These few lines retrace our origin, the history of GIRS. This is what we would like you to understand about us and our company. This is what we stand for, what you can expect from us and what we would like to do together so that riding our bikes can also mean something different for you.
GIRS = The Girouts
It all started in 1997 when my brother and I, aged 15 and 18, were both cyclists and dreamed of becoming professionals. Living in our parents' basement, we started by assembling custom bikes for ourselves and our teammates. Our quest for efficiency in our personal and professional lives is reflected in the design of our bikes. Knowing we had to be as good as everyone else with half the training time, we were determined to build the bike that would give us the best performance and efficiency. We might have to test a new frame every 1000km. We became professionals, Guillaume in the Marlux team in 2002, Alexandre at Agritubel in 2005. Since then we have continued to ride and our practices have evolved towards mass cyclosportives, triathlons and more recently Gravelman. If you're still reading, be daring, come share a bit of the road with us on a GIRS bike.
A family story
As teenagers, we were 2 promising brothers in road cycling. Following in our father's footsteps, we quickly became addicted to the sensations provided by this machine launched at 40km/h on 19mm tubulars. These sensations, these adrenaline rushes which also communicate to us the desire to be the one who drives the fastest in the village, the department or the country. In this quest for "always faster, we quickly understood that training was not the only key to being ahead. And that in this game, the equipment was going to be a good way to push our limits almost unlimited. Well yes, limited to our budget...
Create our own bikes
The solution our father found to offer us the most efficient equipment at "lowest cost" was to buy the Casto team's Max-sport emergency bikes at the end of the season. These bikes (at a time when peloton riders were still contributing to material development) were therefore at the cutting edge of technology and were trading at half the market price. The great opportunity to allow us to dominate the local races before having the chance to be in the big leagues.
When Maxi-sport and the Castorama team closed, we lost this privilege. However, it was difficult to imagine that we were going to have to spend double the budget for a bike that runs slower, wasn't it?
So we decided to create GIRS (for the Girout brothers) to continue riding the best bikes. We made ours at Cyfac, which in 1997 was the welder for many pro teams. Backdoor way to find the pro bike at half price 😉
Share our bikes
Since then, we have always worked in this direction, to offer you bikes as we would have made them for ourselves. Bikes which, for our budget, give us the feeling that once on the starting line and the bib pinned, the race is not lost in advance!
Of course, we have become a company and it is not by magic that we manage to offer the best performance/price ratio. We have opted for a short distribution cycle, even if this closes our possibility of exporting via distributors. We design our bikes, but leave the possibility for others to use our molds in other countries (be careful Moules does not mean that we give the recipe and the ingredients, nor that it is the same pastry chef who takes the cake…) which in the majority of cases allows us to reduce and share construction costs, or even research and development costs.
We avoid paying people to tell us that our bikes are good, since since we were 14 we have developed this sensitivity on our own. In the same spirit as our communication budget which often comes down to word of mouth…
Even going so far as to offer a “just varnished” Rawskin frame to both show that we have nothing to hide, but also so that those who only want performance do not have to pay for the “beauty treatment”. ".
We wrote some time ago about our "made in Brain" concept: it doesn't matter where or how it was designed, the important thing is that the bike you have between your legs helps you give your best. yourself.
