Trek’s Madone SLR 9 AXS Gen 8 bicycle and its paint scheme show, perhaps in the best way, the creativity, skill and devil-may-care attitude of Trek’s painting operation and its appreciation of history.
Unveiled this year in celebration of the company’s first 50 years in business, the bike’s paint scheme is filled with little graphic designs depicting Trek’s milestones through the decades.
Trek co-founder Dick Burke’s glasses-clad face with a red hat and white beard is instantly recognizable. The red barn where Trek first began crafting bicycles (and its empire) stands tall.
Beers clashing for a cheers are a nod to the Trek name being dreamed up at the Pine Knoll Supper Club; a cow nods to America’s Dairyland and even Herman the Sheep, Trek’s mascot, makes an appearance.
Located at its Waterloo headquarters, Trek’s art department is robust. It is responsible for painting all orders for its Project One custom bike program. Each Project One bike is hand painted and hand built, one by one, to fit a customer’s specifications.
In a recent blog post on the Trek website, the company wrote about Ashley Anderson, its colors/materials/finishes development manager, who has been with Trek for 15 years.
Anderson takes imagination to application, with bikes painted from a wide swatch of colors and even textures.
Trek, and Anderson, need to know paint’s interaction with carbon, how it looks under dawn or dusk and how an idea transfers from page to bike.
“None of this happens because of one person,” Anderson said in the blog. “It takes an incredible team, from R&D to validation techs to the painters in the booth, all putting in the hard work to bring these ideas to life. I help make sure it all comes together the way it should — on the bike, on the web, and in the rider’s hands.”
The paint department employs 43 people, including painters, decalers, finishers and team leads. They produce about 5,000 bikes annually. Customers can opt for a specialized bike through Project One, and then choose from a variety of bike series including the Select, Signature, Icon and Chroma.
“When we talk about Project One, it is the best of the best, it is our best platforms, it’s our best product,” said Micah Moran, Trek art director. “It’s the best parts collection, it’s the best paint, it’s the best painter.
“It’s the most elevated thing.”
Each team will customize a bike with up to 70 different colors.
The Signature custom paint bikes — which include solid colors, metallic ones, neons and more — are the most popular, of which they do around 3,500. The second most popular is the Icon scheme. In this series, bikes can have a crystalline design, where thousands of tiny crystals form to create sparkling lattices in the paint.
A paint scheme called Real Smoke uses actual fire to trap smoke in the layers of paint. These kinds of schemes make up about 500-1,000 bikes each year.
The highest end scheme is the Chroma, which creates a shimmering, heavy liquid rippling effect. About 500 are painted each year.
The easier bikes to paint, typically in the Signature series, take about three to three-and-a-half hours to complete. The Icon schemes can take up to nine hours depending on the techniques used on a bike. The Chroma takes over 10 hours to paint.
