Oops my post escaped before complete. The completed post should have read:
Marcus asked about some build particularities of Cinelli bikes: "Steven Maasland had that correspondence with Andrea Cinelli regarding whether SC stood for Super Corsa or Speciale Corsa. I wonder if Andrea or someone else at Cinelli could shed some light on the subject. Steven, do you still have any contacts at Cinelli?"
Andrea confirmed that the Riviera frames were made under contract. Going by memory, I seem to recall that he told me they were made by Garlatti (it should be in the archives). The rest of the frames of the Cino era were built in house. None were built by Cino himself as he was never a builder.
With regards to sales, the large majority were sold out of their shop in Milan and abroad. They did not have an extensive dealer network in Italy. Once again going by memory, it was something like 10 dealers in Italy, all of which had some past personal ties with Cino. Andrea said that Cino did not want to create the impression that he was competing with his handlebar, accessory and tubing customers, so he only sold at exhorbitant prices. His reasoning was that anybody who was willing to pay his prices was buying his name and reputation only and wouldn't have bought something from one of his customers anyway. Andrea suggested that his prices were something like 20% higher than other 'similar' quality bikes.
Foreign sales were also much easier for Cinelli than most other Italian companies because of the family's language abilities. Cino's wife spoke very proficient English, French and German. Andrea said that in many years foreign sales accounted for 90% of sales. In Italy, in many years more bikes were supplied to individual riders as loaners or sponsorship than actually sold.
Cinelli was almost certainly the best know 'boutique' Italian builder in the world from the 50's onward. This held true in Switzerland (Cino's first wife was Swiss), Germany, France (Cino had absolutely fantastic connections in France as he was the Italian distributor for TA products), Britain, the US, Canada and teh wealthier countries of South America.
Beyond the language aspect, Cino was also able to play his enormous influence in the Italian and world Professional cycling fraternity to his advantage. Cino was in fact one of the two 'godfathers' of Italian cycling alongside Tullio Campagnolo. He was the long-time head of the pro cyclists federation and an influential member of the CONI.
Lastly, regarding production numbers, Andrea said that annual production before the 70's rarely passed 400. In the 70's the numbers went up to close to 1000 without ever passing that number. Once Colombo took over, the serial numbers indicate the year followed by the progressive build number. I have not personally seen anything but 5 digit serial numbers, so this means that even during the Colombo period, production numbers never passed 1000 frames per model per year.
Steven Maasland Moorestown, NJ USA
PS: the comment: "in France, everybody knows Colnago, but Cinelli is relatively unknown." may be true today 29 years after Cino left the business, but in 1978, the exact opposite was the case. Back then ALL bike business people, as well as most cyclists would have known Cinelli, whereas Colnago was still relatively unknown to both.