Trek Headquarters Tour

We start the day with a ride from the East Madison Trek store at 8am. Then we head to the Trek headquarters in Waterloo, WI for lunch and an early afternoon tour of the Project One portion of the factory.

The ride goes over to and around the Wisconsin State Capitol building. The bike path goes up and over two freeways. You ride a circular ramp up and down. The path goes by the lake. Here is a short video approaching the lake.

We rode around the capitol building and stopped at the steps for a photo.

After returning to the Madison East Trek store on our bikes, we had a little time to go to the hotel and get cleaned up before heading out to Trek Headquarters in Waterloo.

There are a few bikes and a little of Trek’s history in the atrium of the headquarters. The Y bike, an early carbon fiber mountain bike. This particular bike is from Robin William’s bike collection of over 100 bicycles. His children auctioned off 87 bikes for charity in 2016. This is one of them.

Trek uses life-sized plastic cows to test paint schemes for bikes since they have more surface area to actually see the paint scheme. There are lots of them in the building, but we could only take photos of the ones in the atrium.

After lunch provided by Trek in their cafeteria we had a tour of the Project One paint shop and Trek racing. No photos allowed. Lizzie Deignan stopped in the racing shop while we were there, we had a 30-minute Q&A with her. She saw so many changes to women’s bike racing over her career.

Q&A with Trek CFO, Chad Brown

Chad worked bike retail in high school college for 6 years. Triathlete, joined Trek in 2011 as comptroller, but moved to CFO in 2014.

He talked about e-bikes which are popular but expensive.

He was asked a question about AI somewhat in jest, but Chad took it very seriously. He talked about how AI is affecting his job and bike retailing / servicing. Finding the right part given the huge number of parts is a problem that they are looking to AI.

Q&A with Trek President, John Burke

When asked about trends in bike geometry, John replied “I’m not on that committee.” He does sit on the committee that decides which bikes to produce and the pricing committee. He is working on simplifying their product lines and supply chain. If Toyota is 100, VW is 60, Trek is at 30 right now. Europe sales are four times US sales.

John and his wife will ride a century on a weekend. His wife is his bike mechanic. He talked about the Trek Ride Club app that has a ride line button to offer remote help. They used it once and the technician told his wife how to fix a badly slashed tire with a dollar bill.

Afterwards we headed out to the back parking lot to try some demonstration bikes. I got to ride a not-yet-released road bike. I talked with the engineer who did the range testing when I turned the bike back in.