John and Petor took off on a whirlwind tour to visit framebuilders and manufacturers after the 2025 Bespoked UK. One of those stops was Hope Tech, and their afternoon left a lasting impression on John. Read on for what makes Hope Tech so special and why he wants to put Hope on all his bikes from here on out…
“They did it. I can’t believe they’ve done it. Vertical integration in the bike industry… under one roof.” I said to Petor after our visit to Hope at a pub down the road from the UK manufacturer. My post-Bespoked UK brain was overloaded with UK builders and tired from late nights editing and writing. As soon as I stepped into Hope’s Barnoldswick-based facility, it was like I’d inhaled a pile of smelling salts.
As with our Starling Cycles Shop Visit, Petor and I were slow-moving the morning we were supposed to show up at Hope. We’d set up a meeting with Alan Weatherill, the Sales Director of the UK manufacturer, to give us the proper tour. Hope was founded by Alan’s brother Ian and his business partner Simon Sharp. Simon sadly passed away several years ago.
Petor was excited about this prospect of hanging out with Alan, noting to me, “Growing up, working in a small bike shop, the rumor was that every day, Alan makes tea for the whole company during each of the three daily tea breaks.”
We later debunked this rumor. As we found, Alan only makes tea for his visitors at Hope. But the company takes its tea time seriously.
There are about four total in the Hope facilities. As Alan made us tea that afternoon, my mind raced through what I had just witnessed from our quick tour around the building.
Vertical Integration
When it comes to manufacturing, one of the ways in which a company can optimize efficiencies is to have as much of its manufacturing process under one roof. In doing so, it can prototype, QC, and streamline production. The roadblocks to a vertically integrated business model include overhead, or the cost of everything associated with the business, such as space, which can be expensive, and achieving streamlined production. Every bit of inefficiency adds up and can drain an operation.
In short, as this is a complex subject, a vertically integrated operation houses raw material and controls every part of the process through the final product. This is relatively unheard of in domestic manufacturing, or production that happens in the country of design origin. In the past, I’ve visited a few Taiwanese facilities that come close to vertical integration, but even those large factories outsourced many of their steps.
Hope was (almost) completely integrated, and it blew my mind.
Family Owned
Petor and I crammed our camera equipment into his wife Rosie’s station wagon and we began our drive from Manchester north to Barnoldswick, where Hope is based. The building has a presence in the small town. It was initially built in 1889 and functioned as a cotton weaving shed.
Many decades later, a high-quality printing company owned the building and went into foreclosure with the bank. At the time, Hope was in another building nearby, but Alan and his brother saw an opportunity to buy a massive 110,000 square foot facility for pence on the pound. They purchased the facility, including indoor furnishings, for around £1.5 million.
Alan walked us through the long carpeted hallway, lined with exquisite photographs of Hope products and riders or racers in iconic UK landscapes. We followed him through corridors and down a staircase to the raw materials ingest bay. Right off the bat, he shows us twenty-foot-long extrusions of aluminum and crates of forged components, which resemble simplified, rounded versions of the final products.
Component Path
“We get these extrusions made in the UK or the EU, and the forging is all done in Italy,” Alan noted. These two singular stages in the component’s lifespan would be nearly impossible to bring under one roof. Forging and extrusion facilities can be space-consuming, and while Hope is big, it’s not that big. In terms of raw material, the company keeps approximately three months’ worth of inventory for production. Its schedules are in place well into the future to ensure continuity of supply. They keep it lean and efficient.
Immediately out of the loading bays is a giant hall, lined with 47 Japanese CNC mills. Each of these machines represents a different pathway for a component to become a final product. Hope workers load the machines with the forged, raw components, and the machines run their selected programs, slowly carving out the material as a constant spray of coolant coats the observation windows.
I followed a pair of F22 flat pedals from start to finish. Once the component is completely milled, it’s degreased thoroughly and then polished using crushed walnut shells in another machine. From there, it goes into a storage rack. Random components are plucked from production and tested in the company’s in-house fatigue and destructive testing facilities.
Final Finishing
Here’s where Hope does things differently. When you order a set of pedals from a shop, someone from fulfillment walks to the rack, pulls the pedals, and takes them to the anodizing vats. The pedals are attached to the appropriate color dipping rack and anodized, all in-house.
Down the hall from the anodizing area is the laser etching room, where the final material treatment is applied. From there, it’s onto assembly, where workers press in bearings and offer one final quality control check before boxing them up and putting them in the “outgoing” table to be picked up by the postal worker. This process keeps Hope running lean in terms of raw materials and final products.
