veganbikes

A lot of brands out there make a lot of crap and some also make some really high quality bikes as well. Say a brand like Trek I would say is pretty highly overpriced on a lot of stuff but they have the ability to make some decent stuff but the larger logo is a little annoying as some of their color schemes are decent but their business practice of shutting down local shops and turning them into Trek only stores and propping up poor performers with better performing stores just to have their name out there is dumb. Specialized is treading down that path as well but I have a little loyalty there as I do have two Specialized bikes and they are good bikes but they can suffer from a little name premium sometimes but say on their new Aethos frames you might not notice they are Specialized as the branding is more minimally done and it is quite a nice frame. Companies like Santa Cruz and others don't wade into the crap as much but they don't need to you have a lot of bigger brands to do that.

The important things on a bike are geometry and fit and are they using decent parts and hopefully fewer more proprietary parts and then do they have good support behind their product. My old Specialized Langster frame cracked after 11 years and they replaced it with no fuss. If the company has a good reputation and is using good geometry and parts I am down to look at their stuff but these days I prefer building from the frame up so complete bikes generally don't interest me as much especially with the propensity for using SRAM brakes these days and while the SRAM brakes are much improved I don't want DOT fluid anywhere near my bikes : )