Walk into a bike shop and you meet countless logos with no obvious order to them. This guide gives you three orders: by price and prestige, by where they come from, and by when they started. Hover anything to open its card.
Two readings of the same data. The climb profile borrows cycling's own difficulty scale — the scale a Tour de France climb is graded on, which tops out at hors catégorie. The scatter drops the metaphor and plots the two things that actually decide where a brand sits: what it costs to get in, and how much racing history you are buying.
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Thirteen of these nineteen brands are European, and most of those sit inside a triangle between Milan, Koblenz and Dijon — so Europe gets a panel of its own. Taiwan does not appear often on a shop wall, but two Taiwanese factories build a large share of what hangs there.
Every logo has been trimmed to its artwork and padded into an identical box, so no brand reads larger than another. Markers use each brand's icon mark; cards use the full wordmark. Drag a file onto any slot to replace it, or double-click to scale and reposition. Hover a marker to open its card.
Drag the handle — or press play — and ride the route from 1840 to today; each brand lights up as you pass its founding year. Three waves stand out: the European workshops before the wars, the American and Taiwanese boom of the 1970s, and the direct-to-consumer wave after 2000.
Who owns a brand, who actually builds its frames, and how it reaches you are three separate questions — and the answers rarely match the badge on the down tube.
Specialized and Trek are two of the last major brands still privately or founder-family held at meaningful scale. That is genuinely a differentiator: most of their premium competitors have been through private-equity or sovereign-fund ownership changes in the last five years.
Taiwan is the manufacturing backbone even for brands that read as American or European. Giant and Merida do not only sell bikes under their own names — they physically build for other companies, and Merida both co-owns and produces for Specialized. So two "competing" bikes on the same shop floor can come out of the same Taiwanese factory, sometimes the same line, differing only in paint and decals.
Selling direct — pro-level bikes without dealer markup — is what made Canyon. The last two years have shown the flip side of that structure. With no dealer network to absorb excess inventory or spread the service load, Canyon carried the oversupply and an e-MTB recall almost entirely on its own balance sheet.
Founder Roman Arnold has since returned as Executive Chairman to lead a restructuring, and the company plans a dedicated e-bike store at its Koblenz headquarters in 2026 — its first real step toward physical retail after being built entirely on online sales.
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