It's amazing how unobtrusively a man can enter the room, even though he is 1.97 metres tall and responsible for an estimated turnover of almost 220 million euros a year. You almost overlook him as he steps through the glass door in the reception area of his company headquarters in an industrial estate in Koblenz. "Hello," he says in a low voice, "I'm Roman".
The man standing in front of you, wearing a green baseball cap, a sporty white T-shirt, jeans and blue Nike trainers - this man is shaking up the global bicycle industry. A story that could have come from Silicon Valley and yet is set in the Moselle valley, in one of the oldest towns in the country, and tells of new beginnings, risk and scientific progress. About the man who created the Canyon bicycle brand and dreams of celebrating Tour victory with it.
There are many people who underestimate Roman Arnold when they see him for the first time. You hear this from engineers, athletes and fellow journalists. The unassuming manner in which he enters the room seems to many to be a contradiction to the image of a doer that they have when they think of soon to be 1,000 employees and rapid company growth - especially when it comes to sports products, which are all about dynamism and aggression. When you then see the Canyon bikes in front of you, with their broken lettering, brushed against the current and full of energy, it enlivens the contrast when the boss says: "I'd say I'm more introverted than extroverted. I don't need to be the centre of attention."
He is important. Two days before TOUR's visit - in late autumn 2014 - the Colombian Nairo Quintana was in Koblenz. The Giro winner from Movistar, one of the two professional teams on Canyon bikes, was given a tour of the company by Arnold, tested a fat bike and took a walk with the company boss through the Koblenz autumn landscape. There are only pictures of this on Arnold's mobile phone. Not a trace in the media.
Two days later, we are standing with Roman Arnold between three slanted concrete walls that form a triangle at the heart of his company headquarters with the artistic name "canyon.home". Videos of professional racing cyclists are shown on flat screens on the walls, alongside exhibits of design and high-tech bicycle parts. "The company is a way of expressing myself and my personality," says Arnold. Designer lettering, an aesthetically sophisticated setting, clear lines, clear messages, this is the centre of Canyon, you can see what it's all about here: direct sales, technology, successful professionals in the sport.
This building could be described as a museum or a monument, but Arnold himself calls it home. It was opened in 2008 to bring everything from management to assembly under one roof. But the space is no longer enough. Since 2016, production has been running in the canyon.factory, six kilometres away from the headquarters, in a logistics and assembly hall for up to 250 employees. Arnold wants to secure more efficient production and jobs in Koblenz. Long-term capacity: 155,000 bikes per year. The plan is to complete a wheel every 48 seconds at peak times. An ambitious goal - but initially the new production process caused problems: Three different software systems had to be made to work together, in reality this meant days of downtime, customers didn't know what was happening with their orders - it was a major crisis. "I was personally responsible and had to speak up and fight," reports Arnold.
Roman Arnold comes from a cycling background. "Of course I love the competition," says Arnold. As a youngster, he rode for the RRC Neuwied, came second in Germany in a youth trial in the individual time trial, but he was not selected for the national squad. Arnold joined the Rhineland-Palatinate performance programme on the track in Friesenheim, riding with Udo Bölts. You can tell that his enthusiasm for bikes stems from his own past, and so he also talks about other brands like a racing driver talks about his great rivals: appreciatively, respectfully.
Arnold's family background is important for understanding the rise of his company. Little Roman, the middle of three brothers, grew up in the small Catholic village of Löf on the Moselle, in a conservative, narrow world. His father was a refugee and always a stranger there, finding it difficult to fit into this small world. In addition, his father worked as a sales representative for customers far away and was therefore almost never there for the children, at least during the week. But when Roman Arnold started cycling, he grew up together with his father. His father accompanied his son to the races at the weekends, where Roman would go the extra mile. "I wanted to show him that I could do something."
