Cyclist
Magic of metal: Behind the scenes at Mason
‘Do feel free to rein me in or just tell me to shut up,’ says Dom Mason, founder of Mason Progressive Cycles. ‘I’m not known for being concise.’
We’re strolling around the renovated barn and outbuildings of the brand’s Sussex HQ, just on the edge of the South Downs. The buildings are some 400 years old but have been upcycled and outfitted to serve as a base for Mason and his team. Their flint-stone walls and exposed beams house Apple Macs and trendy decor inspired by Mason’s interests: snowboarding, skateboarding, music and, of course, bikes of every genre. The tasteful clash of modernity and tradition is a fitting metaphor for Mason’s own bikes, which are designed and assembled on site.
‘I trained as an engineer, worked in agricultural engineering and ended up teaching the subject,’ Mason says. ‘But my life, and my brother’s, has always revolved around bikes. He started the dirt jump bike brand DMR, which led to him being offered the UK distribution of Kinesis forks, which back in 2000 was making carbon forks for Specialized. By this point I’d had enough of teaching, so he said to come and sell these forks for him.
‘Carbon forks back then were pretty exotic, but the first thing I realised was that it was bloody hard to sell them on their own, so I said, “Let’s design a frame to go with them.” Kinesis at that time was making loads for other people. I chose the tubes, came up with road geometry and got the frames made so we could sell the frameset, which would go more easily. If I look back at that frame now… goodness me, it was awful. But that’s what got me started in bike design.’
Mason then spent the next 15 years at Kinesis honing his craft. ‘My engineering background came in handy. I understood the “why” behind good and bad designs, which streamlined the iterative process hugely.’
He struck out on his own by founding Mason in 2015. ‘I’d learned so much but I wanted to apply it exactly in the way I wanted to. I’d kidded myself that Kinesis was mine, but it never was, so I wanted my own thing because towards the end at Kinesis I got divorced from the production process when I wanted to be in the thick of it.
‘Some inheritance money from my dad gave me the capital I needed to start Mason. Julie, my wife and Mason co-founder, said, “Great, we can use that money for a new kitchen.” I said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think I want us to start a bike brand.”’
Family matters
Mason has been a family company from the start, and remains by design a small and close-knit team. The ease and comfort each member has in the company of the others is evident, and Mason is treated like brother rather than boss. It helps that Julie is still around to keep him in check.
‘Mason started as Julie and me, plus our two sons, sat around the kitchen table sorting parts, with frame boxes in the front room. Seb, our eldest, stuck the first head badge onto a Mason frame,’ says Mason. ‘There are definite advantages to this setup. I can design a bike but accountancy is not my strong point. Basically I can’t do maths. Julie is so good with all that stuff, patiently working things out where I would get stressed. Without that, we wouldn’t be where we are today. The other side of that coin is that it’s hard to switch off and we often bring work home with us.’
Going against the grain
When the brand’s development is considered, that work ethic has been no bad thing. It all kicked off thanks to a perfect storm of timing, circumstance and – although he’s reticent to claim it – no little vision from Mason himself. His approach now treads a line between custom artisan and mass-production. His bikes are batch-made in Italy and assembled to order in the UK.
‘Over a couple of decades I watched carbon fibre take over and Taiwan take work away from Italy, which used to be the world’s production powerhouse for metal frames. To be honest, carbon bores me. It’s not possible to work with it closely enough, with production being so far away. Metal frames, being made by masters in Italy, let me get hands-on in the way I wanted to again. Plus, from my work at Kinesis I knew their potential to be competitive with carbon frames hadn’t gone away.’
Mason reached out to established Italian makers, but persuaded them to incorporate features from modern carbon bikes such as oversize bottom brackets, tapered head tubes, internal routing, thru-axles and disc brakes – progressive features at the time, hence the brand’s name.
‘Traditional, highly skilled makers in Italy, using modern components and tech, building in small batches with high-end tubing, just felt like a magic mix for me. I work with several makers as I wanted the best for each metal we build in, plus the best painter.’
All roads, all over
Mason’s first two bikes were the Definition and Resolution. Made from aluminium and steel respectively, they are best described as ‘all-road’ bikes, although they were around long before that term was coined. Mason’s friend, ultra-endurance racer Josh Ibbet, helped refine the bikes.
‘He said he was going to do this race that was just coming onto the fringes of consciousness back then, a little thing called the TCR [Transcontinental Race],’ says Mason. ‘He did it the previous year but wanted to do it again because his bike let him down. He asked for a bike. I was like, “Blimey, give someone a bike? Can we afford it?” But we gave him a Definition and he won the TCR that year. It was just more evidence that this “fast far” thing was our niche.’
Mason says that kickstarted a fruitful development channel, which fed into his own ideas.
‘I’d get calls from Josh in the middle of races. “Dom, I’m in the Pyrenees and my rims keep hitting rocks, I need bigger tyres.” I’d noticed WTB had just started doing 47mm 650b tyres, so I decided I’d design a drop-bar bike that could use tyres like that. The result was the Bokeh, one of the first “gravel” bikes on the market.
‘A few years later: “Dom, I’m in the middle of the Mexican desert, I’ve got bottles strapped all over my Bokeh and I need wide tyres on big wheels.” So that convinced me on the design of the InSearchOf, a gnarly adventure bike, to help others do big expeditions in comfort. That’s basically how the range has developed.’
Mason’s lineup now extends to nine bikes, eight of which are drop bar. He proudly rolls each out in turn, and seeing them lined up highlights that, paradoxically, while each fills a very particular niche, all have overlapping features that make them capable more generally.
‘In a way it makes our job more difficult when it comes to advising riders on the bike they want,’ says Mason. ‘Having many similar options means it’s always an involved discussion, but the upside is that we will have a bike that’s perfect for them.’
Mason says the range is finally where he wants it to be in that sense. It’s just as well, because the market is very different compared to when the brand started out.
‘Everyone does a version or two of our type of bike these days, whereas in 2015 it was basically just us and Open,’ says Mason. ‘So we’ve got huge competition and are up against brands with 40-person R&D departments. However, the longer we go on, the more confident we are that the way we work works. Specialising in a certain type of riding keeps us pushing forward. We’re happy with where we are at. Now all that’s left to do is keep on keeping on.’
As business plans go, that’s pretty concise.
Spanner in the forks
One of Mason’s USPs almost proved its undoing
Occasionally, success can be plucked from the jaws of disaster. Which is exactly what happened when Mason made plans to produce its own forks.
‘Stemming from my early days at Kinesis, I always start a bike design with the fork,’ says Dom Mason. ‘Get that right and you can work backwards from it naturally. But back when Mason was starting, and I was having these ideas of where drop bar bike design should be going, the fork I wanted didn’t exist so I was certain we had to make our own. We used this maker who made one batch for us, then disappeared. Shut up shop, done. We’d invested in the frames, had orders to fill. What an “oh, shit” moment that was. I had to get up at 2am every morning for a month to try to find a new Taiwanese vendor, calling people that wouldn’t pick up. Meanwhile my wife Julie was apologising to customers for the delay, asking them to stick with us. It was terrifying.’
It took six months of no sales for Mason to get another supply of forks arranged, but there was a silver lining.
‘Those six months confirmed a shift in trends I’d been seeing, so I switched the design to thru-axle and flat-mount from quick-release and post-mount, and added more tyre clearance. I ended up nailing down features that became standards, so the event that almost killed us got us ahead of the game.’
Check out the Mason Cycles range at masoncycles.cc
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