Ridley Bikes

Special Reports
Ridley Bikes The Leading Belgian Bike Brand
Text & Photos: Daphne Chen
L
ocated in the Flemish region of Belgium, Ridley
was founded in 1990 by Joachim
Aerts. Aerts had a passion for
riding and even won a number
of races, but he also understood
how difficult it is to ride at the
professional level. He then spent
a few years building frames and
doing painting work for various
Belgian cycle companies before
he used his riding experience and
frame-building expertise to start
up his own company. Flanders
is home to 6,000 racing clubs,
but with its biting wind, winter
ice, and bone-breaking cobbled
roads, it is also home to some
of the harshest riding conditions
in the world of cycling. Ridley
engineers test all their products
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▲ Young and talented founder Joachim Aerts.
in real-life riding conditions,
knowing that if a bike can
handle Flanders, it can handle
anything. Today, the company’s
flagship Ridley Noah is one of
the top bikes in the world.
www.biketaiwan.com
Company Overview
Ridley manufacturers a
complete product line, including
road bikes, time trial bikes, cyclo-cross bikes, mountain bikes,
Special Reports
▲ Ridley PR Manager Jan Geudens.
▲ All Ridley frames are hand-painted and have
a reference tag for individualized tracking.
▲ In order to assure fast delivery, Ridley has a
constant inventory of 700-1,000 bikes.
and women’s bikes. In
the early years, about 50%
of its output was for other
companies, but now most
of Ridley’s production is
under its own name. The
company currently produces and sells 30,000 bikes
a year, and had a turnover
of €30 million last year.
Frames account for about
20% of the company’s annual production.
Ridley exports to 44
countries, but the Benelux
region is its major market.
The company sold around
2000 bicycles on the Japanese market in 2011. Ridley
maintains a constant inventory of between 700 and
1000 bicycles to ensure fast
delivery. Distributors in
Europe place their orders
through the company website, and delivery time to
European countries is only
one or two days.
In 2010, Ridley
moved into its 12,000 m2
high-tech plant in Paal in
eastern Belgium. The new
plant has 50 employees, and
mainly focuses on painting
and assembly. Frames are
purchased from Taiwan and
China. Mid and low-end
frames are coated in China
and Taiwan, but Ridley insists that all the high-end
and customized frames are
coated in the company’s
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Belgium plant. Ridley also
has a painting plant in Moldova with 15 employees.
Customized Workmanship
Ridley has a well-deserved reputation in the bicycle industry for its painting technology. Top-end
and customized products
are coated by hand, without
the use of any stickers. The
workmanship is slow and
deliberate, and the attention
to detail is impressive: it
can take up to four to six
weeks to work on a frame.
Ridley prides itself on
a personalized touch that
is difficult for much larger
companies with automated
assembly lines. Ridley
bikes are assembled to customer specifications from
start to finish at personal
workbenches by an individual mechanic. In general, a
Ridley worker can assemble
a single time trial bicycle in
one day, or ten road bikes in
the same period. By avoiding large-scale productionline assembly, Ridley can
retain both production flexibility and accountability,
and each bike can be traced
back to the worker who
built it.
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www.biketaiwan.com
Special Reports
The FAST-Concept
Ridley PR Manager Jan
Geudens says most brands
work in the same way, only
focusing on streamlining
the bike with droplet shaped
tubes. For Ridley, this is only
the beginning. Their engineers, in their constant strive
to develop the fastest bike in
the world, thoroughly analyzing aerodynamics. Throughout
years of in-depth wind tunnel
testing, they discovered three
major issues that cause drag
and restrict bike speed. Ridley
found a solution for each one
of them. The result: the FASTconcept, a tripod concept containing three groundbreaking
technologies.
F-Splitfork™: jet foils
which draw air away from
the spokes, and counteract on
turbulence generated by the
wheels.
F-Brake™: the first real
integrated brake.
F-Surface™: a textured
surface applied to strategic
locations on the frame, letting
air travel smoothly around the
frame instead of detaching and
creating drag.
Frames and Components
According to CEO
Aerts, Ridley is on schedule
to once again produce highend frames. The company’s
▲►Ridley Noah FAST is one
of the leading aerodynamic
bike with three groundbreaking technologies, in the
market.
▲Ridley fully suspension bike.
latest model carbon fiber aerodynamic time trial bikes for
2013 will be manufactured in the
Moldova plant, and will debut
at next year’s Tour de France.
The frame program for 2014 has
also been completed, and annual
production capacity is expected
to be 500 units. Ridley has plans
to construct its own wind tunnel laboratory at the company’s
Belgian headquarters in order to
continue to improve aerodynamic
strength.
Ridley also recently relaunched its 4ZA (Forza) brand
of components as a stand-alone
line. The 4ZA line, named after
the Italian word for power, was
available only on Ridley bikes
until recently. CEO Joachim
www.biketaiwan.com
▲4ZA ( Forza) stem.
Aerts is excited about the range.
“The 4ZA brand is about bicycle components giving you the
power to perform,” he said. “4ZA
is about performance products
for racing, performance products
tested to the bone.” The 4ZA is
available in three component levels to fit every budget: Stratos,
Cirrus, and Cirrus Pro.
Aerts emphasizes, “On all
Ridley frames, we follow one
development philosophy – Form
Follows Function. Every tube
shape, frame construction and
geometry is chosen for a specific
reason. From the beginning, reliability, stiffness and strength have
been the essence of our design.”
This is Ridley. They are
Belgium.
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