“Why is the closest OPEN retailer 4 hours away?”, is something we get asked quite regularly. Well, the whole reason we started OPEN is to stay small and to keep it simple. If we had 1,000 retailers worldwide, we wouldn’t be small nor would it be simple. We’d need a whole team of customer service and sales people just to take care of those retailers, never mind the people we would need to take care of the end consumers. How do we know? Because we used to do it that way in our previous lives.

Sometimes people think that we didn’t enjoy ourselves when we were part of these bigger organizations. That’s not really the case, for the most part we did enjoy it. It’s good fun to build something, see it grow, go to dealer events all over the world and talk to people who are passionate about cycling, about your brand and the bikes you make. And every now and then, we even got to sneak in a ride in those more or less exotic locations.

However, there is a time and place for everything and towards the end of our “big company” careers, Andy and I both felt that our time in those places had lasted long enough. We came to that conclusion completely independently, and without any real ideas about what future place we would want to spend our future time in. That came later and sort of by coincidence. And in fact, I don’t really remember how it exactly happened. He left, I left, and then I thought I should see what he was going to do next, as I always liked him.

Funny part is, although I distinctly remember hiring Andy several years earlier for the “big company”, I don’t really remember much of our interaction while we were both there. We were part of the same organization for several years, he even more or less reported to me for some stuff, but I don’t really have much recollection of us ever sitting in the same room and discussing things. This is not to say that didn’t happen - it certainly did - but it was just one of so many things happening at the time.

In one sense, it's not so different now. We don't see each other that often, although we speak almost every day. But unlike before, I now remember the meetings, and they are often connected to exciting reasons such as trade shows or big events. 

At any rate, we agreed the new time and place for us would be small, and with some sort of normal work-life balance. And 1,000 retailers don’t fit into that equation, in fact we’re starting to worry that the amount of success OPEN is having right now is already a bit of a strain on those principles. We don’t mind working hard (after all working hard to stay small is our motto), but we’re finding out more and more that this motto is not just a funny play on words - it really IS hard work to stay small.

So we try to simplify, simplify, simplify, as much as we can, so that we can stay small as an organization while still growing the number of consumers who can enjoy the bikes we design and build. That also means expanding our retailer base a little bit, as long as we can manage it (and still get our own rides in).

More about all this tomorrow!