Spitballing and Speculating

I still owe all you readers a quick 2x2 analytical table using the different dimensions of capitalism and markets (and thinking about the scale of the business enterprise) to categorize different kinds of builders and brands. My spring break is drawing to a close tonight and, fortunately, I made good progress on my commercialization of football …

Placeholdin’

Two week deadline again...and running up short. Making progress on my political-economy of world soccer article manuscript, but this leaves me short on the framebuilding stuff. Been thinking about it, though, and had hoped to build on the Braudelian markets vs. capitalism material from past two posts.You can probably tell where I'm headed with that …

“Operationalizing” Braudel

First off, big picture update here.Though I missed it by a day, I'm trying to stick to this every-2-weeks posting thing, no matter how painful. Two weeks go by so fast (between teaching, administrative stuff, going on school field trips and so forth) and I'm finding that trying to write to this schedule is a …

Markets vs. Capitalism & Fernand Braudel

In previous posts (yeah, from a year or two ago...but that's still previous!), I've used - without explanation - the term "capitalism" when trying to think through the position of handmade bike builders and the bike industry more broadly and I'd like to circle back to that a bit in this post and ones to …

2 Weeks?! Article Update

Just passed the 2-week mark since my last writing...which means I owe myself a blog post here. I do have a good reason for not posting: finally finished the revision work on this academic article manuscript and resubmitted it to the journal this morning (technically still on the weekend, with today as a holiday)! Revising …

Starting 2017 Off Right

Well, at least I'm starting it with a plan - and one that might provide some public accountability!   Yes, I went the entirety of 2016 without posting to this blog. Hard to believe, but there you have it. I drafted quite a few things and stayed busy with actual work (interviews, listening to interviews, …

Estimating Handbuilt Bike Segment Size: Next Steps

The first steps in my "estimating the size of the handbuilt segment" effort were pretty successful in soliciting some useful feedback directly and on the forums...while also kicking off some interesting discussions (on list and off) about how to delineate and categorize different parts of the segment as a whole. Knowing the scale of the …

How Big is the Handbuilt Bike Segment? Part III

Last time we looked at the total number of handmade bike builders in the U.S....which turns out to be a pretty big number. Turning to output and value, estimation is even more challenging; without direct observation, we must rely largely on informed-insider opinion and observation. The following, then, is intended only as a "thinking out loud" …

How Big is the Handbuilt Bike Segment? Part II

Last time we worked through the bike picture outline of the bike trade in the U.S. The really short story is that a lot of bikes are sold overall ("a lot" - that is - if you only took "bike shops" as your frame of reference), most of them for kids, most of them comparatively …

How Big is the Handbuilt Bike Segment? Part I

How do the handbuilders fit into the larger bicycle industry?While it is clear to even a casual observer that the U.S.-made, hand built and/or custom bike segment is small, just how small is difficult to establish with any certainty. This is to some extent just a fact of the size - it is difficult to …