Something that comes up occasionally when discussing All-City is the question of "Why don't you put model names on your bikes? Everyone else does."
Well, my friend, there are a myriad of reasons for this, so let's get into it.
1. Aesthetics
We care about how our bikes look, and absolutely abhor the idiotic bike industry bullshit that goes on with graphics today. Does a company really need its website address on a bicycle? There's a thing called Google. If I want to find you on the web, I'll look you up. You don't need to tell me the address 13 times on your seatstays and chainstays, it's not 1998 and the internet is not a new thing.
How many times do you really need the manufacturer on a bike? Putting logos on the forks, stays, downtube, seattube,etc, just seems so ludicrous. If you're the type of person who needs that Euro race look, or you believe that your bike is a status symbol and need everyone to know what it is, you aren't right for us and we're not right for you. And that's okay. There are plenty of other companies who will give you exactly the pro race look you want.
We want our stuff to be clean and classic.
2. Who is that for exactly?
You bought the bike, you know what it is. Who gives a shit if Billy-down-the-street can see that it's the "nobjobber" model from Generic Bicycle corp. If someone checks out your ride and doesn't know what model All-City it is, that's okay. They can Google us *see above or maybe even talk to you. I realize that this hurts us in the marketing sense that lay people aren't able to go "Oh, that's an All-City Space Horse," but don't worry about us, we'll be okay and they still know it's an All-City and hopefullly know how to use the internet.
The one argument I will accept here is that it helps out sales folk in the shops, and we are thinking about doing hangtags to make that better, but really if you're selling us you should know the difference between a Mr. Pink and a Space Horse by heart.
An owner of a bicycle doesn't need to be reminded of the model name or any other bullshit when they see the bike. They know what it is, what it's for, and what it means to them.
3. We'd probably have to name our bikes not stupid things
Now I love the names of our bicycles, they are dear to my heart, but they're also kind of stupid and ridiculous, which is just the way we want them. If we actually put a name on our top tube, we'd probably have to be a lot more conventional with what we called things.
4. Because "everyone else does" is the stupidest reason to do anything
We don't really care about what the rest of the industry does, if we were satisfied with what the rest of the industry was doing there would be no need for us to have ever started All-City. We want to do better than that, and junking up a bike with a bunch of dumb words isn't something we're remotely interested in.
There you have it, a few reasons we don't care to commoditize our bikes by putting a bunch of marketing crap on them, if that bums you out we're sorry, but we think it's a better way to be and a nice thumb in the eye of the industry status quo.
Rafael Says:
February 5, 2013
Never even realized, the bike did not have their names stamped somewhere. I’ve had my Big Block for over an year and the bike is too good for me to care about names logos or whatever.
And I can recognize most of the All-City bike by their color scheme, the green on the Nature Boy frameset is one of the most unique colors I’ve ever seen.
Keep up the awesome work, All-City bikes are rad just the way they are.