers to be our friends. We want our customers to have such a great experience that they want to come back and buy a bike from us again and and it’s as simple as it’s as simple as that. Now, are we there right now? I think we’re on the right track, but I think we have a lot of work to do. We’re doing things like we’re rebuilding our website, we’re getting new systems in place, because it’s easy to say these things than to scale that and make that, you know, workable. That’s a big focus of ours right now. You know, we show off all the fun and games externally and fun riding bikes, but there’s a lot of hours behind computer screens and spreadsheets and spreadsheets and inventory systems and all that to make it happen. So that’s a big area of investment. But yeah, what set us apart was, you know, the rail and rascal and we launched those with the CBF suspension platform. Those bikes rode awesome, and our bikes have only gotten better. Since then, they’ve gotten a lot better. Since then, I think we actually do a pretty poor job of marketing and communicating that our marketing team for the last few months was a one man show of me, and I was a little bit distracted with a few other things after just buying the business back, so I gave myself a pretty poor grade on marketing, but as of a week and a half ago, we have Dylan crane just came on board as a sponsored athlete and Running our marketing and social media. And I’m excited about that, because I want to talk about this stuff more. We do a lot of really cool stuff with how we make bikes. And so time to show that off a bit.

Jeff Barber 42:10
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can say, personally, I tested the Rascal v2 and, yeah, easily one of the best trail bikes I’ve ridden. But it is hard to, you know, I mean, I can say that, and, you know, you guys can say that and push out all the technical stuff that’s going on. But, you know, for for a lot of people, I guess a big part of it is either they need to ride it or, like, they need to have a friend who has one and is like, oh my gosh, this bike is amazing. And I guess, I mean, as a small company that surely takes time, where you just have to kind of build, build that up. And, yeah, but it seems, seems like it’s paying off

Adam Miller 42:49
Totally. And it takes time. And I think just being patient with that is good. You know, when people ride the bikes, they love the bikes. They buy them. The way we built the brand in the beginning was Chris reichler, Head of Marketing at the time, and myself, we’re just, we’re just we’re on the road, like 150 days that first drove around with the trailer bikes and went to demo events and people bought them. Our entire marketing budget that to launch the company was $96 and then we drove around everywhere, and we got great product reviews. The product reviews are the best thing possible when they’re authentic and real, like your your product review, people will call us and say, I read that review. I’m ready to buy a rascal. And that’s awesome. Like those that that real world feedback is what a brand like that’s the most important thing for a brand like us, yeah. And so yeah, it just takes and, and, you know, being DTC there are, it is harder for people to go walk into a shop and touch the bike. That’s the biggest challenge with it. So more product reviews, more people on YouTube talking about their experience with the bike. That stuff’s necessary and something we’re working towards, but we certainly have a long ways to go there.

Jeff Barber 43:58
Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, it’s, it’s hard to compete against a lot of those big companies. And yeah, it sounds like it’s not just one thing either. It’s not just the marketing, it’s not just the pricing, it’s, it’s all of that. With that in mind, do you think being small gives you any advantages? Maybe that the bigger brands can’t match?

Adam Miller 44:18
Totally, and it’s something that I think about a lot, and talk about a little bit in our building here, but like, Okay, what you know, we can’t compete with a company with a billion dollar bike company that has hundreds of people in their R D department, but we have, we’ve built products that are in magazine shootouts with these companies with R D budgets that are not a little bit bigger than ours, but 10 times or 100 times or 1000 times bigger than ours. And products win shootouts, and we’ve had, you know, plenty of riders say they prefer our bike over a bike from whichever one of those brands, so that, I mean, talk about something exciting. Thing that’s pretty exciting concept to me.

Jeff Barber 45:02
But also frustrating, because you’re like, Oh my gosh. Why is everybody buying these tricks and specialized when ours is better?

Adam Miller 45:09
One hundred percent. And so how do we bridge that gap? I don’t know anyone who has any ideas. Let me know, but, but I also think about it. You know, if I compare it to cars, it’s like, hey, a lot of people buy a Toyota. It’s an awesome car. It is so, so great, like, and then there’s, like, newer startup car companies that might do things a little bit differently, but it takes a lot of years for customers to gain confidence that if they buy, you know, the Toyota, like, they can go anywhere in the world and get service and, you know, get them fixed and whatever. That’s a huge selling point. And so many people know they’re great. A lot of people, you people just want that, and that’s awesome. They are great cars, and they’re gonna have great time. There’s a lot of bikes like that too. So kind of the taking that leap of faith to say, I’m gonna buy something from a different company that that is better or has a few unique features that for my riding style I like. It takes a leap of faith there, and that’s okay. I mean, that’s where we’re in it for the long haul. And I don’t want to be as big as most of those other top three or four companies. That sounds like that. Sounds stressful. I like to still ride my bike a little bit. I work a lot of hours now, but, yeah, I don’t know. I think at the end of the day, it’s like, Hey, we’re not making bikes for every single rider out there. If someone really likes what they see from our bike, from our bikes, they’ll, they’ll get them. And we have a no questions asked return policy, and we have a lifetime warranty. And, you know, we we back all that stuff up, and I’m confident if someone buys a bike, they’re gonna, they’re gonna love it.