You won’t find shelves upon shelves full of boxes of final components at Hope. Alan commented, “We’re not going to anodize forty sets of orange pedals and store them. It’s impossible to predict demand.”
This procedure is carried out across every aluminum component, from Tech 4 brakes to Evo cranks. Yet Hope does more than just aluminum…
More than Aluminum
As we continued our tour through the expansive facility, Alan pointed out some more CNC machines – there are 80 total CNC machines in the Hope facilities – that had just finished up making carbon formwork. I’d forgotten entirely about Hope’s carbon components and, oh yeah, bike frames!
About fifty feet from these machines was the carbon layup room, where employees laid carbon over handlebar-shaped bladders that would be filled with glass beads, sandwiched between aluminum forms, and then cured. Alan jokingly showed us the mechanism for pushing the sand into the formwork: a plastic soda bottle. High tech indeed!
In the same room as the handlebar layup, frames and rims are also born. A stack of forms for Hope’s HB.916 160 mm enduro bike, HB.130 130 mm trail bike, and HB.T track bike lay in stasis, waiting to envelop carbon fiber material in chrysalis for a lucky customer.
Once the rims are laid up and cured, they’re off to be built into wheels on the ground floor. We continued into a prep area and a paint booth, where fresh frames hung on the wall, awaiting a clear coat.
More on this beaut to come!
Upstairs from the carbon room is the development team room, where the bikes and components are designed in 3D. In an adjacent space, next to a break room, someone was testing a prototype brake, bleeding the new model that was still hot off the press, so to speak.
Sustainability and More
Bicycles can be an inherently sustainable form of transportation, and there’s no reason the components you hang on them can’t be. Hope prides itself in creating the least amount of waste as possible. 100% of Hope’s metal scraps are recycled. Every chip of aluminum is pucked and recycled. Its products are shipped in plastic-free recycled paper goods. Singular drips of coolant are filtered for contaminants and recycled.
In colder spaces, such as the basement, air-source heat pumps are installed above the CNC machines that take the warm air coming off the machines and heat the water that runs through the radiators in the offices and assembly areas.
Even the air conditioning in the facility is built into the building’s foundations. The building was erected on top of a canal, and giant fans pull cool air from the surface of the water to circulate throughout the building.
Hope does its own laser-cutting of disc rotors, where the scrap sheets are then recycled. A robotic arm loads a pizza oven-looking heat treater behind a cage while two blokes assemble the rotors, saving every piece of unused steel in the process.
On top of the building, a large 160 kW PV cell array generates solar energy. The entire facility is lit by LED lights.
Every iota of energy is calculated for, and Hope prides itself on its sustainability and other initiatives. They sponsor a women’s racing team and offer each of the 140 employees a free bike after six months of employment. They even operate a kids’ bike program, where parents can subscribe to a service that supplies a different bike for each stage of their child’s development. More on that to come…
A Lasting Impression
Alan made Petor and me a cuppa as we began to process everything we’d just witnessed. It was a lot to take in, but the afternoon’s impact was not lost on me. As someone who has long supported manufacturers and makers, I was utterly impressed by the leaps and bounds Hope has made to ensure its people are taken care of and that its company remains sustainable and profitable.
Employees seemed genuinely stoked to see me and Petor there, even if only for the fact that the story ought to be told. Hope doesn’t make horns, so they don’t toot their accomplishments in extensive press releases. They’re operating an environmentally friendly facility, so there’s no need to greenwash their products. Making every component in-house means they take pride in what they put out into the world and back everything with warranties and refurbishment services.
When you’re this good, you don’t need marketing agencies to fatten up your product copy. The goods speak for themselves.
Hope For the Bike Industry
As Petor and I continued our pub dinner, we kept yammering about how impressive we found the facilities and people who keep them running. Hope brought me hope that the bike industry can exist more sustainably, that manufacturers can truly vertically integrate, that fewer SKUs are better for everyone involved, and that product development comes as needed, not as a means to drive consumerism with model year rollouts.
Hope knows that if they sell a customer a set of EVO cranks that last forever, they’ve done their job well and that customer will be a lifelong devotee to the marque.
I’m the sort of person who becomes a very loyal customer of the brands I respect, and after this trip, I’ll be putting more Hope on my bikes. Particularly the UK-made ones!
I wanted to thank Alan and everyone at Hope for opening the doors, stopping to say hello, and for doing what they do so damn well. The world needs hope right now, and seeing how Hope has evolved to be efficient while sticking to its roots gives me just that.
See for yourself at Hope Tech.