Part 2 ” Pass me a cry towel ”
Believe me when we decided 2 years ago, as we started seeing carbon pushing high end aluminum down stream, my first goal was to produce it in the USA. My good friend Jason from then ENVE and I thought we could do it and what a great story that would be for both of us. 6 months later the hard facts as our made in America Carbon frame would have to retail for $1000.00 more than the competition to cover the costs of the middle man doing the manufacturing.The decision was made based on the domestic trends and new buying habits that this would not work.
It would work if we produced it ourselves in our factory as we do with our high end aluminum but we had $ invested years into building our facility to produce aluminum and the casts to tool up for Carbon well forget it.
I decided to try an lobby for any programs avil to help us capitalize such a venture and set up a production cell for producing Carbon frames in our factory. Remember my brain says build not buy , but thats another story.I started local , chamber of commerce, county EDC, State , Federal, pretty much a waste of time for small companies our size. My wife & I even sent several letters explaining our dream & situation to President Obama, very frustrating not getting a response not even from an intern, time for the cry towel.
During all this we had decided we could make our aluminum factory work if it could become more efficient and started to introduced LEAN manufacturing principals
to improve capacity , QC, overhead etc. and this has been working well and is a process of constant improvement. We have started seeing the fruits of this direction and as stated earlier our Aluminum $ MSRP’s are in line or better than most in our class.

Stay tuned for Part 3

Part 1  ”My soap box”
Move over for my soap box!! I could talk this subject till black & blue for days and believe me it is from first hand experience. I have from day one and till this day always been a very hands on guy, basically I build stuff, designer / artist / craftsman type, with my hands.
I have hung on to this ideal to the bare end of our existence but there is a point when you have to buck up and do what currently works or risk losing it all. Carbon frames has been a huge step for a small under financed company like Intense especially when you have a shop full of HASS cnc machines & 35 employees & other local businesses we support in our community set up to produce High End aluminum frames.The overhead alone to support that structure in California / USA alone is challenging let alone the $ costs of developing proprietary Carbon frames off shore and we have stepped up to making both work.
Please blame it on the Big guys , Spec , Trek etc. as they have pollerized the small boutique
companies out of this Carbon trend , just as in road we now see Carbon taking over the high end moving up the segments from XC to Trail , AM even DH, the costs alone to do carbon are challenging to say the least but yes we must evolve or die so here we are doing our best. Just as aluminum displaced Chromo steel some 20+ years ago , overnight , and if you didn’t jump on the band wagon you where left in the dust to become smaller more niche, many are facing this same situation today.We are doing our best to add as much value on the new carbon frames here at our factory so we are just purchasing front & rears from Asia and manufacturing all the alloy parts, assembly, Fox shock etc. even the box is made down the street and you will see the Carbine MSRP is in line with the market.
If you check our made in USA in our factory alloy frame $ MSRP’s you will see we have remained very price competitive and some cases actually cheaper than others asian made frames with lesser suspension tech .
There is a movement in manufacturing these days as global economies crumble that you source where your manufacturing is and you manufacture where your customer is , so maybe our day is ahead of us if we can stick it out.