Trek Bikes: Spinning Gears
Project One is just one tooth on the Trek cog. “We’re doing everything from the silk screen supplementation on textiles for team uniforms to a ton of web interactive stuff,” says Lynn. “We’ve got four dedicated product graphics designers. They’re doing colors and graphics on all the different bike brands, as well as aftermarket products. In total we’ve got about 15 designers on board to do all the design work. We run a very lean organization and it’s a lot of work. Performance, reliability and flexibility are very important to us. That’s why we run every creative aspect of this organization on Macs.”
Every designer on the team sports a single 17-inch MacBook Pro linked to a network. Their main tools are Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but the team often has to crack open 3D documents from the engineering team. To do it, Lynn runs Parallels and Microsoft Windows. “I used to have a PC desktop box sitting under my machine, just for 3D stuff,” he says. “I’d have to fire up the PC, make translations, spend a bunch of time getting the files into a form that could work on the Mac. Now I run Parallels and a program called Rhinoceros in Windows. It’s the can opener of the 3D world. I can open a bunch of different files from our engineering group and save them to my MacBook Pro.”
That ability to multitask allows the Trek team to power through a variety of design projects without any snags. “The machines have been very solid for us,” says Lynn. “The machines allow us to run multiple applications at the same time. We’re doing a variety of different things — we’re working in Illustrator and Photoshop simultaneously. We’re playing music. We’re keeping in touch with chat and email. We’ve come to expect multitasking. It’s an extension of our lifestyles and the Macs are designed to work that way.”
Broad Branding
The team at Trek doesn’t just have to deal with multiple applications and formats. It has to deal with multiple brands. Trek owns Klein, LeMond and Gary Fisher, three big names in bikes. Each brand has a unique identity and its own team. “We segregate the designers by brand,” says Lynn. “There are certain development processes we share — like paint colors — but beyond that, we’re on our own. My graphic work on the Gary Fisher and LeMond brands is going to be very different from the Trek designers’ work. We may look over each others’ shoulders from time to time, but we treat these brands as separate entities.”
And the differences go deeper than just graphics. “The product managers for the brands are different individuals,” says Deubel. “The industrial design and engineering teams are split up to focus on specific brands. That stems from being true to the brand. With Gary Fisher, we go back and remember our roots with the brand, we incorporate his mountain biking experience into the bikes.”
The goal, says Lynn, is to create graphics that will captivate a large audience of consumers. “The Trek brand is a powerful brand that has a broad appeal,” he says. “We stay current with our aesthetics. We look at a lot of different sources of inspiration when we’re coming up with the graphics for our products and we appeal to a pretty large base of people. That’s not easy to do.”
Customer Connections
The Trek team wants to connect with even more people in the future. To do it, they’ll use a combination of interactive web portals and podcasts. “We got our feel wet last year with some podcasts during the Tour de France,” says Deubel. “We used Bob Roll from the Outdoor Life Network.” Roll covered the race in his signature humor and enthusiasm. “We got a lot of great feedback from that series, but we’d like to expand on the idea,” says Deubel. That means adding video podcasts and streaming QuickTime clips to the Trek websites. Deubel envisions behind-the-scenes videos from the Trek factory, training videos from Trek-sponsored cyclists and even home videos from dedicated customers.
“Trek is part of our customers’ lives,” says Deubel. “We want to listen, we want to hear it. We want to support that dialog and it’s going to be video based, blog based, photo based and Internet based. We’re using freelance videographers at races and test rides and for behind the scenes stuff and research projects. We’re capturing a lot of high-definition video and we’ll be doing everything exclusively on the Mac using Final Cut. We’ll keep moving in that direction, otherwise we’ll be left behind.”
Adding video content won’t require a major equipment investment either. “Apple provides us with a platform to work with that kind of media,” says Lynn. “It allows us deliver those kinds of messages, to have those dialogs with our customers and that’s very important to us.”