This story first appeared in Issue 102 of Singletrack, which wasn’t so very long ago. However with the sad news this week that Simon Sharp, co-founder of Hope Technology, has died, we thought it a fitting tribute to the man who helped bring the brand we know so well into being. Our thoughts go out to all Simon’s friends and family.
WORDS AND PICTURES BY SAM NEEDHAM
Hope Technology remains a success despite relying on old-fashioned things like domestic manufacturing, minimal outsourcing, company bicycles, happy, loyal staff and lots of tea. Sam Needham takes camera and cuppa and finds out more.
Hope Technology
Squeezed between the rolling flanks of the Yorkshire Dales and the mighty Trough Of Bowland lies a sleepy town with one of the longest place names in the UK to not repeat any letters. By the hair on its very feet, Barnoldswick tiptoes just within the Lancashire border, and over time has become a pocket of industry thanks to Esse Stoves, Rolls Royce, Silentnight beds and of course, the bright and colourful company we all know so well: Hope Technology.
A Small History
Swing back to 1985: a year of great things. Microsoft released its first ever incarnation of Windows in hope of achieving global frustration for years to come and the movie ‘Back To The Future’ was born, inspiring wild imaginings of what 2015 might just look like. Beyond the hover boards and angered PC users sat two friends, Ian Weatherill and Simon Sharp in their fancy new ‘shed’. They’d just left their positions at Rolls Royce to start IPCO, their very own engineering firm. Aside from tinkering in their shed and making jigs and fixtures for local aerospace companies, both Ian and Simon had (and still have) a passion for motorcycle trials alongside riding bikes. In fact, Ian once won the Junior National Motorcycle Trials Championships and Simon, well, you can still see Simon making an appearance at the infamous Scotland Scottish Six Day trials.
Back in the mid to late eighties, in between filling their boots with stream water and slipping over rocks on motorbikes, they were bashing their heads together to find a solution to one big problem we can all collectively shudder about – cantilever brakes on mountain bikes.
Let’s leap forwards a few years, to 1989, the year the Berlin Wall was brought down, and the year that Ian and Simon finally put a stop to ‘canti-induced near death experiences’ and made their very own disc brake for mountain bikes. And it wasn’t just ‘their own’ – it was the only disc brake for mountain bikes at the time. Two short years later, in 1991, after two years of making hubs and brakes for their friends, Hope Technology was born and took residence in the ‘Hope Mill’.
The Now
Hope has long grown out of its first shoes – a few times in fact. But even then, there seems to be a perception that Hope is a relatively small outfit in the snug of Barnoldswick. What people don’t always know is that Hope is still run by the very same two chaps that started it in the first place and that a lot of their employees are more than just locals and friends, they are part of the factory furniture, and that is happy testament to any company in this day and age. As an encapsulation of that, take Lindley Pate – Ian and Simon’s first employee back in 1990. A man of a certain modesty and a quiet love of fishing – more so than bikes – Lindley is still very much part of Hope. What was then a three man team is now 120 men and women strong, and Lindley, Machine Shop Manager, still makes sure the hubs keep ticking and ensures there’s a constant supply of shiny product for the likes of us to get excited over.
And a constant supply of product it really is. There are some 70 CNC machines in total on the ‘shop’ floor, that run 24 hours a day, seven days a week thanks to a little help from some good engineers – and even then there is no product on the shelf as such. Everything that is CNC’d, polished, etched, built by hand and packaged in-house is produced to order. And pretty much everything that Hope has in its ever growing catalogue of bike components is manufactured in the factory, right in the heart of Barnoldswick. The springs and pawls that create the infamous hub tick are curated in house. Even the pins that grace their pedals are machined there.
Leading lights
One man who keeps a keen eye on things is Woody Hole, the commanding chief of dispatch and one of the many friendly faces that make up the company. Woody has plenty of strings to his bow, most recently by adding the World Champion title and stripes to his name by taking the overall masters win in the 2015 Enduro World Series. His bike handling and speed have been honed over the years he’s spent riding moto-trails (there’s a theme here) and then racing downhill for Hope at international level, not to mention his strict champ’s diet of pizza and beer. He’s not the only accomplished rider and racer who spends their working week under Simon and Ian’s employment, mind. There’s also Paul Oldham, the CNC development engineer, who should need no introduction. Paul’s as quick on his bike as he is with his wit, which in real money equates to four national titles, a Three Peaks Cyclocross win, a recent partaking in the Commonwealth Games, 10-15 hours of training a week alongside work and family life and quite a few injuries to keep him on the level.
