With the rise of direct-to-consumer cycling brands, does provenance matter anymore?

Provenance, at its simplest, is the story of where something comes from—who made it, how it was made, and the chain of decisions and hands that shaped it along the way. In cycling, a culture that so often focuses on marginal gains and material innovation, provenance can feel like a soft, almost nostalgic concept.

Yet, a recently released short film, Provenance, an intimate portrait of Rob Quirk of Quirk Cycles, reminds us that it may be one of the most meaningful—and increasingly endangered—values in the modern bike industry.

Cycling has always been intertwined with craft. The steel frame, in particular, carries a mythology built not just on performance but on process: tubes mitered by eye and geometry discussed over cups of tea rather than spreadsheets. In the film, Quirk’s philosophy centres on participation—the idea that value is created not only in the finished frame but in the builder’s involvement in its creation.

“These drop outs are my drop outs. You only get them on Quirk Cycle frames. When you look at my bike you will see these are my parts. They’re unique to what we do here.”

This is provenance in its richest sense: not merely traceability, but authorship.

Quirk is arguably one of the most well known of a relatively new generation of UK framebuilders that have emerged over the last ten years or so. Quirk trained over a decade ago, with the now closed, Bicycle Academy and since then he's run a small but vibrant operation making steel and titanium frames out of a unit in Hackney, sold to customers all over the world.

Quirk recently announced Simon Mottram as a lead investor as it attempts to scale the business. Something that is alluded to in the film, with confirmation that Quirk is moving toward a curated range of three new models.

This isn’t the first time a framebuilder has made a marketing video underlining the importance of working with a person in a shed, although that somewhat deliberately undersells Quirk’s facilities. Makers making beautiful videos is not new.

In fact, one might argue the angle grinder with sparks flying has been a mainstay of every frame building or crafting video produced since hipsters first walked the earth.

In Quirk’s film, there’s a subtly more thoughtful take on this visual device however, where sparks shoot across the movie-frame attached to the abrasive on a belt driven machine, like lasers. A similarly well considered shot, highlights a Goodyear logo on an apron on a wall, the film maker observes it as it appears to be switching on and off, lit with the pulses of Quirk's Tig welder. This attention to detail, is yet more evidence of a commitment to craft, delivered visually in this case, by Quirk's collaborator, and the film’s creator, Micheal Drummond.

What makes this well-executed version, and vision of what provenance means particularly resonant today, is the backdrop against which it sits.

We’ve always had craft builders in cycling. They are often small, expensive, and slow, embodying process and attention to detail. On the other side of the artisan, are large, brand-led companies whose frames are made offshore, but whose value lies in design engineering, marketing, and the promise of ‘race-winning’ performance or identity.

Emerging strongly beneath both is the rise of price-led brands; companies that frequently manufacture in the same factories as the major players but strip away much of the brand narrative to compete on cost.

Each model delivers something real.

Brand-led companies absolutely stand for something. They invest heavily in research, testing, athlete partnerships, and product ranges. Their bikes are often excellent. Price-led brands, meanwhile, have democratised access to high-quality equipment in ways that can’t be dismissed, and many riders are on very capable kit because of them.

But, and perhaps it’s always been true in cycling or sports marketing, something subtle – as the film appears to suggest – is being eroded in this shift toward abstraction and efficiency.

Provenance can indeed create emotional durability and a connection with our kit. The resulting bike is the product of human attention. The builder aligned the dropouts and checked it on the surface plate, gently cold-setting the frame into a position that’s often a magnitude closer to perfection than ‘industry standards’ ever require. This doesn’t make the bike faster, or perhaps even better (although we could argue on that point), but it does make it different.

If all bicycles become interchangeable commodities, then differentiation increasingly relies on branding or pricing alone. In that environment, the story of craft risks being lost altogether.

Quirk’s perspective pushes against that slow but meaningful drift. Being “part of the process,” as the film suggests, is a reminder that value can be experiential and rational, not purely functional.

Riders who commission a custom frame often talk about the conversations, the fitting sessions, the sense of co-opting the frame into life. The bike becomes a souvenir of the experience, with the memory embedded in it.

When that requirement leaves the chat, we lose a sense of accountability and some of the transparency. We miss out on the human imperfections that signal care rather than deficiency. Most of all, we lose connection—to the people who design, weld, paint, and assemble the machines we ride.

No one's arguing here that every cyclist should buy a steel frame. Of course not. The modern industry’s scale and capability, alongside the accessibility it delivers, are genuine, and an achievement we should never take for granted. But the film raises a more nuanced challenge: to remain conscious of provenance even when we choose value or convenience.

Cycling itself is a culture built on stories of riders, triumph and disaster, the roads we ride on, and the makers. When we reduce our equipment purely to price or brand positioning, we risk flattening the experience, perhaps.

Provenance does not make a bike objectively better then, but it reminds us that the things we ride—like the adventures we go on themselves—are shaped by people. And once we stop noticing people in the process, we start to lose something far harder to quantify than weight or speed.