Rycyclable

Rene Herse

Rene Herse is a Seattle based tire company. Almost all of their tires have fun Cascadia names, like Steilacoom or Humptulips. Sounds great, why would I, a guy perpetually stuck in Seattle, have an issue with that? Oh, let me count you the ways ~~~~

  1. They don’t make their tires. They own the IP for their tires, which dictates the compounds, building techniques, tread patterns and names for their tires but they contract out the actual manufacturing of their tires. Functionally their tires roll almost identically to Panaracer Gravel King tires. Why those? Cause panaracer actually makes Rene Herse tires, and Gravel Kings are basically their “store brand” versions of Rene Herse tires. Like other store brand products, you get the same thing for half the cost because there’s no IP markup. This isnt to say that Gravel Kings are cheap. New gravel kings run roughly $60 per tire new. But the Rene Herse equivalent with cost you fucking $100 per tire. Insane. So no, they are not a tire company, they are an intellectual property company and should be treated as such. See that quote above? Cycling weekly is their own

  1. They also make (design, contract out) their own bike parts. Most people don’t think of them as a component company, but they technically do sell Rene Herse branded components. Brakes, derailers, shifters, cranksets, headsets, stems, handlebars, even frames sometimes. Here’s the thing though. They don’t make parts for you and me. They don’t even make parts for racers. They make parts for bikes from the 1920s-1940s. They do this, they say, to preserve old bikes. But here’s the thing: I don’t fucking believe them. How many bikes from that era still exist? hundreds? thousands? And it’s not like every bike from this era uses the same standards, Rene Herse chose very specific stands they want to keep alive to be as obtuse as possible. To be clear, almost everything that Rene Herse sells that isn’t tires or cranks is not compatible with 99.999% of bikes on the road. So they ALSO sell you the custom braze ons you would need to make your bike compatible with their parts. Every few years they even sell their own full bikes, which are literally incompatible with any parts they don’t sell. And how much do they sell for? Their derailer costs fucking $900. Want to shift the derailer? Oh sorry, well the shifter is also proprietary and will cost another $250. Downtube shifting only. Go fuck yourself. With prices like that, their full bikes must cost 4-5 grand, right? What?? Don’t be silly. $14,000. For a bicycle. And they only make them in limited runs, which you have to send in an APPLICATION to get a chance to buy the fucking bike. Which is, again, completely incompatible with anything made after 1970. You are not resurrecting a dead standard at that point, you are just locking style obsessed whales into paying you exorbitant prices for a worse product that only you can fix in the future.

  2. Which brings me to my last point. Rene Herse, and especially their leader Jan Heine, style themselves off of early 19th century french “constructeurs”. This is grade A, thermonuclear, superconductive horse shit. Their entire existence spits in the face of everything “constructeurs” stood for.

So, backstory time, who were the “constructeurs”? They were custom bike makers in France in the early 20th century. Notice I didn’t say bike frame makers. Making a bike frame from scratch is no small task (trust me). You need all sorts of tooling, jigs, and a great source for steel tubing. Not to mention, you know, being a professional welder/brazer. It is a hyper-specific, high skill task that normally needs the backing of an entire company to get done. People doing it in their garage are true artisans, in every sense

Constructeurs took it a step further. They didn’t just make the frame, but damn near every component on the bike. I’m talking custom, hand made brakes, racks, stems, handlebars, the works. These are not just artists, these were bicycle mad scientists. Every part of the bike is made with their own personal touch and ideas. And guess what? These people still exist. Pictured below is a bike made by Ryan Chapman. Scroll through his website sometime and you’ll see nothing but passion, sweat, and good style poured all over these bikes. He seems to be willing to go as custom as his clients are willing to pay for, and he cranks (haha) at least one of these out at a month. This is a master of his trade. A modern DiVinci.

So, how does Jan Heine honor the artists he jacked his company’s style from? He patents it, pays other people a cut to mass produce it, and sells it for criminally high prices. He caught lightning in a bottle and sold it to some rich suckers who don’t realize that lightning cant fucking survive in a bottle. And worst of all, he made all of it only compatible with his ecosystem of parts. Chapman’s bike, pictured above, is able to accomplish everything and more that Jan’s bikes can do, while still being compatible with normal standard bike parts, and costing less than $6000. Oh and they are ACTUAL constructeur bikes, Jan, made in his garage and not in a factory in Taiwan. You slimy capitalist piece of shit (To be fair, however, Ryan Chapman still puts Rene Herse tires on a lot of his bikes so I doubt he’s as mad about it as I am, bro is really staying in his lane and thriving).

If you like the style of contructeur bikes but $6k still sounds ridiculous to you (it is) you should just check out Velo Orange or Nitto and their bike parts. They are guilty of a lot of the same stuff Rene Herse is, but at least their parts fit on normal bikes, are actually useful/well made, and cost normal amounts of money.