2017 Europe Fitting Tour
The Vanilla Workshop is a small bicycle framebuilding house in Portland, OR. We make about 200 frames per year with a staff of about 15. This translates to a ton (roughly 150) hours per bike - a lot of time sweating the details. With so much attention going into the bikes and the customer experience, we came to realize that no matter how good we do everything else, without a great fit, the bike will only ever be “OK”.
How to bring our own fit methods to our customers around the world? We looked at how craftspeople throughout time have solved this problem, made some modifications to the traditional notion of a trunk show and launched our Fit Tour.
Since 2014, our fit tours have taken us around the world to find our people. We ride their roads, share our bikes with those who have mostly seen them through the web and most importantly, these future Speedvagen owners get a full consultation and custom fitting session with founder Sacha White.
Speedvagen Fact Sheet:
Sacha White started making frames in 1999 under the Vanilla name. By 2003, the bikes had gained a sort of cult following and White came up against two problems: 1) the waitlist for a Vanilla had grown to 5 years and 2) because of the long wait, many owners weren’t riding their bikes the way they were meant to be ridden. Being a racer and ex-messenger himself White, while he loved to build something that was very fine, had no interest in building a bike that was going to hang on a wall.
Enter Speedvagen.
Born in 2006, Speedvagen was created as an answer to the stigma of long waitlist and perceived preciousness of Vanilla. At it’s core, Speedvagen is a minimalist, modern race machine, built for each individual owner with a turn around time of 2 weeks to 2 months, depending on the details. All design, fabrication, paint and buildout is done in-house in our Portland, Oregon workshop.