This was also the birthplace of the current business: father and son Arnold recognised the lack of modern racing bike accessories. They travelled to Italy with a Mercedes and a blue trailer and bought Sidi shoes and Assos trousers from dealers there to sell them in Germany on the sidelines of the junior races. They were unique in the region. Business was booming and they soon opened their first bike shop in their garage at home. Arnold graduated from high school, but three days later his father died at the age of 46. A decisive moment: Arnold was actually drawn to the sports promotion company of the German army and planned to become a sports physician at some point. But his godfather persuaded him to stay with his mother and do an apprenticeship.
Arnold trained as a wholesale and export merchant and continued to run the garage shop he had opened with his father in the evenings. Perhaps he would have gone to university at some point, moved somewhere else, led a different life. But Arnold stayed in Koblenz and says today: "If my father hadn't died so early, there would probably be no Canyon." The company is therefore a very personal and emotional affair for the founder.
The development of this company is astonishing. In 1985, Arnold opened his first bike shop in Koblenzer Straße. At the end of the 80s, he began sending bicycles directly to customers. Representatives of the most sought-after brands came to Koblenz because they got a feel for the market here. At the beginning of the 90s, Arnold acquired the licence to manufacture under licence from the triathlon brand Quintana Roo. In Taiwan, he met Louis Chuang, who helped him to establish long-term relationships with Asian suppliers that have lasted to this day. Chuang is also the godfather of Arnold's elder son. From the mid-90s onwards, Arnold established his own brand of bikes, which from 1996 onwards bore the name Canyon. These bikes were not developed by Arnold, he sold finished products. At the end of the 90s, the company then developed products with its own customised design, started developing its own frames and produced the first mountain bike developed entirely in-house, for example.
In the early 2000s, the momentum increased enormously once again: Arnold brought in Lutz Scheffer, a sought-after designer and mountain bike constructor who worked for the brand until 2017. He worked together with the late Hans-Christian Smolik, a pioneer of bicycle technology who also headed up TOUR's testing and technology department until the early 1990s. In the "canyon.home" you can see the milestones behind glass, such as the 3.7 project: in 2005, Canyon presented the world's lightest racing bike at 3,764 grams. Next to it, a racing bike with hydraulic disc brakes, presented in 2006 and thus many years ahead of the market. "I think that the ideas for these bikes came largely from me," says the CEO, looking at the projects on display.
But Arnold says "we" much more often than "I" and doesn't want to single anyone out. "I have to have a team of people around me who I trust and who can support this project. But they don't have to be yes-men," explains Arnold, and standing next to him - nodding - is Michael Kaiser, who many also associate with Canyon's ongoing success. Arnold lured the expert with a doctorate in fibre-reinforced plastic composites from the Institute for Composite Materials in Kaiserslautern to Koblenz in 2007. Kaiser heads up research and development, maintains links with universities and drives forward funding projects.
One word Arnold often uses is "overcompensation". There was a recall of racing bike forks at the end of 2006 that hit him hard. On the ground floor of the "canyon.home" you can see what this means. There is a computer tomograph, with two technicians working next to it. They check all safety-relevant parts that leave the building. An investment of millions. Arnold and his team have also convinced three suppliers to buy CT scanners. The Canyon technicians also work with ultrasound equipment, endoscopes and microscopes. An infrastructure that was the result of a mistake and yet has led to something good, says Arnold: "I am proud of the fact that the small Canyon brand is helping to improve the standard of an entire industry."
After the recall, Arnold felt "disorientated". He then remembered a customer from Switzerland who had bought a triathlon bike from him many years earlier. This customer had ordered a personalised version with a Swiss flag, but there was more than one mistake in the production in the USA - the most conspicuous: the Norwegian flag was emblazoned on the bike. Arnold had to try to salvage the situation, sent the bike back to the USA and explained the whole thing to the Swiss. It took a year before the correct bike arrived at the customer's premises.
But he remained friendly. That was one reason why Arnold remembered this man - a specialist in corporate vision and leadership team building. Arnold called him and together they developed the vision that is the basis for Canyon's corporate transformation. A short time later, Arnold realised that it was time to get professional help with brand management. Too many bikes were similar to his - and Arnold brought the experts from the Munich agency KMS TEAM on board. Normally they look after large corporations, but now they created a sporty corporate identity for a medium-sized company.
