New Carbon Ritte Esprit Aims to Epitomize the Modern Road Bike

That’s a lot of money for a frame that they’ve just ordered from a catalogue and painted. Better off buying a Winspace.

Hey all, a lot of assumptions being made about this bike.

I can understand some of the skepticism – for a small brand like us to take the financial risk to build bikes that are ground up engineered to our spec in our own molds is not the norm. It most definitely would have been faster, less costly, and lower risk to buy catalog frames – but it’s simply not our approach. These frames are as far from open mold as you can get – if you check out the geo chart it’s easy to pick up that there is no way to achieve these results without investing, heavily, into molds/tooling. Some pretty sizable brands aren’t even making the investments in size specific rear-ends or main tube shaping that we are, for example.

I would not expect that everyone is following along with our little brand, but for those who have, you’ll know we’ve taken quite a long time to release this frame. Developing the molds, refining the layup, and honing in the QC has been a journey – we started on these bikes almost 3 years ago and feel we’ve gotten it right. The bike is distinct in ride feel and geometry (which we worked with Tom Kellogg on as we have for all of our current model bikes) to suit what we wanted out of a modern, carbon road bike. If a catalog frame had done that, there would be no reason for us to have spent the considerable time, energy, and capital to get here.

Quality wise, we are confident in comparing these with anything else out there. We’ve been very stringent with the QC standards and tolerances – pushing for tighter tolerances than any others we’re aware of when it comes to bearing seats, brake mounts, BB cup alignment, weight variance / void tolerance, etc. We back the frames with a lifetime warranty against defects for that reason. We’ve also generally offered no hassle returns on bikes – we’ve not yet had any returned, which I take as a good sign.

At any rate, we’ve got a handful of bikes out for review and hopefully there will be some additional 3rd party thoughts on these in the near future. Tyler and crew at Bike Rumor haven’t had the chance to ride one of these yet, but we’d love to make it happen. We’d also welcome anyone in the SoCal area to ride one and see what you think (and some further afield demo opportunities soon as we work with our dealers to plan that).

If you’ve got specific question about the bike, the brand / brand history, etc feel free to reach out to us. I’m glad to chat and we are pretty transparent about what we’re doing and why.

-Elijah @ Ritte.

Seems to me like Ritte have hit a sweet spot in terms of differentiation, management commitment to product quality (kudos Elijah@ritte) and pricing. Elijah’s note alone (below) makes me want to get out and ride this beast with a nice polished credit card in my back pocket for that end of ride purchase. Seeing bike brand owners going public and beyond marketing cliches to support their products is a rare thing these days.