Age of innovation
As a sometime professor of strategic management, Jamie Anderson has a neat line on market dynamics as it applies to collecting bicycles.
‘It parallels demographic shifts,’ he explains from his house in Flanders. ‘In the past 15 years we’ve seen an explosion of prices for Eddy Merckx and Colnago bikes of the 1970s and 80s. It’s not rocket science. People get to a certain age, the mortgage is paid, they’ve got disposable income and they want the bike they loved as a kid.’
Yet while the bikes Anderson lusted after as an aspiring racer increasingly fall into this category, his collection of around 80 machines is more than an exercise in retroactive wish fulfilment. Instead, having grown up in an age where technology could still potentially win races, Anderson’s big passion is innovation.
His collection focuses on the three decades when steel gave way to aluminium and carbon, charting a period when European craftsmanship was overtaken by international firms using processes more space-age than artisan. Living
