“There’s something to be said for buying products from folks who’ll lose their house if it fails – you’d better believe they checked their math.” Loren Mason-Gere, Marketing Manager for Rolf Prima Wheel Systems, offers a peek into the product development of their new hooked-rim all-road wheels and makes the case for small brands leading innovation by staying their course rather than chasing trends. Read the article and join the discussion below.

Science and Style

Depending on which phase you observe, product development in the bike industry could either look like a space station preparing for intergalactic travel, or judges of a skateboard contest choosing best trick. It’s a wild mix of science and style. Lucky for me, as Marketing Manager for Rolf Prima, my job’s the latter.

We’ve been deep in the product development process within the past year at Rolf Prima HQ. We were hard at work designing our new all-road offerings, the Ares and EOS AR. With product research and competitive analysis completed, the product had lived in the crazy mind of our engineer and his testing lab for months before he released it to me. It wasn’t “done”, but the initial design process was completed. It would soon be time to run them through the testing gauntlet, and then the fun part: pile on the miles. First, I had to float the concept and specs past some key accounts.

The first call I made was to a semi-famous wheelbuilding outfit that we’ll leave unnamed. I love this part. I get to jump on the phone and talk about bike parts with friends.

The conversation is typical – covering a bit of life, a lot of industry talk, and then narrowing down to the matter at hand. I describe the wheel, its intention, and its key properties. The confidant is along for the ride. We go through specs – anticipated weight, width, depth, hole counts, and available sizes. He’s asking questions and I’m testing our ideas against someone who routinely deals with all manner of end-users and competitor product. He knows the environment, the options, and the process. He seems to be all in… until we hit a roadblock.

“They’re hookless, right?” he asks.

I pause. I’ve been dreading this question.

“Um, no, we’re sticking to hooks for this model.”

“Dude. That’s not good. No one wants hooks! I personally will never ride another hooked wheelset again.”

“Seriously…?”

Here we have a dilemma.

Hookless Rim Hype

I knew going in that this could be a sticking point, but also knew Willy, our engineer, wasn’t bending on the hooked front. Engineers get pretty attached to details like safety, and downright righteous about doing things “right” once their testing and calculations guide them in a given direction. Convincing them to alter their designs based on public feedback? Around these parts, that’s damn near impossible.

But before we follow Willy down his road of justification, filled with math and test results, let’s hang with our friend the wheelbuilder. Why is he so righteously devoted to hookless rims?

It has a lot to do with crowd-directed product design, also known as “trends.” Even my marketing mind is skeptical of this. It leads to self-reinforcement in quick order. Companies release a product with a given feature, backed by a sizeable budget. If their marketing team is good at their job, people will want a product with that feature in no time. Those folks then vocalize their desire and parrot what they learned from said marketing to their friends and local shops. Street knowledge spreads quickly. Once disseminated, requests barrage retailers. “Oh, I like what you’re offering, but I know I really want it to have x (in this case, hookless rims).” Those requests then flow up the food chain and soon enough, companies like ours (small enough to work with shops directly) are hearing from them that they need that feature, because their customers are asking for it. “I can only sell x,” they’re telling us. “Everyone is about x.”

At the same time, a framebuilder might be telling us the same thing – not only because they heard from customers, but because they heard from shops. So here I am as a sales manager, pulling the chain and shouting the same request up the ladder. “Willy! We need fewer hooks!”

Engineerism

For us, along with many of our small-brand friends, this is a blessing and a curse. Our products are designed by ultra-nerdy, crazy-smart inventor types. These are people who absolutely love to make things. Machinists, engineers, mad scientists, and tinkerers. Companies like ours also tend to be owned by individuals or small groups, rather than shareholders, and their budgets are small enough that fear of financial meltdown is real. It is an interesting mix of innovation-oriented and fiscally constrained. The result is that products tend to take longer to develop, but be more thoroughly evaluated by the time they hit the market. Small brands can’t afford to product-test on their customers. A recall that would inconvenience a major global player (fill in your least favorite component maker here) would bankrupt most of us, and we don’t have the advertising budget to paper over it. Simply put, we can’t afford to fuck up.

In our case, the company culture was also born and raised in “engineerism.” We were founded by an inventor who later went into business with the most ruthlessly efficient, process-obsessed engineer I’ve ever met. Our brand is about the product – bottom to top. People will buy it, they reason, if it is the best. End of story.

You and I know there might be some details lacking in that approach, but this is how engineers think. It’s my job to balance out their thinking with what I understand about human psychology and what I see taking place in shops.

