A Visit To The Specialized Museum – BionicOldGuy

Specialized Bicycles has its headquarters in Morgan Hill and has a nice museum on-site. My Tuesday riding group had visited it before in spring 2020, right before the Covid pandemic took off. We went again last Tuesday, and this time our guide was Robert Egger, who has been their creative director for years. He designs their concept bikes, a lot of which are in the museum, and also guides future directions of the product lines. He is also a good and funny guy and a great storyteller.

It was fun to hear him tell the story of how Mike Sinyard, the CEO, founded Specialized Bicycle Imports, which grew into the current company. I told that story here, but we got some new tidbits from Robert.

The next fun anecdote was how Robert got involved with the company. He had graduated with a degree in industrial design, and was working for a bike dealer in Los Gatos in the early 80s. A customer came in that Robert didn’t recognize and was asking questions about a lot of products made by Specialized. Robert would say the Specialized product was pretty good, but here is why a competitors model was better (their bike bags are a made a little sturdier, or their water bottles have a more wide-mouthed opening so it’s easy to put ice in them). When he later found out that this was Mike Sinyard, he thought he would get fired if Mike complained to the owner of the store. Instead, Mike called him up and arranged to have him come down to Morgan Hill for a visit. He hired Robert on the spot, and gave him his first assignment- to oversee improving all the parts Robert had thought were not the best.