An April 17 email from Revel Bikes’ senior management stating that the Carbondale-based company was going out of business sent shockwaves throughout the cycling world. In its roughly decade of existence, the company had become widely known for its innovative mountain-bike designs, especially with the introduction of its first carbon-fiber Revel frame in 2019. As Devin McCoy of BIKE Magazine wrote that day, “This news is saddening for the industry and larger MTB community.”
Literally at the eleventh hour, in came Adam Miller. He had founded the company in 2015, moved it to Carbondale in 2017, sold it in 2021 while staying onboard and then left in 2024. In late May, it was announced that he was buying it back.
The Sopris Sun recently sat down with Miller to see how he and the company have been doing since he reacquired it. Here are excerpts of that conversation.
The Sun: I’m guessing that these past several months have been quite a ride.
Adam Miller: That’s a good way to describe it. To say the least, I feel wildly fortunate. Since 2015, I’ve been putting all of my effort into this business. I sold the business at the end of 2021, [when] we were considered the fastest-growing mountain bike company of all time. I kept [the sale] really quiet, because not much was supposed to change. I was going to keep running the company, but we would just have private equity backing the business.
TS: But that didn’t work out so well?
AM: After a few months I realized that the private equity company and I saw things a little bit differently. They wanted to take the business in a different direction than I did, so I started working my way out of the company … and then I left the business.
TS: When did you learn that Revel would be closing?
AM: I got a call the night before. I was just floored; it was just the worst news of all time. So, then I decided to buy the company back.
TS: Since you have been back, how is the company doing?
AM: They downsized pretty excessively before they closed, and unfortunately a lot of people were let go. It took just over a month for me to go through the process of buying the business back and starting the new company. We’ve hired several people since then. Within the first month, we were cash-flow positive. It’s a different business model: we’re more direct-to-consumer focused, so we’re able to lower our prices, have a more sustainable business model; and it’s going kind of better than I could have hoped or expected.
TS: What about the Taiwan operation?
AM: We set up this Taiwan facility in 2022. Taiwan is at the heart of the bike industry. Think of Silicon Valley is where tech companies are; Taichung, Taiwan is where bike companies are. It’s a big way that we can make business in Carbondale work. Because of the expenses here, we’re able to warehouse more of our inventory over there. Because of the tariff situation, it’s the only way a bike brand can sell bikes to other countries and have any kind of reasonable pricing for those products.
TS: What about tariffs?
AM: It’s a truly atrocious method of trying to make businesses successful in this country.
(Miller then described the pre-Trump bike tariff structure, with relatively low duties on frames and somewhat higher ones on assembled bikes, which encouraged companies to assemble bikes here. The current administration has added a 20% tariff on top of those rates. Speaking for the bike industry, he commented, “Not a single company is saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to ship our manufacturing to America.’ No one is; there’s just not an option for it.”)
TS: How does that work for Revel?
AM: [It] takes a team of people in Carbondale to design and create the bikes, a few places in Asia to manufacture the products and ultimately get assembled in a few places in Asia and here in Carbondale. Most of the carbon comes from Vietnam, then assembly and components are made in Taiwan. With the current tariff structure, there’s no business model that makes sense for a bike [destined for sale outside the United States] to touch American soil. We can sell a bike to someone in Canada, and it just ships direct from Taiwan. If we didn’t have the tariff issue, it would come here to Carbondale and go to Canada. The way we’re adapting is expanding our footprint more globally and working to sell our bikes to other countries to diversify our customer base. And, unfortunately, we’ll be increasing prices, but slowly.
TS: You now have e-bikes too, right?
AM: Yeah, we just got them here three or four weeks ago, so a brand-new bike for Revel. When I started working on this in 2022, the idea was [that] we want the perfect e-bike for the Roaring Fork Valley — the bike that you could take up after work and do two laps on Ajax Mountain.
TS: What are your plans for the future?AM: We have more bike-development projects going on right now than the company has ever had. For me, personally, … I’m here for a long time … I want to build this company for the long haul and make the best possible bikes we can and share that with as many people as possible.