Revel Bikes Is Back And Here To Stay!

Revel Bikes Has Been Bought Back By Original Founder Adam Miller.

My whole life has been shaped by bicycles. I started tinkering with bikes as a kid, and by the time I was 11, I was running a mini bike business out of my bedroom in Anchorage, Alaska, parting out used bikes and selling them on eBay. A few years later, when I was 14, I landed a job at our local bike shop, and that’s when my future in bikes truly grabbed hold. I wasn’t just wrenching and changing tires and learning about all sorts of bike companies and business models, I was getting more and more passionate and fascinated by bikes, the people who ride them, and with the kind of community that two wheels can create.

As my career evolved, and I started then sold my first company, I was lucky enough to travel all over the world and formed incredible relationships with people in manufacturing, distribution, and everything related to bikes, from factories in Asia to the trails in Colorado to shops across Europe. Those experiences led me to start Revel Bikes in 2015. Over the next four years, I worked on designs and logistics and developed Revel’s first two carbon fiber mountain bike models – while also designing fun titanium bikes and running Why Cycles. I was surrounded by an amazing group of designers, engineers, and bike nerds, many of whom were also my roommates. We’d spend long days at the office, and nights in the living room tinkering with prototypes, dreaming about launch day.

When we finally launched Revel in 2019 with just those two models, it took off faster than we ever imagined. We were just six friends in a warehouse in a small Colorado mountain town, and somehow, our ideas were working. Revel was never just a company to me – it was a personal mission. We built the bikes we actually wanted to ride, rooted in quality, sustainability, customer service, and a genuine love of riding bikes and being outside in the mountains. I had an absolute blast working crazy hours and running the company for several fantastic years.

In late 2021, I sold the company to a private equity group. I believed that with more capital and infrastructure, Revel could grow into something even bigger, while holding on to what made it special. I stayed on for a while to help with the transition, and then I fully stepped away in early 2024 when the company’s mission started to deviate from my own.

When I left a year ago, I thought and hoped Revel would live on and continue to thrive, but that didn’t happen. Last month, I found out, just a day before the public announcement, that Revel was shutting its doors. The employees, the community, the customers…we were all left hanging. This news was truly devastating to me – I had poured my heart into Revel for the better part of a decade, and I couldn’t just let it disappear.

So I bought Revel back, and now we’re here to stay. The business is going to be smaller, leaner, and smarter, and the team and I are more motivated than ever to make Revel what we always knew it could be – a responsive, customer-oriented company with incredible, carefully crafted bikes that we want to ride and we think you will too.

As Revel re-emerges, we’re planning to stay laser focused on what really matters. This company is not going to chase growth for growth’s sake. We’re going to create something we’re proud of, for the long haul. We’ll sell directly to riders, and we’ll have a frame-only program for dealers with the hopes of seeing more epic custom builds. My team and I are committed to running everything with the same obsessive attention to detail that started in that bedroom bike shop in Alaska and that put Revel on the map in 2019.

To everyone who stuck with me and this company, thank you. To those just discovering Revel, welcome. We’re just getting started, again.—Adam Miller, Founder of Revel Bikes

It looks like Revel will be honoring their lifetime warranty for all current owners, and continuing product support on any former purchases. Structurally, the company will be much leaner than previous, with only some of the former staff returning to work.

Revel will be offering more direct-to-consumer sales than before, while supporting dealers via a frame-only purchase program with no minimums. Pricing is meant to decrease in kind, but we haven't seen firm numbers on that yet.

This is good news for the bike industry after so much bad as of late.