Chang caught the biking bug after he completed high school, and he soon became one of Taiwan's best cyclists. Before retiring from competition at the age of 30, he had won several Asian and world road and track championships. Following his racing career he coached Taiwan's national cycling team and opened a bike shop selling high-end bicycles.

The shop became a gathering spot for cyclists, who talked about, well, mostly bikes--and quite often the European brands that carried the world's fastest racers. "Italy and France were known to make the best racing bikes, but each of their products had its strengths as well as weaknesses," Chang says. The cyclists dreamed of the perfect bike. "We knew exactly what we wanted," he says, "and we knew Italian and French producers weren't in the habit of filling small orders for custom designs." But business at Chang's shop was steady, and the talk remained talk.

The earthquake that struck Taiwan on September 21, 1999, caused Chang to think more seriously about the problem of getting hold of custom-made bikes. Chang's shop in Taipei suffered little, but the damage to factories in central Taiwan was extensive. The market for new bikes also shrank. "If they can't make the bikes for us," he reasoned, "why don't I do it." Besides, nearly all the parts of the Italian bicycles were manufactured in Taiwan. "It seemed to be my chance to turn the crisis into an opportunity," he said.

Chang decided that he would put his talk into action and build a better bike. His designs combine parts suited to the particular needs of the cyclist, and because of his experience selling imported bicycles, tracking them down was not a problem. His 20 years of experience and hat rack full of championship crowns helped persuade manufacturers to supply him with the parts he wanted. He explains that cyclists can be like high-end stereo lovers, assembling their dream product by picking different parts from different brands.

At the outset, Chang started with the bike's frame, which he calls the heart of a bicycle. For bike racers, the frame can give or take seconds from the race time, but not all frames suit all courses. State-of-the-art frames are generally made from aluminum and carbon fiber. Riders must weigh the competitive advantages of both. Aluminum is light and strong. Carbon fiber is even lighter but not as strong. Carbon fiber frames are used more often on track bikes, while aluminum frames are better suited for mountain bikes. Heavier aluminum bicycles are fast, but riding uphill becomes a problem, while lighter bicycles are slower on level surfaces.

It may take up to a dozen layers of paint to get the desired colors and patterns.

To make the ideal bike for a customer, Chang must know, in addition to what kind of surface the racer will ride on, a cyclist's height, weight, length of arms and legs and shoulder width. "Each cyclist is different, and so each bike should be as well."

To boost the image of his bikes, Chang has accepted some rather counterintuitive supply-chain oddities. The tubes used to make the frames, for example, are imported from Italy, but they are actually made in Taiwan. As a beginner trying to establish a brand name, Chang accepts this round tripping because he benefits from world-class suppliers' endorsements. Once he gets hold of those well-traveled frame tubes, craftsmen experienced in manufacturing for the Italian market cut, shape and weld the tubes to suit Chang's specifications.

The small size of CSK allows Chang to design all the bikes himself, keeping a tight grip on quality. Moreover, there is a lot more to consider than just the cyclist's size and weight. Chang must balance, for example, the use of stronger round tubes and weaker flat tubes, which reduce wind drag. Chang has ridden more than 50 of the world's top racing brands and is confident that his designs maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of those brands, but it is difficult for him to put the recipes that define his designs into words. "It's like cooking," he says. "A chef always knows how much salt to add, but it's kind of difficult for him to answer if you ask him exactly how many grams of salt he uses."

CSK distinguishes itself not just by the mechanics of its bicycles, but also by the custom look of the end products. CSK, for example, paints its bikes in a distinctive fashion, but every bicycle can also be hand painted to customer specifications. "Depending on the design, it may take up to a dozen layers of paint," says Lee Chi-lu, who runs the paint factory responsible for putting the color on CSK's designs. "The time-consuming process and small quantity are not agreeable to most large manufacturers."

How the bike looks has little to do with how it performs, but Chang thinks that a uniquely painted bicycle is always an eye-catching advertisement for the company. A few months ago, for example, a "strawberry bike" Chang made for the strawberry festival in Miaoli County attracted lots of attention, possibly turning strawberry-festival lovers into future customers. His stars-and-stripes bikes garnered some media attention when two secret service agents rode them during a security detail for US president George W. Bush.

When Chang completed his first bike bearing the CSK brand name in 2000, the only part that was not made in Taiwan was the derailleur system. Chang recalls a "Taiwan Bike" tournament in the late 1990s, in which all cyclists had to ride bicycles that were 100-percent made in Taiwan. A questionnaire circulated after the races indicated that the cyclists were most dissatisfied with the locally made derailleur system. Even today, the market is dominated by the Japanese brand Shimano. CSK also uses Shimano, and the investment for developing his own derailleur system is more than Chang can afford. "Does Taiwan have the ability to challenge Shimano? Definitely yes," Chang says. "Do Taiwan's large enterprises have the will to invest the money and time when it's more convenient to buy Shimano? I doubt it." Chang once proposed to work with large manufacturers to create a locally made replacement but was turned down.

Although Chang has complete confidence in his bikes, he still has a long way to go before establishing a sizable market presence. Chang explains that professional teams are supported by bicycle manufacturers, and the cost of supporting a professional bicycle team--at least US$1 million a year--is beyond the present reach of CSK. Most national teams, on the other hand, choose their own bicycles. Since cyclists' performances on national teams can propel them to professional racing organizations, they demand a lot from their bikes. By targeting these racers, Chang hopes to climb up through the profession with successful riders. Today, national teams from Australia, Malaysia and South Africa, to name a few, ride Chang's cycles.

CSK bikes are assembled at the shop in Taipei.

Chang has also exhibited his bikes at international shows. Despite the high quality of his bikes, however, sales have stumbled on the perception that Taiwan produces only leisure cycles. Chang remembers that a Japanese shop told him straight out that it would not have any made-in-Taiwan bicycles in his shop because the quality was just not there yet. Attitudes are slowly shifting, however. Japan's largest bicycle accessory manufacturer, for example, has begun to model their products on CSK cycles. CSK currently has retailers in 15 countries.

Another way to establish a reputation for a racing-bike maker is, of course, to win races. Using his connections with local and foreign cyclists who are confident in his knowledge of bicycles, Chang got some of them racing CSK bikes and the results were impressive. "A gold medal speaks louder than any promotional activity," he says. Good performance also catches the attention of professional publications, which then pay more attention to CSK products. Several of Chang's bicycles carry five-star evaluations (on a scale of one to five) in the trade magazines.

But what makes the CSK products competitive against, say, Italian five-star custom racing bikes? "Shorter delivery time," Chang replies. An Italian custom bike that is most likely manufactured in Taiwan takes between six months and two years from order to delivery. CSK delivers within one to three months for models that have already been produced, and six months at most if the design is entirely new. In part, CSK's advantage is the hunger of a new competitor. "The Italians tell you to bug off because they are on a coffee break," says Chang, who found the makers in Italy less driven by time pressures. "If you need a bike, my door is open any time of the day."

Making a thousand bikes a year, however, is hardly profitable enough to keep factories making CSK products busy. To survive, they have to take orders from other brands, and many factories are relocating to places with lower production costs. Chang believes that the growing CSK brand name will help bring more business to these small factories, boost their image in the market and bring in higher-paying orders. "Pushing for quantity is bound to fail because there's always somewhere with lower production costs," he says. "I'm not trying to be the largest, but I'm definitely going for the best."