Trek Mountain Bikes: Do They Deserve Your Loyalty?

One of the most well-known names in mountain bikes is Trek. The Trek Bicycle company has been an innovator in the field for thirty years, and remains a huge name in biking. Trek is about a lot more than mountain bikes, though. The Trek Company dominates biking across the board, from touring, extreme sports, mountain biking, BMX, police bicycles, to recreational biking, and they continue to grow as a global industry powerhouse. Trek customers pay a premium for the research, innovation, and performance packed into every Trek product, and we're glad to do so, given their track record.

Currently under the guidance of CEO John Burke, Trek began in 1976 in an old red barn in Waterloo, Wisconsin. At that time, they had 5 employees and a single product - steel touring frames. In the 30 years that followed, they've added a huge variety of products and locations, becoming a global company in every sense of the word. Trek now makes specific bicycles for mountain bikers, tandem riders, police forces, racing, children, and even specific frames for women - an idea that some thought had seen its day. Through all of this growth, Trek has managed to stay at the top of it's game, as is clearly evidenced by the endorsements of Tim DeBoom, Ironman World Champion, and of course Lance Armstrong, perhaps the biggest name in biking, who won the Tour de France a record-breaking seven times between 1999 and 2005, each time riding a Trek bicycle.
In 1984, Trek created the Trek Component Group, specializing in biking gear, like helmets, water bottles, apparel, racks, and more. The Trek Component Group Catalogue has grown to be more than sixty times its original size in the intervening twenty-three years, and this growth continues today. Overall, the Trek Bicycle Company cleared sixty-nine million dollars in sales during the 2007 fiscal year.
The company's mission reads as follows:

"Trek is people committed to changing lives through cycling. Who strive to enhance the riding experience worldwide through innovative products, dynamic partnerships, bicycle friendly development, and exceptional dealer and customer care."

Beyond this business-centered mission, which the company seems to be able to follow-through on, Trek has made commitments to some more humanitarian concerns through their "One World, Two Wheels" program, which aims to make the world a more bicycle-friendly place. Of course, every step they make toward building more bicycle lanes or promoting bicycle commuting will help Trek's bottom line, they point out that these steps also aim to combat global warming, carbon emissions, obesity rates, and traffic congestion, and they're not wrong. One program goal is to, "is to increase US trips taken by bicycle to 5% from the current 1% by 2017," an achievement that would certainly go a long way toward fitness and emissions.

Trek started early, and has a solid track record behind them, but in today's global economy, staying on top is increasingly difficult. Cheap global labor and the ability of smaller companies to benefit from the research and innovation done at Trek will make the company have to work harder to hang onto customers. If they continue to treat their customers, dealers, and sponsored teams as well as they do now, Trek won't have a hard time keeping loyal customers and hanging onto their market share.