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"Boutique" Parts
Most of the best bicycle parts are made by a few major companies, who provide excellent value thanks to good design and economies of scale resulting from large-scale mass-production.
In the bicycle industry, the best frames have traditionally been made by very small-scale, custom or semi-custom framebuilders.
There are also small-scale makers of premium or super-premium parts, companies such as Chris King, E.A.I., Phil Wood , White Industries and a few others. These small, high-prestige manufacturers often (but not always) make products superior to those of the big manufacturers. For instance, Chris King headsets are the very best, and Phil Wood hubs and bottom brackets are unequalled.
Unfortunately, the "boutique" category also includes a lot of other companies who produce overpriced, inferior products, or sometimes just slap a prestigious name on generic Asian imported stuff.
"Boutique" hubs
When a company wants to get started making bike parts, hubs, especially front hubs or singlespeed/track hubs are the easiest thing to make. There are many boutique and off-brand hubs out there.
Boutique hubs are often sold on the basis of light weight, but that's often a bit of a scam. Boutique hubs are generally sold without quick release skewers, while major-brand hubs come with skewers. This has two negative effects:
- The boutique hubs are effectively more expensive than they seem, because you still need to buy a skewer.
- The weight specifications you'll find in catalogues are the hubs as supplied. Thus the boutique hubs will have a significantly lower listed weight, since they are weighed without quick release skewers!
Boutique hubs are commonly CNC machined out of bar stock, so the "grain" of the metal is perpendicular to the hub flanges.
Major brand hubs have forged bodies, making the spoke flanges considerably stronger.
"Boutique" hubs are often marketed as if they were an upgrade from, say, run-of-the-mill Shimano hubs, but in fact they are generally inferior in quality to genuine Shimano hubs! (The only hubs that I consider actually superior to Shimano are Phil Wood, and they typically cost at least three times as much as Shimano.)
"Boutique" wheels
Many newer bikes come with "premium" wheels with reduced numbers of spokes. Basically anything fewer than 32 or 28 spokes per wheel would fall into this category. These wheels are touted as being faster due to improved aerodyamics, and many people assume that the reduced number of spokes makes them lighter. In practice, these wheels are actually heavier than good traditional wheels! The reason is that when you use fewer spokes, you need to use a stronger, stiffer, heavier rim to make an acceptably strong wheel.
These wheels are basically throw-away items, intended to be used for a season or until they get damaged, then replaced with a new set.
