Crisp Titanium

 
Texas may now be known for cycling thanks to disgraced Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong and his Mellow Johnny bike shop, but when Darren Crisp was growing up there being a cyclist marked him as some kind of freak. He tells tales of having bottles and cans thrown at him when he went out riding and even of having locals taking pot shots at him for the simple reason he was on a bicycle. For most people that would be reason enough to move away, but Darren left the US to go to Italy because of his career choice; the fact that a move to Italy enabled him to immerse himself in cycling culture was simply a secondary benefit.
 

 
The work Darren was doing when he moved to Italy was architectural design for retail construction, which entailed him building the fittings for high-end retail stores for the likes of Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada. Fortunately, this meant that he spent his days welding stainless steel, titanium, and various other high-end metals. He says of this time, “I was working on $90 million stores and that meant the company I was working for was happy to invest in all of the latest technology. I was really able to hone my metal working skills through my day job.”
 
While Darren had been a hobby frame builder for many years, having built his first frame back in ’95 using True Temper steel tubes and Henry James lugs, with photocopied pages of Talbot’s frame building book as his guide and a sheet of plywood used as a build table, it was the New York terror attacks of 9/11 that, by a strange turn of events, gave him the option to first try titanium frame building.
 

 
Despite living in Italy at the time of the attack, Darren was in New York for a project to deliver a new store for Prada, but the ensuing security lockdown meant all work stopped. With time on his hands he attended a titanium frame building course at the United Bike Institute (UBI), tutored by US titanium frame building specialists Mike DeSalvo and Jim Kish.
 
“Up until that time I didn’t really know what defined a custom titanium frame, what it meant to build one for someone else’s use where you have to take in multiple considerations, whether that be structural considerations, or marketing considerations, product liability, and on and on… that I’d never really thought about,” says Darren about the beginnings of his move to full-time frame building that began with his attending the UBI course.
 
He continues saying, “When I decided to make the transition to frame building full-time it was really simple, despite going from a fully equipped fabrication shop to just using hand tools. One of the restrictions of the job I was doing was, with it being such a large scale operation, I would get lost in the process as more and more people got involved. My creativity was getting lost, with frame building it is the opposite.”
 
“The work that I am now doing, is how do I make a ti bicycle frame stand out where the casual observer might notice there is something special going on, but not because of flashy paint jobs or stickers? I want there to be a characteristic that is intrinsic, and if you look at my frames it is basically the work I did for 15 years in architectural design making simple shapes as elegant as possible and with very clean lines and edges.”
 

 
The ‘special something’ that Darren talks about was easy for him to create when he began building full-time, as at that point he had the time available to really get to understand what each customer wanted from their Crisp Titanium frame. The ordering process would include not only going for a ride with Darren, but often joining him for dinner too, all of which gave ample opportunities to discuss bike fit and handling requirements.
 
However, today with an 80 bike wait list the design process has had to be streamlined. Yet Darren still manages to maintain contact with customers on his wait list as he explains, “A bike is just a bike, it is everything else that happens before I start the build that makes the experience fulfilling for my customers as well as for me. I can’t make people wait just because it is a Crisp frame, because after all it’s just a bike frame and I could name you 20 people who could build a ti frame; but at the end of the day it is about my finding a common philosophy with my customers and friends and giving them something that gives them joy when they ride it. Something that they can connect with.”
 

 

[rps-include blog=127.0.0.1 post=30120]