This article was produced in collaboration with Gloria and was first published in Rouleur Issue 144
Carlos Ramirez is not your average founder. This is obvious as soon as we sit down for coffee with him at a side table in the Archive cycling café in Surrey, which is also the home of Gloria. He doesn't do the rehearsed, polished spiel, he wears a baggy tee-shirt and a baseball cap and he speaks very quickly with a soft Venezuelan Spanish accent that runs syllables fluidly together. It's the same with his ideas – they stream out one after the other, sometimes heading off on a tangent, but always coming back to the coherent philosophy that has dictated the direction of his young brand: modern cycling has become too obsessed with performance metrics, bikes have become too complicated and too expensive.
"We're coming to this very strong wave of cycling maturing," he says. "They got a cheap bike in Covid, they went to a better bike when they decided they liked the sport. A lot of people dropped cycling, but those who stayed in it went to a fancy bike. Now, six years on, it's like, what do I buy? I want to have some input on my build, I want to have some customisation, differentiation from the mainstream, and that's what's coming down the road right now. In the next few years you're going to see a lot of this."
His argument is that, up until now, bike manufacturers have used the language of speed, performance and marginal gains to sell product. "Those gains are invisible for most of us," he says. "At 50kph – five or even ten watts? If I'm going at 50kph I'm probably going downhill and don't need any more watts. I need the brakes. For the majority of the audience you don't get a tangible benefit. Perhaps for two per cent of the market?
"The other big chunk is having fun, going on an adventure, group rides, commuting… and these people are getting smarter. They won't be fooled by a bike that claims to save five watts at 50kph in a wind tunnel. They want to be comfortable, able to ride a bit longer, and their adventure might be an hour round Richmond Park. My adventure might be riding to work."
In other words, a bicycle for most of us just needs to be durable, versatile and useful. "We've forgotten this, because we went all the way to carbon, and it's just not compatible with all the needs of most people. Carrying a child, leaving it parked outside, being strong enough to resist knocks and bumps – and it has made cycling very expensive."
Gloria's bikes are titanium, which has that reputation as an exotic wonder metal – is this not at odds with Ramirez's reasoning? "I wouldn't necessarily say titanium is the only alternative – I would say metal."
Gloria's beginnings are not the archetypal origin story, either. Ramirez is not an artisan framebuilder. He had been working in finance in the City and had gone to Miami for a family event.
"For the christening of my first son, we went there with my family. I am from Venezuela originally, classic Latin American. Miami is a big hub, midway for us. My family and in-laws came in, then Covid hit and we couldn't get out. So I bought an old steel bike, second hand, just to ride."
He scrolls through his phone and finds a picture of it. It's a Raleigh, and not the type that was made of Reynolds 753 and ridden by Joop Zoetemelk et al. It's basic, very robust looking with a plain blue paint.
"I had left behind a three-bike fleet – the latest one I'd bought was a nice Bianchi, I'd spent a lot of money, but now I was riding around on this $200 metal bike and thought wow, this is cool. It felt a bit sturdier, a bit better, I liked the tubes, the style."
As soon as he got back to London, Ramirez bought himself a Dutch J.Guillem titanium bike and again had that same 'wow' feeling.
"I called the guy and said, can I sell these? He said, we don't have a London dealer. It was lockdown, everybody wanted a bike, so he said yes. I said I don't have a shop, it's just going to be from my house and he was cool about it. In those six months, I sold quite a few bikes from home. Then I thought, I have a business idea here.
The first Gloria shop opened in Fulham with the idea of being, in Ramirez's words, "a boutiquey place, selling metal bikes, no carbon, a few independent brands. Then we opened a workshop in the basement, and that helped to keep the business going, helped me learn a lot, I stayed in the basement for three years and it was like doing my Master's degree in the cycling industry."
Talking to his customers and observing what they were doing with their bikes and their riding habits, Ramirez noticed that there was a gap between what people actually wanted and what the industry was trying to sell them. He created his first batch of Gloria titanium bikes with Lynskey, the legendary name behind Litespeed, as a collaboration.
"Rather than just have a product, it was more of an experiment to see, would anybody buy a Gloria bike? I knew the bike was going to ride well, the QC was going to be good, the lifetime warranty was, as an American company, well established… but the Gloria logo. Would anyone buy it?"
People did buy it and kept buying it, so Ramirez started looking for a manufacturer in East Asia. "Lynskey didn't allow me to tweak – it was a Lynskey model with my logo. I couldn't have different cable routing or different geometry or different finishes."
He says he was amazed by what he discovered in China. "I got to that moment where I realised that in a niche market, there are a few factories that work for everyone. You come with your ideas and with the production knowledge and the production facilities, the people and the infrastructure, you can do exactly what you want to do."
By this point, Ramirez's quick eyes had spotted a question on my open notebook about manufacturing in China versus the USA, and he's eager to address it immediately.
"I find it's an amazing opportunity to communicate this," he says. "It's one of the questions we get asked. Is it a good product? What is quality control like? You might think anyone can get a few pipes of titanium and stick them together, but a titanium welder at the factory in China does three to four years of apprenticeship and training before they can go to the factory floor, because it's a very delicate process."
