Trek Headquarters Tour

We met at the Trek headquarters in Waterloo, WI for breakfast in the cafeteria and then a short introduction to Trek Travel. There were about 60 people in the room, but only three couples had taken a Trek Travel trip. We took one in Provence, France in 2023.

In the foyer inside the entrance is a mini museum of the history of Trek.

John Burke, the second generation president of Trek did a Q&A session. He raced bikes when he was younger and has kept most of his bicycles from over the years.

He described the Trek company of today as 50% product, 25% hospitality and 25% IT/logistics. He predicted that the hospitality and IT portions would probably grow more in the current tariff environment.

60% of bicycle sales are outside the US, and much of the basic components are made outside the US as well.

The headquarters site has prototyping manufacturing equipment, but not volume production. The custom painting for the Project One bikes is done at headquarters. We saw many interesting paint jobs including the 2025 Tour de France paint job. We were allowed to take photos of some sample frames, but photos were not allowed most places.

Interestingly, they did try to switch to robotic painting, but the robot wasn’t reliable, it spent too much time waiting for repairs and wasn’t quite as good as the hand painting.

Trek sponsors racing teams and they have some of the winner’s bikes displayed with the mud and dirt still on them, including the bike that Lizze Deignan rode when she won the first Paris-Roubaix Femmes held in 2021.

After that, we changed in the locker rooms and got our bikes out for an hour-long ride. There were three different groups based on speed, 20+ mph, 17 mph and what was advertised as 14 mph, but was between 10-11 mph.

The back roads are pleasant to ride on and there are few cars.

I saw a badger run across the road on the ride, but I wasn’t recording at the time.

Then we put our bikes in a room in the on-site fitness center. Trek employees would move them to an area near the start line in the morning, making for an easy start for us.

We changed back and drove over to the lodge, which is on the other side of the mountain bike trails by headquarters for lunch. SRAM gave a presentation over lunch and raffled off a groupset to be installed on your bike by the Lawrence store.

Bike frames don’t have a lot of room on them for the painters to experiment with color schemes. So they use plastic cows. Many painted cows were spread throughout headquarters, we couldn’t take photos of them, but this one was out at the lodge.

Then off to the Madison East store to see what they had. When Trek is clearing out inventory, this store often has great deals.