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cookeaa- my criteria for a car is reliability. If you could find me a reliable car I'd pay ANYTHING! £500 or £5,000!
Sod the keying, speed etc etc.
b r - Member
Bikes are a bit like cars, once you've spent a certain amount there are very, very few really crap ones.As to brands/marketing, people will pay far in excess of a products costs if they believe the hype - you've only got to look at the high 'value' fashion items. Many years ago I did some work at an importer of materials and silks - they were buying scarves in at dozen for a pound - that eventually ended up in Liberty at £50+ each.
As for bikes, for me the cost of the frame is irrelevent - its how it rides thats the key. But its in the components where you can make a real difference, and usually money talks.
Its also very enjoyable in buying a mainstream bike, and then swapping and buying top end stuff over time - whenever deals and/or breakages happen.
That man has underlined this whole thread with one stroke. I've done the same and come round full circle in 20 years of riding. I now have Specialized DH and AM bikes and a Giant road bike. I'll ignore my [url= http://www.flickr.com/photos/flamejob/4036338735/ ]hardtail[/url].
Is that a Newsboy? You have bought among the most pointless bikes ever, well done 😉
Do people really consider Santa Cruz to be boutique ?
Wow, I've got two of them. 8)
Do people really consider Santa Cruz to be boutique ?
They do feel very special even though the designs arent anything special. they just get the angles etc etc 'right'.
Do people really consider Santa Cruz to be boutique ?
I'm just as surprised that people don't.
But as I said before, I think it's more a disagreement about what the word means than about what SC (or Orange) actually do.
Personally (and probably like many others on here) my attitude to bike buying is more like "what can I get cheap that's suitable for the sort of riding that I want to do?"
I don't flatter myself that only one bike designer is clever enough to create a bike good enough for my immense talents.
And this all comes back to what is boutique?
Is it only custom built bikes, properly bespoke stuff? In which case there's hardly any out there! Or is it small manufacturers with a small number of employees working on a small scale?
On another note... WGAF!?
I bought the Chameleon because I wanted something with horizontal dropouts to run a Rohloff and it was the first bike to turn up on ebay locally at the right price.
I bought the Blur because, on paper, VPP sounded like the best suspension linkage and it was cheaper than an Intense.
So, all this time I should have been feeling smug and looking down on other people on their common bikes. I never knew. 😥