MyCanyon: This is what drives me
An interview with Canyon founder Roman Arnold Back in 1978, the origins of MyCanyon were being pieced together in a small garage in the west of Germany. A young cycling fan named Roman Arnold was building up dream bikes for his first customers.
Back in 1978, the origins of MyCanyon were being pieced together in a small garage in the west of Germany. A young cycling fan named Roman Arnold was building up dream bikes for his first customers.
More than forty years later, we interview the founder of Canyon at this full circle moment in his working life: the launch of our custom bike programme MyCanyon.
I started in the bike business many years ago with a small workshop in my garage to make extra money to support my racing, and we did many custom builds for our customers. I always wanted to bring the ability to customise to canyon.com. A few years ago, we started the research and development to create a way for our customers to customise bikes. After a lot of work to get this right, we are now ready to launch MyCanyon. I couldn’t be prouder of the great work our team has done to make this happen.
Yes, bicycles are more than a business for me, they’re my great passion.
It first started in childhood. My family was not a perfect family: my dad was a sales rep, and he was not at home during the week, so we grew up with my mother and us three boys. We would fight for our father’s attention and were hungry to be closer to him. Soon after I got my first bike I started racing and became the local champion in Koblenz [the hometown of Canyon]. I saw how this made my father proud, so I wanted to do more and more of it. I started training properly and have good memories from that time.
If you translate the word ‘passion’ into German, it’s ‘Leidenschaft’, which is associated with a kind of painful feeling, and I think that’s apt for cycling. It’s very difficult, and painful, to get to the top, but it’s satisfying. I soon began to win more races, and this changed my life with my father and my family. It brought us all closer together, and we ended up starting a small business.
What was that first business?
I was racing a lot as a young teenager and my dad said ‘we cannot afford to always go to races far away’, so we came up with the idea of going to Italy and importing cycling kit and parts back with us in a big trailer, which we would then sell directly at the races we competed at. There was no internet back then, so we would be bringing products back that people couldn’t get in Germany. I remember we had the first ever Assos bib shorts one year...
From those early days to now, your journey in the bike industry has been long and varied. How do you reflect on it?
Yes, I’ve been working in cycling for more than 40 years. It has been really interesting to see the developments from steel to aluminium to titanium then carbon fibre. I think what is different for me than with many other guys is that I’ve seen all the different sides of the industry. I've been the smallest retailer working out of a garage, then a wholesaler, then a distributor with my brother's company, RTI, where I also was involved. Then I became a manufacturer and finally went consumer direct.
Has there been any one principle, or observation, that has marked those 40 years for you?
From the start, I was always very interested in new things, and innovation. We would only bring back the latest kit from Italy in the trailer. I remember we had the first ever Lycra shorts, the first overshoes. We were always looking for how to make the life of our riders better, and I think this is consistent with the whole story of Canyon. I didn’t start the company because I thought there was a good business opportunity, I did it because I loved it.
I wanted to have better bikes for me, better bikes for my friends, and better bikes for our customers.
And we have always tried a lot of different things – with plenty of trial and error – to find that progress.
Do you have a general approach to progress and innovation?
Innovation starts much earlier than the product you end up selling. First you have to understand what the customer needs. What are their problems? It starts there. But you also must be obsessed. I bumped into Jan Frodeno [triathlon legend and Canyon rider] recently, and I asked him how his retirement was going. He said: ‘I still go to bed early and wake up at 5am and do my training. Why? Because it’s all I’ve done for twenty years.’ He’s still obsessed with triathlon, and
to make great products we must be obsessed too.
Sometimes my family asks me about so-and-so celebrities or a film or song, but I don’t know them. My life is very small. It’s very deep, but it’s narrow. It’s cycling. And in this field, I'm an expert and I want to do better and better. This is what drives me.
The first customisable MyCanyon bike is the Aeroad CFR, which has had enormous success, both commercially and at the WorldTour races. What does this bike mean to you?
The Aeroad means a lot to me. When I think about the first Aeroad, I think about Philippe Gilbert winning all those races in 2011. The Aeroad was also the first road bike we developed an integrated cockpit for. That’s something that’s normal on bikes these days, but it was a very big innovation in aerodynamic bike engineering back then.
Where would you like to see MyCanyon go in the future?
All of our bikes, at a certain price point, should be customisable. This would allow more of our customers to show more of their personality. I would also like to see MyCanyon going to mountain bikes and gravel bikes, and customers being able to blend the two with different handlebars, and so on.
And what about the future of Canyon in general?
My hope is that we can always keep curiosity within our company
and that we always remain open-minded. We can’t rest on our laurels. Maybe it’s not a good attitude to have, but I’m the kind of guy for whom winning isn’t enough. I’m already thinking about the next thing for us to get better and keep driving change. The world doesn’t stand still, so we have to adapt, often much faster than we think we need to.
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