It is fitting for this man, whose intelligence and power of action are often underestimated, that his brand was also not understood for a long time. "Many people didn't realise that we could be affordable and at the same time a technical leader," he says. But times have changed. He draws a comparison with electronics: today it has long been recognised that a brand like Samsung combines good prices with the best technology.
Perceptions change, and so it is with the dream that Arnold told a journalist colleague about a good ten years ago. A Tour winner would one day sit on a Canyon bike. If you look around his company, this is perhaps only a matter of time. Here hang the framed yellow and dotted jerseys of Cadel Evans, Jelle Vanendert and Joaquim Rodriguez. The Colombian Nairo Quintana won the Giro d'Italia on Canyon and excelled in the Tour. That pleases Arnold. He likes the little man from the Andes. A labourer from a poor background. A leader who tells people what they have to do, but who is sociable and polite off the saddle.
Arnold likes that, it suits him. "I think almost everyone who is particularly good is so good because they want to show others that they are good. Sometimes that can be exhausting." He has worked his way up, has not studied, but understands what people tell him, sees through processes and drives development. His credo: "Have the end in mind at the beginning." Arnold reads management books, draws inspiration from products from other industries, such as Dyson vacuum cleaners or Bose systems, and speaks publicly about brand management - but he hasn't become an intellectual because of it. He enthuses.
Arnold often says "awesome". It was "awesome" when Cadel Evans became world champion on Canyon in Mendrisio. It was "awesome" when the Shapeshifter technology worked on mountain bikes. "Awesome" was Quintana's Giro triumph. Arnold's "Geil" doesn't sound like Saturn's back then, but like one you sigh quietly to yourself when you look down from the Stelvio Pass. It's the "Geil" of someone who watched Gerrie Knetemann and Franceso Moser sprint for the title at the Nürburgring in 1978 and who collected autograph cards. A fan.
And that also explains - in addition to all the development boosts and market opportunities he is hoping for - why he is energetically entering professional sport with his company. The teams tell him how intensive the support from Koblenz is.
Today, Arnold is talking about something else. Of "Legacy", his legacy. Arnold was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent surgery in 2016, which left its mark on him - in the same year that there were major problems with the new production facility. His company is now set to take the next step: "My goal is to be the world's leading manufacturer that sells its brand directly," says Arnold. In August 2017, Canyon will start selling to customers in the USA - a market that Arnold has had his sights on for a long time but has not yet dared to enter. Roman Arnold is not taking this step entirely on his own, but brought an investor on board last year: the American company TSG Consumer Partners took over a "significant minority stake" in Canyon; it is now to help build up the US business and keep production in Germany efficient enough to remain competitive in the long term. Arnold reports that many investors have wanted to get involved with Canyon over the years, but now it has all fallen into place.
It's a small thing that sums it all up. When he was a child, Arnold's favourite game was called "Company". He and his brother would stake out companies out of Lego bricks and use Matchbox cars for field service. They sent their cars out and had to convince the other to buy something. They emulated their father, says Arnold, because that was exactly his job. Roman Arnold has come a long way without having to travel far. He is still very close to his youth.
About the person
Born 7 July 1963 in Koblenz
Professions learnt Wholesale and foreign trade merchant; bicycle mechanic (both completed with an A)
Family Arnold is married to Gesine Arnold for the second time and has a daughter and a son with her. He also has a son and a daughter from his first marriage.
Today, Arnold works as CEO / Managing Director of Canyon Bikes.
Canyon
Foundation 1985 under the company name Radsport Arnold
Employees approx. 1,000
Turnover 2017 220 million (estimated)
Mountain bikes account for two thirds of sales and road bikes for one third. Sporty urban bikes are added to the programme in 2015.
Professional teams2007 Unibet; 2009-2011 Silence Lotto/Omega Pharma-Lotto; since 2012 Katusha; since 2014 Movistar
