McMahon: Does SRAM have any interest in making frames or complete bikes?
Day: We don't — that's our customers' business. And we love being in components. We love other people being in other parts. I do wish the frame suppliers would speed up their deliveries, though, because oftentimes that's a negating factor in the whole channel. We run on 30-day lead times, and frames are usually 90 to 120 days. If they could speed up, then we'd all get to take a piece of inventory out of the channel, which would be great.
You know, when we first started the company, we thought we'd be just shifters and do a shifter company. We got into it, and we became really successful on mountain-bike shifters — not road shifters, but mountain shifters. It was an interesting ride. I remember in 1991, we went from about 10,000 shifters to 300,000, so we really cracked the code in the market. Then 500,000, then 2 million, then 5 million, then 8.5 million shifters. It was an incredible rocket-ship ride. It was at that point we chose — instead of just riding the profit curve on shifters — to take the profits and become a full line of components supplier.
And it just happened at that time that we discovered that the Sachs Bicycle management division was available for sale. That was our first acquisition. But it was really important because it brought with it an experienced team of German engineers who really knew how to stamp, forge, and heat-treat metal parts, whereas with Grip Shift, it was all injection, with the plastic, where you get the shape out of the mold. So it was terrific that we were able to complete that acquisition at that time and drive it forward. It was great to bring the Americans and the Germans together. We were probably a little more freethinking, and they were more disciplined, and it took some time to get those two approaches together, but it's come together really well now, and it's exciting. When we look at Eagle now, on the drivetrain side, all of that came out of Schweinfurt, Germany. There's a ton of innovation multiplied by the German engineering skills.