At first, they built fifteen frames a day, then twenty, then more. Each was cut, filed, and silver-brazed by hand from high-quality Reynolds, Columbus, and Ishiwata steel by builders who knew what quality meant. Bevil ran the operation in Waterloo, and what they were making was unlike anything else in America.
In the summer, the barn doors stayed open. On the best days, someone would suggest a swim, and they’d all pile into cars and head for the town of Lake Mills, about 10 miles south of Trek, and Rock Lake, which had a nice beach with a walk-up bar.
The frames they made carried a commitment to beauty and a mark of expertise. But as an enterprise, they were out of their depth. Dick had set fulfillment standards for the shop, and the crew in Waterloo fell far short of them at the beginning.
They knew craft. What they needed was efficiency. And for this, Bevil went to Japan, where the great builders of Osaka and Tokyo had been refining their processes for generations. What he saw was factories that ran with rhythm and clean workflows, where artistry was supported by order. The visit was the beginning of scalable production.
How Trek grew from a barn to a worldwide pasture
How Trek outgrew the barn
Later, the exchange went both ways. Suppliers from Japan visited the barn in Waterloo to see what the small American builder was doing. Mike Appel, one of Trek’s original employees, remembers their eyes widening as they stepped inside. A brazer lay back in a reclining chair, torch in hand, the flame hissing just inches from his face as he silvered a joint from below. The visitors gasped. So this was American craftsmanship.
“These were serious people,” Bevil said later, laughing and reminiscing about the dilapidated barn and run-down café he’d taken them to on their visit. “But their willingness to understand, to help, and to guide us is really what made Trek possible.”
The work grew smoother. The bikes, more beautiful. And slowly, dealers began to take notice.
At first, Trek sold locally, mostly to shops within driving distance from Waterloo. “To walk into a dealer and say, ‘This bicycle is double-butted Reynolds 531 tubing, hand-brazed with a silver rod,’” Bevil would say later, “was like a space alien descending into Beloit, Wisconsin.”
Trek’s first true retail customer was Elmer Sorenson of Penn Cycle in Minneapolis. Bevil sold him a frame out of the trunk of his car, and from that exchange grew a long partnership between builder and retailer. Sorenson became one of Trek’s earliest champions, selling its bikes to riders who, for the first time, could buy an affordable American frame that rivaled anything from Europe.
Word spread from one shop to the next, and within a few years, dealers across the Midwest began placing orders. Trek was still small enough that every sale felt personal, but the current was picking up.
They were no longer a handful of “crazy cowboys” building bikes in a drafty barn. The spirit was still wild, but the operation was beginning to look like a company.
By the end of 1979, annual sales had reached two million dollars. The barn that had once seemed impossibly large was now bursting at the seams. Dealers wanted more frames than the barn could possibly produce. The solution was inevitable: they needed a factory built for the future.
In 1980, Trek bought land up the road from the barn, a cornfield belonging to a local farmer. The purchase price was only $10,000, but it came with a condition: construction could not begin until the harvest was cleared. No sense letting good a good crop go to waste, he must have reasoned.
It was a small, human detail that might have seemed unimportant at the time. But the detail still lingers, nearly fifty years on, because it says something about how the company grew. Trek was moving forward, but it was still rooted in the rhythms of its home soil.
When the field was groomed and the first shovels finally broke ground, the company crossed an invisible line. The barn had been the heart; the new building became the body.
By the early 1980s, Trek had become a name people knew. Retailers praised the quality, riders admired the detail, and magazines wrote about the precision and polish of the American company that now stood toe to toe with the best of Europe.
The timing was right. Schwinn, long the dominant force in American cycling, had begun to lose its edge. Trek’s touring bikes were new and distinctive, built with an attention to finish that no one could match. Dealers who once sold only European imports now made room for Waterloo-built frames that were every bit as beautiful and often better.
Trek had become, as Bevil put it, “the darling of the industry.”
As the company grew, so did its curiosity. By 1984, Trek had begun experimenting with new materials. Aluminum, bonded with aircraft-grade adhesive instead of welded, was the first step away from steel.
European brands had tried similar designs, but their nostalgia held them back. They kept aluminum tubes the same diameter as the steel they’d used for generations, and the result was a whippy, inefficient ride. Trek’s engineers solved this by increasing the tube diameter, creating a bike that was lighter, stiffer, and unmistakably modern.
Something changed in the artistry, too. Bonded aluminum required less hands-on finesse but far more engineering. The factory was no longer just a place of craft. It was becoming a place of invention. It was the beginning of the bicycle arms race.
In the summer of that same year, between semesters, a new Burke walked through the doors.
John Burke, Dick’s son, started his time at Trek picking and packing parts in the warehouse. “Your name gets you in the building,” his father told him. “The rest is on you.”
He learned the business from the ground up and from every angle. The first summer, he packed boxes, picked parts, and shot hoops in the parking lot with the UPS driver who’d make pickups and deliveries. Later, he’d answer phones, process orders, sit in on sales meetings, and work the Western territory as an outside rep. And later still, he’d lead the customer care team, the sales team, and eventually the entire company.
But in those early years, he was learning how Trek worked and why it mattered.
By 1985, the push into bonded aluminum signaled a new era, but growth brought constant change that impacted the business. Costs rose, margins tightened, and the founders’ philosophies pulled in opposite directions.
Dick wanted to scale the business; Bevil wanted to perfect it. Neither was wrong, but both could not lead. A moment of inevitability — one that began on a leap of faith over ten years earlier — caught up with them, and they confronted a moment every partnership eventually faces.
It wasn’t a falling-out so much as an acknowledgment of limits. They had always been moving toward this point, and perhaps they both knew it.
In early 1986, Dick assumed control of the company. Bevil agreed to stay on for a year as a consultant, completing projects already underway — a three-tube carbon road frame and a bonded aluminum mountain bike frame.
“The oil and water amalgam,” he said later, “couldn’t stay together. It wasn’t possible.”
They were two men bound by mutual respect over a company that was changing, whose differences had once powered the company and now defined the boundary between them.
But beautiful things come from tension, and Trek’s story has always been one of the energy born from opposing forces. The tension didn’t break the company. It charged it.