Don’t Buy What You Don’t Need!

Here at Rene Herse Cycles, we don’t want to sell you what you don’t need! Our mission is to create tires, components and accessories that enhance your cycling experience. We’re confident we offer things that you, our customers, find valuable. There’s no need to try and sell you things you don’t need. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

We’ve all been there: We need a small part, but it’s only available as part of a complete set. Or a component is rebuildable in theory, but in practice you can’t get the spares you need to do so. We’ve been there, and we don’t like it! That’s why we offer spare parts for almost everything we sell.

In the unlikely event that a crankarm gets damaged in a crash, there’s no need to buy a new crankset: We offer individual arms at reasonable prices.

If you crack a fender, you can get a spare set of blades—no need to buy all the hardware again. Conversely, if you need an additional fender stay for a special installation, or if you lost a stay eyebolt, we also offer those separately.

For our popular NUDA carbon pumps, you can get the o-ring that seals the pump against the valve as a spare part. Our supplier was surprised when we asked for extra o-rings. It’s true that the o-rings rarely wear out, but it can happen. And we don’t want you to junk a perfectly good pump just because the o-ring has been abraded by valve stems with sharp threads.

We also encourage you to patch your tubes. We offer patch kits for TPU and butyl tubes. The TPU patches allow you to keep using your Rene Herse TPU tubes almost forever. Rather than sell you replacement tubes, we figure you’ll instead convert the other bikes in your stable once you’ve experienced the superior speed and ride feel of TPU tubes. (And if you don’t, that’s OK, too.)

If you’re running butyl tubes, we continue to support you with tubes and patch kits. In fact, we even offer patches separately—because a tube of vulcanizing fluid is good for many more patches than what’s included in the patch kit. We also offer pre-glued butyl patches for on-the-road repairs. Just because we love TPU tubes doesn’t mean we stop to support butyl (and tubeless, too, of course).

Disc rotor covers are almost essential when you’re traveling. They protect your rotors from contamination and your bike frame from scratches (or worse). The ones we used to sell were blue. Brake dust could discolor them over time, so we’ve worked with Ostrich in Japan to make a special black version, just for Rene Herse. Because your equipment should look good for as long as possible.

Planned obsolescence is a hidden way of selling you more than you’d buy otherwise. Older riders will remember when 9-speed cassettes were introduced. Back then, it was an open secret that the industry was already working on 10-speed. And then 11-speed, 12-speed, and now 13-speed. Cramming another cog into the rear cassette isn’t rocket science, but dribbling out these ‘improvements’ over time illustrates a golden rule of product design: Always leave room for future upgrades.

That may also be the reason why modern cranks have replaced classic five-arm spiders with four arms, even though three arms are all you need to transmit torque and power, and keep the chainrings from wobbling. You don’t have to be a genius to predict a switch to three-arm cranks—for even greater weight savings—at some point in the future…

That’s not how we do things. Any component we introduce is as good as we can make it. We don’t leave room for future upgrades. Once we realized that three arms are sufficient, that’s what we offered, right from the start. You can buy our components with confidence, knowing that they won’t become obsolete as soon as we introduce a ‘new-and-improved’ version.

And when things change, we make our parts forward- and backward-compatible. Even our first cranks, introduced 15 years ago, can be converted to 12-speed. Just swap in a new big ring. We’ve designed our 12-speed rings with a little offset, so they reduce the spacing between the chainrings for the narrower chain without requiring a new crankarm. And the ramps and pins line up with the teeth of our existing small rings, so you don’t have to replace your small ring when you upgrade your cranks.

Or you can convert your cranks to a One-By—just change the big ring and replace the small ring with our smart One-By Chainring Spacers. And if, at some point in the future, you’ll want to run a triple for whatever reason, that’s an easy swap again. And of course we’ll be offering chainrings for all those cranks, too. (Try finding replacement rings for a 2011 crankset from a big maker!)

There’s another way many companies try to sell us buy things we don’t need: Most subscriptions have gone to auto-pay in recent years. Once a year, our credit cards get charged automatically. If you’re like me, you tend to forget about canceling subscriptions you don’t want or need any longer. Before you know it, you’ve paid for another year…

That’s not how we do Bicycle Quarterly subscriptions. We charge you only once. When you’ve received your four editions and your subscription is up, we send you a renewal notice. Then it’s up to you to decide whether you want to re-up for another year.

What it comes down to is confidence that we offer something our customers find valuable. That’s also why we don’t send reminders if you’ve left something in your shopping basket. We know that, if you need it, you’ll come back. And if you don’t need it, we’d rather you don’t buy it. We know that you’ll instead come back when you need something we offer.

More Information:

• Spare parts in the Rene Herse program.
• Click on the images for more information about the products.