TH & I recently returned from Frostbike. Frostbike is an annual trade show put on by Quality Bike Products, one of our wholesalers. It’s sort of a mini Interbike, but it’s not in ‘Vegas. It’s in Bloomington, Minnesota. Minnesota is layered with a nice 20-inch coat of snow…but no snow on the roads. Minnesota snow patrol is the special forces of the transportation industry. Seattle snow patrol…the shoe bomber.
We had the first two days chuck-full with seminars. Good stuff, we learned a lot. But I felt like I was in detention. I spent friday completely indoors. That may be a first in my life! Then I found out it was like 60-degrees in Seattle & everyone had epic ride tales. I nearly smashed the tv…but then I couldn’t watch Olympic curling.
But the next day I ventured outside in the 3-degree sun to catch our shuttle to QBP. The trade show was great. Interbike is so busy, it’s really hard to talk with anyone because of time restraints & distractions. But Frostbike was great. We talked in-depth with the owner of Ridley, Jochim Aerts and he gave us a personal tour and some insight into Ridley’s future- that’s valuable stuff to us. We told him about our Super Ronde trip and we’re excited to meet up with him there. We also had dinner with Stan, of Stan’s No-Tubes tubeless tire systems. He talked a lot about tubeless tires & what he’s up to. He’s taking-on the road scene now and we are really excited about this as we have been fans of tubeless for years. He has a new road rim coming out soon. The face-to-face conversations went on all day. It was great to put faces with the names & voices. We really tightened up our relationships with our manufactures & vendors.
We wrapped things up, hopped on a plane & discussed what we extracted from the weekend. It really made our brains fire & we have some great things for you in 2010.
