Go Behind the Scenes of Our Manufacturing Evolution

ALLIED began a dream eight years ago: to make the best bikes in the world, right here at home. We've made huge strides in those years, moving from a small, custom road frame builder to producing best-in-class off-road products that climb the podium of the LifeTime Grand Prix, and making our debut in World Cup XCO racing with former World Champion Kate Courtney.

However, to continue to push the dream and give our customers the best ALLIED experience, we’ve decided to shift some production overseas and partner with trusted and established manufacturers in Asia.

To be transparent about our journey to grow in 2025 and beyond, Drew Medlock (CEO) and Sam Pickman (Director of Product and Engineering) of Allied Cycle Works wanted to share an in-depth look at our current state of production, our manufacturing evolution, and how combining our efforts overseas with those of the team we've built at home is an exciting way forward.

OUR MADE HERE ORIGINS

Making the world's best bikes is what drives us. Initially, we rooted that mission statement in ideating, developing, and producing every part of the bike right here at home. This process worked well as an emerging brand and gave us an incredibly keen understanding of the entire manufacturing process, from raw materials to placing our custom bikes in the hands of the riders.

We also spent years testing competitor products, gaining a lot of knowledge about that over eight years as well: how other bike brands develop the bikes they do and what quality they achieve from their processes.

Point blank, we found that some bikes created by established and trusted overseas manufacturers that our competitors use were regularly hitting the same quality, if not even better than we were. Plus, the volume of products they could produce vastly outpaced our own. That started to raise questions of how we could scale up to grow ALLIED as a competitive brand and maintain our high-performance standards.

PARTNERING FOR PROGRESS

We really contemplated. We were aware of all the work our team had done to get ALLIED here and create bikes that dominated in races like they did. But then we also had to look at the less fun parts of our business, which were low inventory of bikes, long lead times for customers on warranty replacements, and a manufacturing queue that slowed our ability to bring all these cool new prototypes to the market. Essentially, we'd hit a production ceiling at our Bentonville factory.

We asked ourselves if scaling up in-house was feasible. We found that getting to where we need to be from a manufacturing perspective would be a mountain of work and an incredibly expensive undertaking. We realized that to continue to grow, we needed partners.

Our partnered manufacturers in Asia have a truly impressive and professional process that they've refined for over 20 years, and our quality targets are the same: world-class. And already our partnership has put winners on podiums. Our BC40 mountain bike frame, ridden by Kate Courtney, and our new ABLE gravel bike frame are both produced overseas—as are more bikes and components we can't tell you about just yet.

CREATING THE RIDE

Here's how your bike comes to life. The initial concept and prototype creation begins in our Bentonville factory. For new ideas, we can machine all the parts, cut and cure all the carbon, paint, spec, and build it here at home. Then, we test everything with our professional riders on our local roads and trails, putting it through the wringer to discover the best design and setup. We don't stop until we're beyond stoked about what we've made. Then, we incorporate those new ideas into final designs that we pass to our partners in Asia working with them to meet our exact high-performance standards. Sometimes, they even come back with design improvements we didn't even know were possible (a benefit from over 20 years of working with carbon).

Once we receive the frame from them, our Bentonville factory team runs it through an extensive quality check, examining the smallest details to ensure everything is perfect. Then, we paint (or custom paint) and build it to the customer's specs before it's ready to ride.

IMPROVED TIMELINES FOR EVERYONE

What used to take ten weeks to build a frame in-house is now significantly shorter. And we can place orders on a much larger scale than we could have produced on our own before. We'll simply have the stock in hand needed to meet our riders' demands.

It's a massive benefit to be able to get that new bike sooner, or get back riding quickly after placing a warranty claim.  

Freeing up our production team at home also means they'll get to do more of what makes ALLIED great: designing and testing badass, innovative bikes and components. And Sam and his team have loads of new products we're prototyping and getting ready to place into production later this year and in 2026.

WHERE WHAT'S BEING MADE

Currently, the carbon layup for BC40, the new ABLE, and various small components are being produced in Asia. But our Bentonville team is busy doing frame quality control checks, finishing work, paint, assembly and producing aluminum parts like the ST03 and DUET stem.

MADE HERE IS STILL A CORE VALUE

Bentonville is still very much ALLIED's heart, and a MADE HERE philosophy is at our core. We're fully invested in our team at home to develop and deliver the world class bikes and components built and painted for the unique needs of each rider.