After I posted the first Random Q&A, James Clarkson from cccycle.co.uk asked if he could post them on his site. I said no because the questions came from another media entity, so that didn't feel right, but told him he could send his own questions. Those, and my answers, are below. As always, love to hear your thoughts:

Simplicity is at the heart of Open’s company ethos, you run as a super small team, through some clever engineering you have developed the Open UP, which is a beautifully simple and practical concept. The overall styling of your bikes is simple, refined and yet manages to hold your attention over louder styled bikes on the market. Can you tell me a bit more about how important this way of working is to you?

To me simplicity is at the core of everything because it has a great multiplying effect. If you’re model line is simple, it’s easier for your customers to understand, so they have fewer questions. Your website is easier, your supply chain is easier, your dealer sales are easier, everything becomes easier. So if you think of a business of being an organization with a never-ending to-do list where you always feel you’re running behind, simplifying everything is the most logical way to “catch up”. 

So we ask with everything, “do we really need to do this or are we doing this because 'everybody' is doing this, because 'it’s always been done' this way?” So we cut big time sucks right away, like sponsorships and marketing. The standard joke with marketing is always that half of it is a waste, you just don’t know which half. While that may no longer hold true, our solution to cut all of marketing at least ensures we also don’t do the part that is a waste anymore.  People ask us often if it wouldn’t be better for the company to hire a few people so that we can do the things we have now cut, but I don’t think that’s the case. Yes, there may be some things that are actually beneficial (visiting dealers more often than Andy can do on his own for example), but is it worth the costs? And I don’t just mean the costs of a rep force, their salaries, their expenses, etc.   

And when you think about it, those costs are much more significant than they seem. Because those reps now also need to go to the trade shows with you, so you need a bigger booth. You need more hotel rooms, which means we likely need to stay farther away from the show (especially at eurobike) and require more cars, etc, etc, etc. There you see the multiplier effect in the other direction, complication breeds complication.

But the most important costs I worry about is the costs of Andy having to manage these people instead of directly working on the company, and the costs of being one more step removed from the dealers and consumers and having the information we need filtered instead of getting the whole story. And our success to date proves that none of the things we cut out are essential.

I should make the caveat though that none of them are essential TO OPEN. I am not claiming that this works for everybody else, or even that it works for anybody else. But it works for us in our particular situation, and it works because everything is geared towards this simplification goal. You can’t do it half, you can’t say “I’ll cut the marketing but keep selling 50 models”, that wouldn’t work. Trendy marketers would now insert the phrase “all in” here but I won’t.

I have read in a number of interviews that you find your inspiration in a lot of places outside of the cycling industry. The outwards voice and image of Open seems to reflect this. Are there any artists, designers, thinkers whose work is important to your approach to your work?

There is one thinker as you call it who I read religiously. One where I made myself a promise that as soon as his daily newsletter comes into my inbox, I read it. I don’t put it off, because I have learned that as soon as that becomes a habit, you get behind so far so fast that it’s over. And that is Seth Godin, every day he has something thought-provoking and it only takes 30 seconds or a minute to read. It rarely applies directly to what I do, but there are very often parallels I can draw.

Geek admission: I do own a Seth Godin action figure, he sent me that a few years ago There are plenty of others that I read regularly, but because of their format or content or the fact that they aren’t daily, I sometimes struggle to read them immediately and/or completely so then I sometimes have to binge-read to catch up (Hugh McLeod, David Meerman Scott, etc). So that in itself is already a lesson, what are the little things that Seth does differently that make it easier to read his stuff than the other newsletters. And how could that apply to the OPEN Updates for example. 

You’ve recently talked about a armature cycling events being less focussed on racing and more about just finishing the event. To me this highlights a trend of people starting to cycle not for fitness, not for racing but for just the experience. Whether that experience is social, like exploring new roads with friends, or more something more solitary, allowing a cyclist to experience and test themselves against the landscape and weather conditions. In some respect I think there is a deep internal desire inside every human to travel, the same urge that 1000’s of years ago helped to developed new communities, town and eventually cities. As its now easier to travel the physical challenge aspect has been lost, I think cycling really tunes in to this. So I guess my question is do you see bikes like the Open UP playing a big part of the development of this part of the industry? Having one bike for all roads allowing you to go anywhere?

