Made in Italy: a tour of the Sarto bike factory
by Corey Sar Fox
If you haven't seen a bike bearing the Sarto logo before you would almost certainly have seen one that was made by Sarto on behalf of another brand. In this piece, Corey Sar Fox takes a tour of the Sarto factory and meets some of the people behind this quintessentially Italian family business.
In a country where it is a challenge to travel more than a few kilometers without seeing a UNESCO World Heritage site, there is little reason to stop in Mellaredo, Italy. It is a small, unattractive town. However, it is conveniently located in the Veneto region, just east of Padua, not far from Vicenza and Treviso – an area that’s home to some of cycling’s most recognisable brands like Campagnolo and Pinarello.
And it is difficult to imagine that something as beautiful as Sarto’s bikes are being made inside the non-descript, beige building at the end of a dead-end street in the industrial zone of Mellaredo. The only indication that some of the finest, custom carbon fibre frames are made here is a license plate-sized sign over the door that reads “Sarto Antonio” in faded typography, embellished with a bicycle-like squiggle.
Though visitors are more than welcome, there is no showroom, only a cramped reception area with just enough space for two plastic chairs and a small coffee table with a stack of cycling magazines and a product catalogue.
The family is blessed with an appropriate name — “sarto” means tailor. Not only do they tailor the size of their frames, but Sarto offers customers the option to customise the shape, structure and most importantly, the brand.
The Sarto brand has been around since just after World War II when Antonio Sarto created the “terzista” — a company that assembles another company’s products according to specific instructions — with his brothers.
“Every week, me and my two brothers would ride our bikes with trailers to the Atala and Torpado factories. They’d give us frames to take back and file, you know, to clean up after they’d been brazed,” says Antonio who was 14 at the time.
Over the next 20 years, the brothers’ services expanded to include manufacturing whole frames. It was the international oil crisis which fuelled a bike boom in the early 1970s that allowed the Sarto family to outgrow their terzista status.
“In 1973, we had 40 employees and finished 200 bikes a day, not just frames, but 200 assembled bikes!” says 82-year-old Antonio as if it weren’t so long ago. Most of these were entry level, 10-speeds exported to the United States and sold under the Sarto Mariella brand. However, the boom subsided and the company returned to making frames for others during the ’80s and early ’90s.
It was in the 1990s that Antonio’s son Enrico officially joined the family business at 18 years old.
“I never considered not going into this business. I always worked here growing up, in the office and also welding in the factory”, says Enrico. “But by the time I finished school in 1992, my father was ready to join his brothers in retirement. It would have been a shame to let all of this just go away.”
So, father and son made a deal: Enrico would officially join the business, if Antonio remained. And together they would build a new, larger factory. Expanding and entrusting a challenging business to an 18-year-old was risky. In an industry that often goes through feast and famine cycles, subcontractors occupy a precarious position; when demand is low, so are the orders.
But back in the mid ’90s demand was not an issue. Italian bicycle manufacturers were selling as much as they could produce. About two-thirds of the bikes lined up for the 1996 Tour de France were Italian, a bunch of those from Sarto.
Maurizio Fondriest, also lined up at the ’96 Tour on a Sarto frame, recounts, “back then the best artisans, the leaders in the industry were in the Veneto, so my brother and I chose Sarto to make our medium and high-end frames and those for our professional riders. The most scrupulous went to the factory to get exactly what they wanted. Our entry-level frames were made by another terzista.”
The decade also saw racing bikes rapidly evolve from lugged steel to TIG welded steel and then aluminium and finally carbon fibre. Sarto first started working with carbon in the mid-1990s, bonding in seat stays on aluminium frames. Then Dedacciai came out with a carbon tube kit with aluminium lugs. In 2002, Sarto made its first 100% carbon fibre frame designed in-house.
Maurizio Fondriest has known the Sartos for more than 25 years:
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“Ingenious is a good word to describe Antonio and Enrico. They just know how to make all kinds of things, they always made their own tooling and milled special parts for our frames.
So, when carbon arrived, they continued to build custom frames like the artisans that they are, like aluminium frames, but instead of welding the tubes together, they wrap them in more carbon. The difference is that back when it was just steel or aluminium, being an artisan was enough, now you really have to know this stuff on an engineering level.”