Serotta
Serotta Competition Bicycles - Couture Cycle Engineering
Serotta Competition Bicycles is a precision manufacturing company. And like Philippe Starck, Frank Lloyd Wright, Yves Saint Laurent or even Ernesto Colnago, Ben Serotta is first and foremost a design engineer and technician. He has become an eponymous CEO only by necessity.
Ben started building racing frames at the age of fourteen with the simple ambition to one day be the best in the world. Armed with his engineering genius, workaholic ethic he set up his first workshop in Saratoga Springs in 1972 at the age of nineteen. And like Ernesto Colnago, Ben could still stroll down to the shop floor of an afternoon and build a bicycle frame should the whimsy take him. We know this because he had to make one for us last year (Luke Scott – last ever Serotta CSi). This makes him almost unique amongst his peers. Ben Serotta and his forty passionate co-workers provide the most effective counter-point there can ever be to mass production – the evidence is in the beautiful objects that fall from their skilled hands, that some of us want to own because they make us feel so much better when we ride.
No Hippy Workshop
However if you think that Serotta is some hippy workshop hidden in the woods you are only half right - Serotta is indeed located in the middle of a particularly verdant forest in Saratoga Springs (up state New York) But the factory is the most advanced and precise facility in the world. Ben’s fixation with quality and integrity has made him obsessed with ‘vertical integration’ – put simply he wants to control in-house every aspect of every component’s production - at a time when anonymously out sourcing production to the Far East is the trend, Serotta is more vertically integrated than any other bicycle manufacturer:
Serotta design and produce all their own small parts in their CNC (computer numerical control) facility.
Serotta butt, swage and machine all their own titanium tubes.
In January 2007 Serotta took over America’s leading centre for composites research and production in Poway California. This company had previously worked for and with some of the greatest names in the industry over the years. When I spoke to their Director Mike Lopez at SICI in January 2007 he confirmed that working to Serotta’s technological requirements and standards presented the greatest and therefore most rewarding challenge in the industry. Hence it was an integration that was popular with the Poway staff because they only wanted to work at the highest level with absolutely no compromise required. The integration is good for Serotta as it ensure unlimited access to the highest quality carbon fibre in the world as well as constant contact with emerging carbon technology.