"The Appearance of Shabbyness"

Working on our lifestyle products here at Trek, one of the biggest requests we get is "can you just make the bike black? I don't want to stand out." The thing about that statement is that it's not totally true and no, we can't make an entire line of black bikes. Yes, some people may not want to "stand out" but everybody wants to be at least somewhat noticed. If that statement were true, there'd be no reason to make the Trek District. And then there would be no trekdistrict.com. The underlying truth is that the requestor is probably scared that somebody will rip their bike off and they'd rather not see their investment in the hands of bicycle miscrients.

Well, now there's a way to deflect the attention from your sweet ride without haveing to actually sacrifice the paint.

UK-based desinger Dominic Wilcox has come up with a solution that is simple but seemingly effective. Dominic has come up with some super-realistic scratch and rust decals that can be slapped over a nice paint job to give the appearance of "shabbyness". You can deflect thieves while keeping a clean aesthetic for only £3.99 (which is only, like, 74 US dollars). While Dominic makes no guarentee as to the effectiveness of his decals, he has seen some success with his own bike in London. Capital idea! Check him out here.

BTW: While these are a great idea, I'm not guarenteeing they will work. You want to keep your bike? Buy a big lock.

Go By Bike PSA

Seeing as it's a Friday and it's also May 1 (Happy Birthday Chris!), the begining of Go By Bike Month, I wanted to get out my PSA about helmets. Bike helmets save countless lives every year. Ride your bikes, get out and enjoy the warmth, and be safe!

Had to post this video. Not sure where it was shot but you gotta love the vibe. bicycle commuters should be hugged more.

The Devo Bike

If you like Devo and custom fixed gear bikes, you will think that this is the greatest blog post ever. I can't say as I'm all that familiar with Devo's music (aside from "Whip It" of course) but I am quite familiar with dope rides and this is for sure the latter. Trek Industrial Design rockstar Mike Hammond worked up this custom fixie complete with "Devo Hat" spacers. After we wiped the drool from our fellow Trekkies off the bike, Mike decided that the bike could do more for the world than just reside in his stable of fly bikes. The bike is currently being auctioned and the proceeds donated to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. If you'd like a chance at owning this amazing piece of "Devo-tion", click here. Bidding is live now!
Two LAF posts in a row. I'd send those guys a bill if I wasn't feeling so.....charitable.

Behind The Curtain At Trek U

In an effort to better educate you, the consumer, we've embarked on a series of educational videos. It's something we've done for years in the hallowed halls of higher bike learning known as Trek University but we only accepted bike shop employees. In an essence, we're now offering open enrollment. And while they may not contain the sheer horror of the videos your driver's ed teacher showed you or posess the middle school giggle-factor of "Your Changing Body", they are pretty sweet. Here's why: They're short. We've already dropped FX and Madone on the web and now we're expanding the offering to the entire Urban and Mountain Bike lines. Here's some behind-the-scenes photos from our Urban shoot. I'll post again when the video is up but you're going to have to wait for the vid till December 26th.

Coming To Your World

If you've read between the lines of the Bike Lane Blog, you have probably discerned that it's written by somebody in Trek's marketing department. This is because that as a marketer I have the years of skilled journalistic training that it takes to write something people would actually want to read. It's also because that marketers are some of the only people who posess the ego large enough to believe that other people actually care about their thoughts and opinions.  Today however, it's not my opinions I'm interested in. It's yours.

If you watch "Mad Men" (Best Show Ever not named "Entourage") you may think that marketing is really just wearing a skinny tie, drinking too much, and cheating on your spouse while you smoke cigarretes in your office. That's really only half of what we marketers do. The rainy season has reached us in the Loo and pretty soon it will be snowy season which then spills into road constructy season. Road constructy season is what we live for because hopefully some roads are in enough shape to ride a bicycle on. Perhaps a shiny new Trek bicycle? You should buy a new Trek bicycle. See, just marketed to you and you didn't even see it coming.
 
  Subliminal advertising (like the kind I just dropped on you) is really the next wave. Aside from giving marketers an outlet for creativity and often returning higher rates of recollection and action (the holy grail of advertising) they can often liven up the environment around you. Why go subliminal? That's actually your fault. You and your TiVos and your hulu.com's, and your progressive insistance to tune out traditional advertising. That's ok, I understand. I'm a consumer just like you and I can't name 3 of the possibly 50 or so ads that ran during "American Morning" while I was getting ready to go to work today. Except that Wolf Blitzer is still on tv. I got that message.

