Project One lets you customise your own Trek Madone |
Typically if you want to buy a new bike you head to your nearest cycle retailer and pick your desired model from the selection on offer. And usually, what you see is what you get. What if you want something a little more tailored to your own tastes though? Well, you’re looking down the barrels of an expensive custom build, and here your options suddenly become a lot more limited.
Trek however is hoping to change this and has rolled out a whole new shopping process for both its brand new Madone 6 and Madone 5 ranges. Instead of having a range covering different price points as you’d normally expect, Trek is giving customers the chance to build their very own custom Madone, down to every last little detail.
How does it work? It all starts at Trek’s Project One website. The first step is to pick your starting point, where you’re presented with several options (Pro, WSD) and then you’re whisked through to the ‘lab’, which lets you specify your own build, using a very smart interactive bike builder.
Just why has Trek taken this novel approach? Andrew Griffin from Trek Bikes tells us that “Trek noticed that there were more and more consumers buying high end frames and speccing the bike’s componentry themselves. At the same time, Project One, Trek’s custom paint programme, was about to be overhauled ready for the new designs. It made sense to try to combine the custom paint with, essentially, custom spec. Once that decision was made it was then an easy progression to include the 5 series Madone frame along with the all-new 6 series. The only issue really is choosing the colours and spec – there are millions of options.”
And the available options are impressive indeed. You start with the all-important paint scheme, the jewel in the crown of Project One. Here there are nine standard paint schemes and 12 signature options, including Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong finish, an Astana team replica and, most natty of all, a flame scheme. The colours of these signature paint jobs can be tailored even more, with the specific colours chosen from a palette.
Once you’ve got your paint job sorted, safe in the knowledge that you’ll never spot another Madone exactly the same as yours, it’s onto tailoring the components you want to hang off your freshly painted frame. These extend to the groupset, where you can choose from SRAM, Shimano and Campagnolo offerings, handlebars, stem, saddle, wheels (where even the decals can be changed) bar tape colour, tyres and the headset. Even the colour of the hoods and cable housings can be tailored to your heart’s content. There’s so many options that, when we first visited, 45 minutes flew by.
Once you’ve finished and inspected your build with the zoomable preview, you then send the details to your favoured or nearest Trek dealer, who will take care of building it up for you. It’s here that the next and final stage of your custom Trek takes place. The size of the frame is chosen through a fitting session, and such things as the handlebar width, stem length and saddle height can be setup. To get the right fit the type of riding you’ll be doing will be taken into account to ensure your bike now only looks great, but fits great too.
Trek quote a turnaround of seven days. Expect to wait a little longer if you opt for a signature paint scheme.
Once you’ve built your dream bike, you can send the spec to your nearest Trek dealer |
This is exciting stuff from Trek, and though we experienced some slowness from the site, a little bit of perseverance saw us creating our very own custom Trek Madone 6 to a spec that we were happy with. The list of options and items that you can change is pretty exhaustive. We certainly weren’t left wanting and were pleased with the bike we ended up at. There’s loads of scope for building a bike the likes of which you’ll never see on the roads, which seems reason enough to go through the process rather than simply walk into the dealer and buy off the shelf.