He continues: "There's no doubt that an artisan can do an amazing job, but then scaling that art is difficult. In our factory you have not one artisan but 40, every single thing is viewed by 20 different people at the different stages of the build and the QC process is super rigorous. If you go to China for labour costs you're wrong. You go there for the technicians in that room who are capable of performing at that level of stress and complexity and do it right, back to back to back to back. Gloria frames come with lifetime warranties – that's how confident we are."
Another revelation for Ramirez was pricing. Once Gloria started producing its own bikes, moving out of London to the Archive in 2023, he started asking some hard questions.
"I started realising, where is all the money going? If everybody else is so much more expensive, where is all the money going? That was a big question for me. Their margins are not 30 or 40 per cent – they're much more. So I went very aggressive on price."
It sounds very businesslike – more about spreadsheets than seatstays, and Ramirez agrees that it's not always possible to romanticise bike building. He laughs when he remembers how he thought he would leave the data and the number-crunching of his old life behind for good.
"Now I spend more time in Excel than I used to when I was in the City, but if you're not on it you will struggle. We see all the romantics of the tooling, the building… but if a business is doing well I'm pretty sure they will spend a lot of time in Excel. You can have the beauty and romanticism, but you need to have the business structure behind it to support the growth, the inevitable stagnant moments and you need a team. You keep the love in the love bucket and the commercial in the commercial bucket."
Does his financial background help? "Yes. There's a bit of luck but it's about when to push go, not to push go too hard, negotiating terms as well, all that commercial side is like any other business but even more complex. I rely on 30 things to build a bike and only one thing is me – the frame. The schedule of parts that goes into a bike is 30 or 32 or 35. The frame is us, but then it's the headset, the axles, the bottom bracket, the cassette… It's different in other industries. For example if you produce jeans you have the fabric and then you make the jeans."
This is the sort of pragmatic practicality that defines Gloria's bikes. "Functional" is a word that Ramirez uses a lot. "The mission is to make highly functional bikes," he says. "A straight head tube does exactly the same job as a fancy tapered one. It happens that a straight head tube is more economical than a fancy one.
"The industry has got to the point where we're overengineering everything to fit the purpose of riding a bike. It defeats the simplicity of the bike. We were against having the cables hidden – it's pointless for the average rider. It's not functional. Until now, we had a straight 44 head tube with two cups pressed in. You can change them yourself, it takes five minutes. Everyone went to T47 bottom brackets – we stuck to BSA 68. It works, everybody has the tool, Shimano BB costs £18. It works, it's been proven, tested."
Gloria's geometry follows the same thinking. "We see road bikes coming higher in the stack. We picked that up a while ago. It was a classic problem with everyone – too many spacers. And toe overlap – no one wants that. Small bikes have to have small wheels."
Gloria's sales process is based around the same straightforwardness. "The customer service, answering the phone is also really important, especially with all the AI agents now. We are a real company that has a phone number on their website. Someone will pick up right now. You can book an appointment. We see more and more that people just want to talk. You meet your customer and that philosophy is important. There's a meeting of minds, you understand what they want. In our reviews you'll often see 'these people talk and these people listen'."
Gloria customers can not only talk about the bikes in real life but they can also come and ride them. "A very important part of it is being able to test ride demo bikes. To test anything, like a perfume you smell in the shop."
At the end of the counter surrounding the workshop area, where mechanic Mael is building up new bikes to be sent to customers, are racks on which Gloria demo bikes hang like outfits in a wardrobe. There's the All Road, All Gravel, All Terrain and All World, which has a packable Ritchey-style breakaway frame. Ramirez has stressed the functionality of these bikes throughout our whole interview – even the stunning road bike prototype that we photograph later has hidden mudguard mounts ready for its future role as a commuter or pub bike – and I almost feel guilty for admiring their looks.
We haven't touched on sustainability so far, perhaps because the impact of carbon fibre is well documented, but I ask the question anyway. "I'm going to go basic," says Ramirez. "This is a longer lasting product, and as a longer lasting product it will cause less trauma to the environment. That's one obvious way to put it. I don't have the numbers for the CO2 emissions of making it here versus making it there, shipping and so on. I know the other product is plastic. When it's broken it's broken and in the developed world it doesn't even need to be broken to be written off."
He gestures towards the Gloria bikes on the rack. "If you crash this and it's bent, you will know. You can still ride it, it can be bent back. We come back to versatility, functionality and sustainability. If I can make a product that you can use more, it stays with you over time – from club rides, commutes, carrying a kid – that you recycle with you as your life evolves… I would rather do this than make a precious undroppable bike that costs a fortune, where if the wind blows on it too hard you need to replace it.
"After ten years if it becomes the commuter or the pub bike then it's good for another ten years. It doesn't corrode or fatigue – it is an amazing material. We're seeing this tailwind for the metal guys now. There are indies like us who can take this opportunity and make things better for the consumer, for the industry, for the market and for the world."