Woody and Paul are just the tip of the swarf pile when it comes to Hope employees riding bikes. “Made by riders, for riders” is becoming a widely used cliché in the bike world but it’s something you’ll never see the folks from ‘Barlic’ boast about; it’s just how it is. It’s matter of fact that most of the 120 (and growing) work force ride bikes far beyond ‘popping to the shops’. Every employee gets a bike to ride and a pick of plenty at that. Riding is not just encouraged, it’s inescapable. And that’s not a bad thing at all.
Only recently, the big dreamer and animated chap that is Ian Weatherill decided to throw a hill-climb challenge for anyone (at work) that fancied busting a lung. It was a straight forward affair that involved rigging fifty-plus R8 lights right along Mastiles Lane, near Kilnsey Cragg. This isn’t anything out of the ordinary for Ian. What Ian can conjure up in his dreams usually ends up seeing the light of day; I’m sure you’ve all seen the Hope hot-air balloon? Or heard of the plans to build a velodrome? Or seen that, at the back of the factory, lies a pump track so neatly landscaped that Alan Titchmarsh would almost certainly shed a tear of joy. As far as top bosses go, Ian and Simon seem to have set the bar pretty high.
The Magic Factory
There seems to be a proud attention to detail at Hope, a trait which has no doubt been influenced by Ian and Simon’s previous time at Rolls Royce. And I’m not speaking just of their product – the factory itself is a feat to be proud of, with floors so clean you could eat your (Lancashire, natch) hotpot off them.
Ian says the factory is ‘F1’. Yes, it’s spotless beyond obsession, effortlessly slickly operated and undeniably magical to walk around, but it’s far, far more exciting than F1. There’s something quite special about being able to see how things are done from start to finish and on such scale. Waltzing around the factory is like walking through a time-lapse. What was raw billet, under the high pitched hum and whirring of the machines, quickly appears as something with a more recognisable shape. A crank, or a brake caliper, or a stem perhaps. A corner turned on the factory floor is just a new glimpse of magic for the non-engineer. We peer into a rotating vat of brake levers immersed in finely ground walnut shells – polishing is one of the final processes a product goes through before heading to get anodised in the room adjacent.
The magic is apparent as soon as you walk through the doors at Hope. The entrance hall-cum-museum is so inviting and intriguing, you almost forget that there’s a vast expanse of goodness beyond. Upstairs, along a quiet stretch of corridor that basks under warm light are the rooms where the ideas spark. As with any designer’s desk, there is an air of secrecy to these rooms and always a nervous shuffle from said designers if any eager eyes peer in.
Owen Hardisty is as much part of the furniture upstairs as Lindley is part of the machine-shop downstairs. He was the fourth man to work under the Hope banner and is to thank for that famous ticking we all love to hear.
Of course Owen too has a background in motorbikes and when not pouring his thoughts and time into the evolution of the Hope Hub, his passions lie in restoring pre-1965 motorcycle trails bikes. It’s also worth mentioning that he found and restored to identical specification the first mountain bike he ever owned. All from memory and right down to the colour of the cables. It’s all in the details, as with everything that leaves the Hopeful hands.
Hope is approaching its 25th year as a company. A company that started with two friends and has now grown to become the incredible organization we see today. With expansion and success it is undoubtably easy for a company to become faceless; to cut corners; to lose grasp of the roots and foundations it was born out of and get pulled into the world of tight margins and cheaper manufacturing costs. That is far from the case here. Ian and Simon are still the sole owners – and they own everything within the building and actually, the building itself. Not a penny is tied up elsewhere and to this day, Hope still manufactures almost every part you could ever want for a bicycle and all here in the UK, with the exception of their rims. The thing is though, there’s not a slight bit of arrogance in the company; no pedestal that they stand on. Hope is grounded and firmly rooted in making great products and doing it properly. All with the help of a lot of tea, a loyal work force, some 70-odd well-kept machines (and the rest) and a great deal of bike riders who know ‘bloody good’ when they see it.
