Straight to the Source

There's no secret about the fact that just about everything on your bike originated in Taiwan, so why not buy it direct from Taiwan? Cut out the middle man so to speak?

You'd get exactly the same pivotal stump post, or whatever, but without paying for the image points accrued from your particular brand loyalty. And as we all know riding's got absolutely nothing to do with buying an image so what's the problem?

You want brand with a decent reputation for quality - "a name you can trust", a "rider owned" company, or one that "gives back to bmx". Maybe all those things actually are worthy of consideration, but throwing in a couple of generic, straight from the source Taiwanese options might keep the rest of them honest. Personally I wouldn't go buying forks or frames from them, or more tech parts like a cassette, but a plain, black, unbranded 7075 sprocket or stump post I might consider.

In fact, someone should start up a company, call it Black Bikes and make one generic, black version of everything - one size fits all, any colour so long as it's black, no team, no videos, no stickers, no softgoods, no frills, 40% cheaper than everything else. Would that work? It kind of bucks the trend of a new colour every five minutes, a new web edit every five minutes and parts you change every five minutes, but surely there's got to be some people out there that are sick of the hype.

Anyway, these guys are far from the imaginary Black Bikes, they are Messiah Bike Co, but they are definitely straight out of Taiwan. Here's the description off their site of the rim tape they do:

"Candy Tape
Hey! It's funnnny. Normally, we could not find any special package for rim tape.
Therefore,we came out a idea that is candy.
We want to make it not only a rim tape.
It will be jucy and taste good also with fuuny.
So we designed 4 kinds of cover to choose"

That one got lost in translation. But the rest of their parts are simple, colourful, light and I'm guessing cheap. So there's no reason for people not to like them. They include a stem, a fork, a sprocket, bars, pivotal seat and post. And don't forget the rim tape.

No idea if or where you can get them, but they look like this: