Uploaded July 2016 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
At Cane Creek, a high end mountain bike component manufacturer in North Carolina, there is a strong belief in innovation, creativity and that good ideas – not individuals - should win. For Josh Coaplen and his team, developing a rear suspension that allows a rider to push his bike to the limits, means getting a lot of ideas wrong to get a few select ones right. The believe in “fail often and fail fast” to create superior products for bikes ridden on the edge of what is possible.
Transcript:
You’re on a great trail. You’re connected with it. The bike’s perfectly set up. It’s just flowing. Seems like you can’t go fast enough, or jump far enough. Nothing else is on your mind, except the wind in your hair. You’re right on the edge. It could get real bad real quick, but right now it’s awesome.
Fletcher. In the mountains of North Carolina, just south of Asheville. A beautiful place to live. A beautiful place to ride. And a great place to manufacture.
We make the best rear suspension products on the market. It’s a subjective best, for sure. Our shocks are more expensive. And when someone buys something more expensive, there’d better be a benefit to it. And that’s not our brand. It’s not our image. It’s the performance of our products. They’re consistent, they’re reliable and they let people ride their bikes in ways that other components don't.
So we design each individual part. And those parts are, you know … by themselves they’re really simple. But then we put them together and then they become something pretty sophisticated. We make great products and the people that make them are proud of making them.
We have to innovate. That way we can be the best. Our approach to business, along with the personalities here, has allowed us to do this. If you believe in good ideas winning … rather than you, then good ideas will rise to the top… and not maybe a single person.
We’ve incubated that belief, we’ve fostered it and we’ve let people make mistakes… a lot of mistakes, getting ideas really wrong, in order to get a very few right. And that translates into success.
So the old cliché is “fail often, fail fast”. And we do that!
At Cane Creek, a high end mountain bike component manufacturer in North Carolina, there is a strong belief in innovation, creativity and that good ideas – not individuals - should win. For Josh Coaplen and his team, developing a rear suspension that allows a rider to push his bike to the limits, means getting a lot of ideas wrong to get a few select ones right. The believe in “fail often and fail fast” to create superior products for bikes ridden on the edge of what is possible.
Transcript:
You’re on a great trail. You’re connected with it. The bike’s perfectly set up. It’s just flowing. Seems like you can’t go fast enough, or jump far enough. Nothing else is on your mind, except the wind in your hair. You’re right on the edge. It could get real bad real quick, but right now it’s awesome.
Fletcher. In the mountains of North Carolina, just south of Asheville. A beautiful place to live. A beautiful place to ride. And a great place to manufacture.
We make the best rear suspension products on the market. It’s a subjective best, for sure. Our shocks are more expensive. And when someone buys something more expensive, there’d better be a benefit to it. And that’s not our brand. It’s not our image. It’s the performance of our products. They’re consistent, they’re reliable and they let people ride their bikes in ways that other components don't.
So we design each individual part. And those parts are, you know … by themselves they’re really simple. But then we put them together and then they become something pretty sophisticated. We make great products and the people that make them are proud of making them.
We have to innovate. That way we can be the best. Our approach to business, along with the personalities here, has allowed us to do this. If you believe in good ideas winning … rather than you, then good ideas will rise to the top… and not maybe a single person.
We’ve incubated that belief, we’ve fostered it and we’ve let people make mistakes… a lot of mistakes, getting ideas really wrong, in order to get a very few right. And that translates into success.
So the old cliché is “fail often, fail fast”. And we do that!
