Text: Steve Shapiro. Article from the August 2012 issue of Ride Magazine.

Meet the unassuming man from Port Elizabeth who makes mass-produced bikes with a boutique sensibility.

From backyard workshops in the rural US to secret factories in the Canadian Rockies, historic and cavernous English plants, old-fashioned craftsmen with dirty fingernails in European principalities and even (until comparatively recently) small, dedicated South African welding shops; mountainbike development has been accompanied by exotic or romantic associations since its origins.

South Africa has designers and product managers who have their fingers on the Asian production pulse and they are tailoring their bikes for you. In the last couple of years, Victor Momsen has probably been the most conspicuous of these: he’s up against the biggest of the big boys who benefit from economies of scale but he knows the terrain, he knows the sport, and he knows the Taiwanese industry because he moved there in his teens and worked in a bicycle factory. The most important reward, he says, is in the time-tested relationships (much more than connections) that he established on that island hub of today’s bicycling world. “Relationships mean that when things go wrong there are people to bounce things off, people to share new ideas and technology with. Anyone can access carbon-fibre frames on the Internet – but who makes the best carbon, frames? And who is pushing the boundaries of that technology? It takes know-how and relationships to give you those insights.”

Today South Africa, tomorrow the world – although that tomorrow may still be a few years off, it is a real prospect with still-secret Momsen niche initiatives that I have been told of and which, I’ll bet, will make big waves – even tsunamis – worldwide, when they become public. But, right now, he is  designing and producing for us.

Anyone can access carbon fibre frames on the Internet – but who makes the best ones, and who is pushing the boundaries of that technology?

29ER Pioneer

Although small in physical stature, Momsen is a 29er man. He recently produced an experimental, über-small, women-specific big-wheeler which blew the critics away with its 26er-type singletrack handling and, finally put to rest the myth which, mysteriously, wished to keep shorties away from the luxurious benefits of bigger wheels. “I’m short,” Momsen concedes. “How can I sell a bike I can’t ride?” And he rides whenever he can balance it with his energetic workload. He also, mischievously, notes that the big boss of the boutique Niner big-wheel brand “is a short, short guy’.’

So, one of our own, Victor Momsen, has taken on the challenge that belies his modest physical presence, to push hard for smaller frames in the genre. “Twenty-niners are here to stay” is his (surely indisputable) claim. “In the beginning they were a niche and very different to what they are today. One of the exciting things is that there are no rules, even if, in terms of geometry, they are starting to be formed.” Twenty-sixers had rules and if you didn’t follow them, “you’d get a big X next to your name and everyone would say the bike rides like crap!” Whether this was true or not was not the issue. “The point is that the numbers are outside the rule book.”

So far, with 29ers, Momsen says, “We’re all playing.”

One of the girls

He gave me an utterly fascinating and informative, part-for-part, description of the tiny, test 29er: the new-age but utterly rational geometry; the intricacies of the fork dilemma that this presented, and the South African product manager’s challenges and solutions in terms of cost and marketing – the potentially bankrupting or success-guaranteeing world of deal-breakers. I learned more theory in an hour with the Port Elizabeth-based dynamo than in 23 years of MTB involvement.

Where will this experimental, extra-small, women-specific exercise go in terms of men’s bikes? He says a small Momsen is already very small. ‘A lot of brands do only medium, large and extra large but we have embraced the smaller frame and do a small – do we go to the extra small? I don’t know yet.” He is pretty sure that other brands will be going small in their 2013 designs and he has big ideas for big and small bikes for that range. “We’re going to try to stretch the sizing; we’ll go deeper and we’ll also go higher for this range, which will manifest just before the end of the 2012 calendar year.”

He is undecided about the applicability of the 650b wheel to South African conditions.

Big plans

“My challenge as a South African brand is to make something different.” He competes, he acknowledges, with the big international brands but to make the same bike and just spec it differently is “a pointless exercise’.

“We’ve got to spec differently and look different and that is what will keep us in the market.”

I wondered how he was able to compete with the massive buying power of the international corporations and still be so price competitive and, while he wouldn’t be drawn into the nitty-gritty, he referred to his brand’s value: “If you go, part for part, with our R26500 carbon 29er you will see that the value is there.” But he’s not giving anything away, it’s a business and “we want the seed to grow and we want to go international in a few years’ time. We’re not a hit-and-miss exercise. A lot of brands in our market have come and gone and we don’t want to be one of them.”

When Momsen takes on the international market, he says, his company will have to follow the rules and he wants to be ready for that. In the meantime, the focus remains on home turf with great support from dealers and, quite spectacularly in recent months, the success of Momsen teams in domestic racing and the Absa Cape Epic.

Race tested

In the recent Epic, Team FedGroup – ITEC Connect of Jacques Rossouw and Brandon Stewart finished in 10th place overall in the GC, claiming a solid third place in the Absa African Category. Robert Sim and Nico Pfitzenmaier made up Team Robert Daniel Momsen. This pair matched the top-20 overall pace and claimed four stage victories in the very competitive Telkom business Masters category before a high-speed crash forced Pfitzenmaier to retire from the race with 20 stitches to his knee, while Sim continued as an Outcast, keeping up with the race, but forbidden to influence the outcome.

“It is very important to me to keep that racing edge,” says Momsen. On the strength of this high-level showing, key 2012 models – dubbed the Racing Type AL529, SL729 and SL929 – have all seen a mid-year upgrade based on feedback from racers, dealers and general consumers.

Niche markets are clearly the way to go, first domestically and, in time, internationally. There are, I can assure readers without divulging any secrets, big developments in the pipeline with co-operation from major, world-acknowledged, industry celebrities from South Africa.

It starts with an ‘M’

Whatever and whoever, the bikes will be Momsens. “There have been a lot of comments about the brand name but the explanation is very simple: these days, to register a name is close to impossible. The name doesn’t sound bad and it belongs to me.” It is also what drives him and means that he has to take responsibility for what he does. “With my name on the downtube and on the handlebars I have a duty to myself to do the best I can.” He wants his bikes to be immediately identifiable. “And in our game it is very difficult because there are a lot of look-alikes.” He concedes that there are industry leaders that everybody follows and that the challenge here is not to go too left-field but to follow the 80/20 rule.

“We will continue doing niches for the South African market and, in spite of high shipping costs and being a little removed from the rest of the world, it has become very exciting because all of a sudden we’re on the map.” (He was referring to the UCI World Cup and the Absa Cape Epic). “The whole world was here; the whole world was watching South Africa and our South African fraternity. These are unbelievable and exciting times to be a South African brand, based in South Africa and wanting to go international.”

The man has passion, and it started in the late ’90s when he was very young. From Taiwan, he brought back experience and even more passion. At first he applied himself as a production manager at Probike in the heydays of the Raleigh brand. “We were the South African benchmark and we raised the bar and created the platform for me to do what I’m doing now,” he observes.

And, okay, he’s also playing. I have one of a few very experimental steel frames for singlespeed application that came out of this indulgence. It may never go into production, but it is my favourite bike. Victor Momsen’s own play – regular single-track sessions in his childhood playground (Port Elizabeth’s Baakens Valley) or heading off to the Harkerville forest tracks near Knysna (a short 2,5-hour drive from his home) – can hardly be shrugged off as dilettante self-indulgence. “I could ride my bike all day long, but then we’re not going to have bicycles to sell so it’s a compromise at best. I love bicycles and I’ve promised myself that as soon as I don’t get excited when I see the new 2015 this-and-that, then that is the day I’m done.”