by Igor
2021 was another fantastic year for VO: we moved to a new facility, hired a couple more employees, are trucking along with new projects, made new connections for suppliers, and are making more investments in inventory.
Before we dive into what we've been up to this year, a quick holiday announcement. To give our staff time with their friends and families, VO will be closed from December 24th through January 2nd, and will reopen on January 3rd. If you need your order to go out before we close, please place it before 2pm ET on December 23rd.
The Move
The big one this year was our move! We went from 7500 sqft to almost 15,000, with 11,000 dedicated to just warehousing. It means we can keep more inventory on hand and provide consumers and shops with more product availability and cool, new designs.
New Products
1x Cranksets - these are a great solution for those wanting to change to a 1x drivetrain, but will still work with single speed drivetrains.
Next Gen Crazy and Seine Bars - We teased these last winter but took a while to actually get them in due to raw material delays. But we're getting a LOT more early in 2022.
1x Sensah Components - I've explored Sensah components before and have heard good things. So when we experienced supply chain shortages, we decided to take things into our own hands and made connections over at Sensah to bring in their SRX and CRX 1x11 components. They've sold well, so we're going to bring in more offerings next year.
Diamond Polyvalents - While I think the Low Kicker design is perfect for many people's needs, the Diamond frame variant does have the classic lines and big main triangle look many people like.
Biggish Bag - Not too big, not too small, we designed the Biggish Bag to be the perfect size for all of your sport touring adventures, city errands, day-long gravel rides, and everything in between.
Pistachio Neutrino - The builds I see online based on the Neutrino frameset continue to inspire and impress me. I've seen Rohloffs, singlespeeds, ebikes, drop bars with carbon rims, bikepacking rigs, and even fixed gear builds. Here's Josie's build, it's a favorite of mine.
Projects
Rando
I'm not the best at keeping secrets secure at VO BadgerWorks. It really comes down to me being excited and wanting to put a stake in the ground so at least someone outside of VO knows what we have in store. I also think rumors are fun in the bicycle industry.
The Rando is coming along. We are doing one more round of prototypes to adjust some geometry and clearances, especially on the smaller sizes.
We picked a color and it is spectacular - it isn't the above one. To be honest, the one we selected was more of an "Eh, it is kinda cool, let's see how it is on a frame", but when we saw it in person, on a frame, it was a hit. It was everyone's pick out of the line up of colors. Picking the colors out of the paint book from a postage stamp size is a sort of try and see process. Dark colors are often darker when painted, and light colors are lighter. Then you have metallic, pearl, gloss, etc... Basically, we got a bunch of colors to try out. Some we go with for production and others might go on future frames. We'll show you the final selection when the final Randos go into production.
Raw materials are ordered up and hopefully that will speed up the timeline for production once the protos are ok'd.
Cranks
We've been testing samples of the 2-piece cranks. They need a bit of tweaking to get all of the tolerances just right. The samples are completely CNC'd since we want to make sure everything is correct before we invest in forging dies. We're also working on some neat chainring designs since we aren't necessarily tied to a certain BCD. There are some neat 80s automotive wheel designs I love that would be cool to implement on a chainring.
Materials of the future!
We're working with some materials besides steel and aluminum alloy. So far I am impressed and pleased. I'm keeping this one close but will release details when we finalize prototypes.
Granola Moose Bars
As much as I like the integrated clamp, we're changing it to a regular height clamp. They'll work with a ton more bikes, especially those old ATBs that use threaded headsets and threadless adaptors.
Odds and Ends
While we always have big projects going, there are smaller projects that we work on, too! We have some less flashy endeavors like nice headset spacers, single leg kickstands, smaller cargo nets, linear pull rim brakes, and some others that are still in the ether. And now that we have the space, we can explore all sorts of projects without worrying about where to put them all!
In conclusion, 2021 has been another wild ride. Between supply chain shortages and moving, we're weathering well and VO continues to be strong. We absolutely have an optimistic outlook for 2022. We want to wish everyone a Happy Holiday Season and a fantastic New Year.