Jeff Barber 46:34
So, yeah, that’s great. All right, so before we wrap up, couple of quick questions. So one, why bring back titanium bikes with the rebel metal lineup?

Adam Miller 46:44
I think this goes to the point of like, What can a small company do differently? We can. We can get creative. We can do what we want. We can say, hey, we’re going to make this product or that product because we want to, even if we don’t have a perfect business case for it, that’s okay. And a lot of the titanium bike started that way. I was just like, Man, I really like titanium bikes. The first bike I ever worked on when I got my first job in a bike shop when I was 14 was a custom seven titanium bike.

Jeff Barber 47:11
Somebody let you work on that as a 14-year-old?

Adam Miller 47:13
They shouldn’t have but, they shouldn’t have but, and then I did the Serrata Fit program and worked with customers to build custom seven and serratas. And the bike shop owners who hired me were awesome about teaching me a lot of that stuff when I was younger. So I was kind of a special place in my heart for titanium bikes, but wanted to do this like modern take on traditional titanium, modern geometry, modern features, you know, all that good stuff which is, which is a little less common. A lot of titanium bikes have kind of more old school styling and frame features, but the material is amazing. A titanium hardtail or gravel bike is so awesome. Like, in my mind, a full suspension bike should be carbon and a hardtail bike should be titanium.

Jeff Barber 47:58
Yeah, I was going to ask you that, yeah. So no, no full suspension titaniums?

Adam Miller 48:02
Well, there’s room for experimentation, so I’d say stay tuned on that front.

Jeff Barber 48:09
Yeah, so maybe?

Adam Miller 48:10
Maybe, because that falls into the category of, maybe it doesn’t make sense, but maybe we want to try it anyway. Yeah, marketing, for sure, yeah, yeah. It’s just exciting. At the end of the day, the titanium bikes, you know, the when the business was owned by the private equity firm, they stopped selling titanium bikes. It was all percentage of sales, and on paper, it didn’t look as good. That being said, it’s been a super successful business. Consistently, every rider loves their titanium bike. It’s we’re able to sell those frames for 1000 to $2,000 less than comparable made in the USA titanium bikes. The raw material comes from the best source for raw titanium ever. We do some really cool stuff with forming the tubes, how those bikes are welded. We do ISO testing on everything which a lot of titanium bikes don’t we do. We test bikes well, well beyond ISO testing for the tie frames, so we’re able to offer a lifetime warranty. Those bikes are absolutely amazing, and there’s like a cult following that we have. When we launched those bikes, we I just ordered like one batch from the factory, thinking, hey, I want to bring titanium back. Let’s see how it goes. We last week, so less than two weeks after we launched the titanium bikes, we had to place another order for more more time heights, so the excitement’s there. They’re unique, fun, cool bikes, and people want them. So in my mind, hey, that’s a fantastic business model too. Let’s do it. It’s a win. Win.

Jeff Barber 49:30
Like titanium bike buyers too. A lot of them are, like, collectors, you know, like they they’re gonna buy that bike, they’re gonna have it forever, and they’re gonna buy another one. And, you know, they want a bunch of different titanium bikes totally.

Adam Miller 49:42
And we see people like, buy a titanium and gravel bike, and then love it, and they’re ready for another full suspension bikes. And they then they call us up and say, Hey, I really like my Thai gravel bike. Can I buy a rascal from you? And I’m like, Yeah, that’s awesome. We all like a bunch of different kinds of bikes, so why not have all of them?

Jeff Barber 49:56
Yeah, awesome. All right, so switching gears. What is something you learned the hard way as a leader, that you’re doing differently this time around?

Adam Miller 50:06
We could do a whole podcast on that. I think, from a big picture standpoint, you know, being a leader of a business, whether it’s a really small company or a small company or massive company, it’s just all about constantly learning and trying new things and staying nimble and adapting to the times and and I think really, at the end of the day, trusting your gut. I mean, I’ve kind of dedicated my life to bikes. I started, you know, selling bikes on eBay when I was like 11, like working in shops. I just really enjoy bikes and the business side of bikes too. And so I think being able to move quickly, trust the gut, do the right thing for the customer, and bringing every decision back to that, not getting too caught up in the corporate, bureaucratic type things that might slow a company down or bring things off track, but just focusing on what does the end rider who’s riding our bike, what do they want, and how can we facilitate that? And every decision should be based off that, and that’s what we’re doing now. We’ve been doing that for the last few months. Our first couple months in business have gone far better than expected here now with the new version of rebel, yeah. And so we’re just going to keep doing that and having as much fun as we can.

Jeff Barber 51:15
That’s great. Great advice. Finally, what’s, the best way for listeners to connect and follow Revel’s comeback story?

Adam Miller 51:24
Hit us on rebel bikes. DotCom, the rebel bikes, Instagram page at rebel bikes, is probably the best way to get kind of the daily updates. Journal of the business. Shoot us a text or call anytime. Always happy to chat.

Jeff Barber 51:38
Awesome. Well, Adam, thanks so much for taking the time to talk today. It’s always interesting to hear what’s happening behind the scenes in the bike industry, and I know a lot of riders will be excited to see revel back on the trail. So thanks. Thanks, Jeff, and thanks again to everyone for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe and check out our full podcast archive at Singletracks, DotCom slash podcast catch you on the next episode. Peace.