From a RF employee, posted on the NSMB forum:
One day when the dust settles and people have moved on, someone will write a book about how this went down (or something like that). But for now assume that any rumors you guys hear are just that. Anybody working at RaceFace, who was at a level in the company where they know any of the details of what went down, for the immediate future (and most likely for quite some time to come) won’t talk about it. On monday Craig is going to release a statement, all employees were told not to “broadcast” this as there are other people involved, many not in this country, who shouldn’t get this news via the internet. This seems kinda pointless now as people have been twittering this shit all day and my phone has been ringing since Thursday evening. The cat is out of the bag. But, anybody pointing fingers, placing blame, coming up with explanations etc… if any of there info were actually true I’m sure there would be alot of crap going down, threats of lawsuits, etc.
It’s not MEC, it’s not the fault of all manufacturing in North America going to Asia, it’s not whatever else you’ve heard. It’s complicated, it’s not just one thing, and it happened for different reasons depending on who in the company you talk to.
The whole situation just really sucks, I don’t think we’ll ever see another company like RaceFace again. There are other North American bike component manufacturers, but most of them are machine shops that make bike parts to keep their machines from being idle. RaceFace was a 100% dedicated bike parts factory, our CNC machines never made anything but bike parts. We were in this weird limbo between the big guys and the small guys. We broke ground because we were small enough to do things that seemed crazy, but big enough that we could afford the R&D and the marketing to do and promote something new.
RaceFace survived off of the dedication, talent and originality of it’s employees. There was always a really high turnaround rate as RaceFace was a hard place to plan a career around. The pay was so-so, the benefits minimal and the workload and stress high. But the job itself, I think most people on this board understand why you get a job in the bike industry. There’s nothing better than waiting in a lift lineup and seeing stuff you made on everybody’s bike. (that and the bro deals, man I’m going to miss those…) But thanks to that feeling of pride, that perk of seeing people enjoying stuff that you made, we got this core group of individuals that just worshiped anything on 2 wheels. The people who worked at RaceFace really REALLY loved their jobs. That’s why today is extra sad. I’m going to get another job. I’m going to go manufacture trucks, or steel girders, or packaging equipment or something else. But nobody there will really give a shit. I won’t give a shit about what I’m doing.
A lot of people’s dreams died Thurday at 3pm.
Yes, I know it’s a little emotional, but the guy just lost his job.