John Klemme talks about Bike Switzerland’s new 2014 Swiss-made touring bikes.
hi everybody this is john at bike switzerland uh 2014 a very big year for bike switzerland it’s our 10th anniversary so that’s 10 years now that we’ve been doing these bicycle trips across switzerland and to celebrate our anniversary we wanted to do something very special and so i’m here today to announce that in 2014 we’re going to be introducing our own bike switzerland touring bike now we’ve been pretty happy with our bikes up until now but we thought this would give us a chance to brand our own bike and also get a few uh of the little problems that we had with our other bikes worked out so that we would have a perfect bike for the kind of tourists that we do and so in developing a bike like this uh it could have been a bit intimidating but fortunately we knew exactly where to go we’re in zurich today and there’s a little town just outside of zurich called uster where we went to have our bikes made and so that’s what this uh podcast is about today the assembling of the bike switzerland bike just outside of zurich here in oosters so hope you enjoy the podcast my colleague jerry and i went to visit our friend roger schmidt in ooster a few months ago roger and his brother run gpr distribution and they handle a lot of big name brands for switzerland they’ve got ridley quatta asos campagnolo physique and a bunch of others they also have their own in-house brand called price price bikes have been around for a long time but they’re only sold domestically here in switzerland their brand has a different concept that works like this customers choose from one of maybe 30 different frames and then they build up the bike exactly as they want it from scratch the customer chooses the components the headset handlebars wheels seatpost seat everything even the bike’s color it’s a great concept especially if you know exactly what you want now let me say this about price and gpr most european companies and almost all swiss companies are domestic in name alone uh almost everything is assembled in china or taiwan but not so with price bikes every couple of months the frames arrive here in switzerland they’re looked over they are painted they are varnished uh and all of the assembly afterwards takes place as i said right outside of zurich in the town of booster the mechanics in ooster work all day they’re like sanizals assembling each bike from scratch according to the customer’s specs some clients are ordering a premium carbon frame with dura aci2 or campagnolo chorus with mavic or fulcrum wheel sets and other clients have more modest budgets but all the bikes are assembled in-house boxed and shipped off to bike shops across switzerland the advantage here is that you get exactly the bike that you want assembled by swiss mechanics at about 25 to 30 percent less than the equivalent name brand bike that was probably put together in china so as i was saying we knew what we wanted the bike that we had been using had served us well and so we were looking for something similar similar geometry a triple chain ring dependable components etc but price did us much better than that this year’s bike is called the tour de zad and here it is it’s the best bike we’ve ever had in our fleet so that’s it bike switzerland’s new bike and i hope you can uh come over in 2014 and and give it a try on one of our on one of our tours across switzerland