Well, the UP promotes the type of riding I want to do, and of course I found out that that type of riding is really enjoyable for me. Just to get back to the cause and effect here, I first started riding that way and then came the UP, it’s the reason for the UP. Of course, I had to content with more bike pushing than was ideal because the bikes I was using didn’t fit bigger tires (I rode that way mostly on road bikes with 28mm tires, not on 40 or 50mm knobby models). But that didn’t reduce the fun, and so I think an important lesson of the UP is that you don’t need an UP to ride that way and enjoy it, at least not to get started. Just go, just take whatever path and be sure to take sufficient supplies to deal with all the flats. And then, when you’re ready for the next step, then an UP allows you to really go to the next level and ride routes you never thought possible. 


I’m stressing this because I want this on/off-road mixed surface riding to be inclusive, not a bicycle arms race. In its core it is inclusive, because it is all about your own limits, not about comparing to others, and I always love to see the enormous range of bikes used at events like the Almanzo. road bikes with bigger tires, mountain bikes, gravel touring bikes with picnic baskets, gravel race bikes, cross bikes, everything goes. Everybody goes at their own pace, with their own goals, but even though that sounds very individual, at the same time you feel you’re sharing this experience and you’re enjoying that same feeling of achievement, from the winner to the final finisher.

In the 2017 ranges of most bike road bike manufactures there is now a ‘gravel’ type bike with something like 32mm or 35mm tyre clearance, essentially they are still road bikes and don’t much scope beyond the basics of ‘gravel’ cycling. Do you think the major manufactures have still got a long way to go before they are making a truly versatile product?

Well, there are specific (financial) reasons why these bikes all have these “slightly bigger but nowhere near what real gravel explorers want”  tire sizes. I am not sure if the investment into bigger tire platforms will happen or not. I can’t be bothered to think about what others may or may not do in the future. When we introduced the UP at SeaOtter, I spoke to the product managers of pretty much every major brand out there. They all came by, and I was happy to show them what we had done and how they could do something similar (We’ll never be the General Motors of the bike industry, we’ll be the Porsche so if somebody else wants to make the GM version of our stuff, that’s fine). But then later I heard from several of them that in the end it was too difficult, so they settled for smaller tires. And they’re right, it is difficult to fit these big tires into a road geometry.

Do you also see this reflected by the number of ‘comfort’ technologies on current road bikes, the likes of the new Specialized Roubaix and Trek Domane? With the open up you have concentrated on tyre size to provide the comfort instead, so are these developments by the bigger brands just a selling tool rather than a practical solution?

Different horses for different courses I guess. The advantage of putting the comfort in the tire is that this bigger tire also gives you grip, puncture resistance, etc. So it’s a 3-in-1. The Roubaix and Domane have other goals, just look at the names. One is named after a pro cycling race, with very specific needs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s my favorite race and in my previous life, we designed and built a frame that dominated that race for the better part of a decade.

And the other bike is named after Lance Armstrong’s favorite “test climb” scrambled so that it doesn’t read Madone anymore. I’ll refrain from jokes about what he was actually testing there, but suffice to say that although these bikes have a use for non-pros, in their core, as their base they are heavily linked to a type of riding that no paying customer will ever experience. 

Yes, we may go to France and ride the Paris-Roubaix course, in fact I have done that many times. And let me tell you, the fastest solution for the pros is not the fastest solution for you or I. There is a huge difference between riding the Arenberg forest at 50kmh or at 30kmh. It’s a completely different road at that speed, you hit every cobble instead of floating over it, and a bike designed specifically for that would do much better.

Now, I always enjoyed riding the exact same bike at Roubaix that our sponsored riders did (or in one case, I rode a 680g R5CA frame just because I could and thought that would be an interesting experiment). Riding something with a bigger tire felt like “cheating” history a bit, and a mountain bike would be slow on the on-road sections. But today it is clear that an UP would be a much superior bike for me on that course compared to a “Roubaix-optimized” road bike. Extrapolate that to all the bad roads, gravel roads and dirt tracks in the world, and the same is true. With as an added bonus that I don’t have to feel like I’m cheating history.

Complete the sentence…..In a perfect world a bike would be….?

FREE !