This brings us back to Willy and his fierce devotion to hooked rims. Why was he so dead-set on such a small feature, even in the face of huge pressure and proven sales of giant companies pushing hookless rims? He had his reasons.

Against the Grain

First was weight savings – this is counter to much of the hookless narrative, but our models showed us that in this situation we were able to decrease weight by keeping hooks. Straight rims (hookless) eliminate the material at the edge of the rim we know as the hook, which could reduce weight, but in doing so, the force of the tire pressing against the rim is dispersed along the entire rim-wall. This requires more material throughout the rim, especially for high pressure tires. By adding hooks on our all-road models, we found that we could reduce the thickness lower in the rim, where it is otherwise not needed, keep material at the hook, and end up with a lighter product. This wouldn’t be the case for all products, but in the case of the AR line, it was.

Next, range of tire fit – as many now know, hookless rims have less preventions for tire blow-off. That’s why hooks were made in the first place. Does that mean that all hookless rims are dangerous? Absolutely not. But it does add a high degree of importance to verify tires work and follow pressure guidelines. In order to ensure customers are safe, this often means allowing a smaller range of permissible tire sizes for any given wheelset. Then you hope they listen, and their pressure gauge is right.

By using hooks, we expanded the range of tires for this product (28-50 mm) while reducing high-stakes questions for customers about what tires they can run.

Similarly, hooks allowed for running a wider range of pressures. This wouldn’t matter for mountain bike wheels, in which high pressure is not a concern, but all-road offerings are designed to be hugely diverse wheelsets. They need to be equally capable on- and off-road. They are also a high-performance wheelset designed for high-speed scenarios such as fast group rides and gravel races, and for an AR offering, the same wheels need to be able to do both jobs. We want users to be able to run as wide a range of pressures as possible without worrying.

The above factors added up to lower anxieties for everyone. As wheel makers, we take the safety of the products we design very, very seriously. It is our highest priority, and it keeps us up at night. While hookless road rims can certainly work, they are open to a greater margin of error and potential for issues. Frankly, that freaks us out. Recent footage of high-speed blow-offs in pro racing have rattled the rest of the cycling industry as well, and consumers are once again looking to hooks for reassurance.

If we go back to my product research discussion during design, the current discussion about hookless road/all-road wheels had not yet emerged. The hype was on, and it was all hookless, all the time. Customers were asking for it and retailers were responding accordingly. It thus made great sense that my friend the wheelbuilder took a hard stance. He wanted to sell products people asked for. And so did I. Without the balance of our engineers and the forced conservatism of our small-brand ways, my marketing-guy brain would have likely followed along on the trend. In fact, I did push back, arguing the best I could for hookless rims. But the whole production team stood strong. They believed keeping hooks on the rim was the best solution for the most people and they weren’t going to disregard their science and testing based on peer pressure – which is really the only argument I had.

While it was frustrating in the moment, at the end of the day, this is why I love this company and the independent, small brands we know, love, and collaborate with. The guiding principle always has been and always will be this: to build the best possible product, based on the best science and first-hand testing, and not to compromise for trends or hype. Even in the face of marketing pressures, brands like ourselves, Paul Components, White Industries, and countless others tend to stand our ground. When we do get on a bandwagon, its destination has been extremely well-analyzed and its benefits adequately proven. Sometimes that means we appear late to the game on the big changes, but it is a sacrifice we’re willing to make. It is rooted in integrity and proof-proven concepts that are integral to how we stay in business and keep our employees and their families fed.

Full Circle

It might not be as sexy as the promised revolution of the cycling experience you find in mainstream marketing, but it can be trusted. I’ve often heard off-cuff comments about going with the major brands because “they have the most money for engineering and research.” There’s truth to that, but those budgets also apply to their marketing and legal teams too. There’s something to be said for buying products from folks who’ll lose their house if it fails – you’d better believe they checked their math. And while sometimes that means we’re behind the game, in the cycling industry, what’s old is often new again, and something as simple as rim hooks can go from passé to yet-again-essential in a matter of weeks. When small brands forgo the temptation to chase the rabbit down the hole, they sometimes find themselves at the front of the pack just by virtue of consistency. We seize those moments.

So, Radavist readers, what’s your take on hookless vs. hooked rims? When is it best to ignore the hookless hype and listen to the engineers? Let’s continue the discussion in the comments.

Editor’s note: we did not take any money from Rolf Prima or Astral Cycling to post this story; we just felt like it was a fascinating look into the discussion from a respected brand within the maker community…