WickWërks is a cycling brand founded in Ogden, Utah, in 2001.
In 2001 a web page from Ogden announced what it called the world's smoothest shifting front bicycle derailleur, coming that fall. Its inventor, Chris Wickliffe, listed his street address and his fax number and invited riders to find him at the trade show in Las Vegas. What WickWërks ended up selling was chainrings.
Wickliffe had decided that the chainring and front derailleur interface was the worst performing part of a mountain bike. He brought prototypes to Interbike every year from 2001 through 2006 and again in 2008, including a derailleur called the Slide Guide that ran on his own twist shifters. By 2012 he was writing that Shimano and SRAM had visited his booth many times.
The rings replace what he called "the old lateral slam and drag method" with ramps that guide the chain across. Slowtwitch counted 11 of them on a 44-tooth mountain ring, where a standard ring might have two or three. Cyclocross champion Katie Compton raced them.
Wickliffe still owns the company. Twenty-five years after that first web page promised a derailleur by fall, the About page lists his wireless one, the Paradigm Shift, as coming.
WickWërks says the name of its shifting design, BRIDGE, stands for Brilliant Radically Integrated Design Generates Efficiency.
