Yeah, I got a racing bike from a local brand that was mainly known for cheap supermarket bikes. However, they did sell small series of high quality bikes directly out of the factory as well. My racing bike is one of those. It was a lucky, heavily discounted grab at their outlet shop sitting there for ages due to the horrendous colour combination of Telekom magenta and sperm white (great theft deterrent 😋).

In the almost 30 years I own this bike now, every bike shop I went to scoffed at the brand and refused to work on it. The only exception was a bike shop at my university town specialising in buying scrap bikes and building new Frankenbikes out of them for the students.

He took one look at my bike when I brought it in, smiled, immediately identified it as a factory bike. He complimented the quality and ease of maintenance, congratulated my purchase (on a 15 year old bike lol) and said he's looking forward to working on it. Save to say he had a loyal customer for the whole time I was living there.