Today, seventeen years after opening its doors for business, Enve is announcing the Melee, its first mass-produced road bike.
Enve Composites has gone through a lot in that time: a name change, a rescue from the brink of bankruptcy, and the building of a custom manufacturing facility, but Enve has continued to hone its craft and expand its offerings through the ups and downs.
Today it finds itself on more stable ground with a core business of wheels and a supporting cast of accessories to upgrade every part of a bike. It’s a comfortable place to be, but there is always movement in the industry; if it’s not forward, it will be backward. Enve clearly understands this and building on last year’s launch of the Custom Road, the Melee is the latest part of that arc.
However, in many ways, today’s launch actually started with the creation of its own manufacturing facility. Having design, engineering, production, and testing under one roof allows a company to chase new ideas.
It was this flexibility that allowed the brand to look toward the future and release the Custom Road in 2021. The vision was for expansion beyond the core business of wheels and component upgrades and something low-volume had to come first. With all the tools in-house, it was possible to hone a low-volume product without disruption. Every Custom Road is hand-built with every customer guided through the process. The Custom Road could never achieve the volume Enve ultimately wanted but it allowed the brand to finesse the processes required for the next step. That next step is the Melee.
The Melee takes the design, engineering, and testing from its factory in Ogden, Utah, and puts it into production in the company’s Asian manufacturing facilities. It also takes the lessons learned and applies them in a way that’s scalable. As a result, Enve says the Melee is actually the faster of the two bikes due to a monocoque design with narrower tube widths and refined tube shapes to improve aero performance.
Despite that, Enve says the character of the Custom Road remains in the Melee, and that largely means the Enve definition of a modern road race bike. It’s not a gravel bike but Enve has built in a level of versatility through tyre clearance, which it can take up to 35mm, with a claimed sweet spot of…
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