So one thing I'm looking into for next year is some environmental advertsing. There are some companys out there doing some really creative things that make you stop and look and give you a little different experience. One thing media companys have been pitching me on is bus stop ads. Interesting thought so I looked into what some other brands have done. Ikea changed a whole bus stop into an Ikea-inspired living room and Adidas turned one into the Ajax soccer team's locker room complete with brick facade and hanging jerseys. So my question to you is, "is this cool?" Would you rather see this than a print ad? Is this more impactful than a traditional ad? Too invasive?

Bike Lane Blog Note: We're going to allow one of our newest designers to co-author from time to time on this blog. The attempt is to give you, the avid reader, a little taste of what we do behind the scenes as well as give an outlet to one of the artists we employ. While it may not be as exciting as the race results from some poorly attended mountain bike race, we'll try to do our best.

Burned you good King of the Mountain Blog!

Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Banana?

"Whoever said 'orange is the new pink' was seriously disturbed." - Elle Woods, Legally Blonde

As a blogger of bicycle culture and style it is my duty, nay, my responsibility to make sure that you're riding in the forefront of bicycle fashion. With great blog, comes great responsibility. A few posts ago we talked about on-bike fashion with Momentum's Urban Legends show. Now we're going to talk about Actual on-bike fashion.
Orange is back in a big way. Take it from us, we rocked an entire District with orange accents and, yes, it looks awesome. With Halloween, the orangest of all holidays, only a few days away it seems only appropriate to give some props to the only color that shares the name of a fruit.

Enter the Trek Valenica. A baseline urban assault machine with some nice orange accents but not particularly sexy. Add a Nashville shop guy's imagination and some orange housing and look what you've got. In the words of Horatio Sanz, "No! No! Too Sexy Senor! Too Sexy!"

Think about what's hot. Orange County (Bravo's Real Housewives new season Nov.25 - don't act like you're not excited). The Syracuse Orange (Not so much in football). The House of Orange (Unstoppable in the 1670's, William III's Act of Toleration guarenteeing religious toleration to certain Protestant noncomformists was off the meat rack, son! ). Reese's Pieces (Always a classic). You love orange. 

Just don't overdue it. Anybody else feel like "salmon" is due for a resurgence?

Halloween at the Salt Mine

When you spend two years growing your hair out just so you can be a character from an awesome movie for a future Halloween, you think that you could win a silly little office costume contest. But when you don't even place and you're beaten by a guy who spent $4.99 at Jo-Anne Fabrics and $2.50 at Walgreens the night before, you've got to be ready to throw down. Today I will expose such an injustice.

Trek industrial designer, Chris Carlson, spent two years growing his hair to just the right length for the world's greatest "The Dude" costume and didn't even qualify for a "nice try anyways" award. If you don't know who "The Dude" is than I have your weekend Netflix order all ready to roll. Order "The Big Lebowski" today so that it arrives on Saturday and get your popcorn and diet sprite and unplug the phone and fill the dog's treat ball with peanut butter and put ear muffs on your kids (there's some dicey language used in the flick) lock them in the basement and tell your significant other that it's totally cool if they go out with the girls/guys as long as they don't call or come back until the movie's over. I promise you'll like it.

That being said, the judging at this year's Halloween costume contest was totally bogus. I mean, Marketing had an 80's TV Character theme going so how is anybody going to top that? Here's how the top three shook out:

1. Shane's "Punky Brewster" costume
2. Sarah's "The Baroness from GI Joe" costume
3. Travis' "Michael Knight" (from "Knightrider") costume

Now, I totally understand how these guises are all legit contenders but how can a trip to Goodwill really top 1,051,200 minutes of Cost Cutters denial in training for a costume to be worn for one day? This ranks right up there with all of the greatly hyped flops of all time: Playstation 3, Britney Spears' VMA performance, Benifer, and now Chris' "The Dude" costume. While he may have not received any corporate props, I'm here to say spot on, Chris, spot on. Had I been the one judging, you'd have been crowned champion, instead, I'm standing in line at Jo-Ann Fabrics with receipt in hand. What do you say when you're trying to return a yard of fabric? "I'm sorry ma'am but this satin was just not satiny enough to satisfy my exquisite taste of such fabrics." Man, I'm going to sound like such a jerk. Maybe I can get some store credit or something like that. What would I use with my store credit? Basket weaving kinda seems fun but who has the time anymore? I'd cross-stitch a pot holder or something like that but I can't seem to recall ordering Chinese ever really requiring such an object. Any ideas?