Part I - There Is No Such Thing As The Bicycle Industry

And Why You Should Re-join It

There is no such thing as “the bicycle industry” - no collective “we” to group together in order to glean information, data, or trends. It flat-out literally does not exist, even though, some of us actually really wanted it to, myself included. But many of us still use those terms to speak about, well, I’m going to make a strained attempt here:

“Things associated with individuals who tend to coalesce around a feeling, loosely held together by a set of objects similar in form to a bicycle.”

Go ahead, attempt to define the thing any further, I’ll wait. Yes, I understand the entomology of the term “bicycle”, but look up the definition, and it simply does not describe what we’re talking about. What sets of objects are we allowed to define as a “bicycle”? Are there rules on how to play? If you say it has wheels, how many wheels can it have? Must it necessarily have a seat, or foot cranks? Where is it allowed to take us, and can it be used while standing still? What number of individuals can experience it at the same time, and must they each have their own object? Do I even have to physically own one of these contraptions to participate?

What is a bicycle?

What is a cyclist?

What is a tandem?

What is a trike?

What is a trials bike?

What is a unicycle?

What is a ski-bike?

What is an e-bike?

What is a stationary bike?

What is an adaptive bike?

What is a hand-cycle?

What is a balance bike?

What is a chainless bike?

What is a trail-a-bike?

What is a cargo bike?

What is a folding bike?

What is a water bike?

You see where I’m going here.

Aligning dropouts when bicycles were made of metals, often called “cold setting”.

Furthermore, what do so many different types of organizations, purportedly within the cohesive bicycle industry we’re referring to, have to do with one another? A Sole Proprietorship, LLC, factory, manufacturer, aluminum extruder, licenser, framebuilder, wheelbuilder, clothing company, distributor, traveling mechanic, independent sales representative, trade show organizer, consumer show organizer, event organizer, social media influencer, training coach, co-op, 501(c)(3) non-profit, cycling association, interscholastic cycling team, race sanctioning body, promoter, trail builder, mountain resort, shuttle service, youth camp, bicycle school institute, helmet technology licensing company, holding company, department store, magazine printer, commentator, news aggregator, suspension design patenter, museum foundation, and an individual riding astride a wheeled mechanical machine. What do each of these have in common?

I have many friends who have never worked for any company having anything to do with bicycles, but they ride a lot - like, a whole lot. It always struck me how little they knew about the industry that fed their love for all things bicycle. Additionally, so many friends who used to work in one of the entities mentioned above, have now undergone the classic “career change”.

The thing of it is, the only “we” that truly exists, are those of us who were magically given something that we cannot coherently explain. Something that appears to me material, but becomes indescribable when pressed. Something relational, but impossible to put to words. Something experiential, but somehow more spiritual than documentable. Something that was, in part, carefully passed down to us by, well, an independently owned bicycle shop. We came up, not through a program, but through a tradition. We were not simply managed, we were mentored. And then once a year, all of the greater collective “we’s” came together just after the cyclical good hard season, to talk shop, bond, interface with our debtors, and make agreements to spend money we hoped to eventually have for objects that did not yet exist.

All of the great endeavors of our self-described tribe are inexplicably, intensively, amazing, until they can no longer indefinitely hemorrhage money, volunteer time, or unpaid man-hours. Whether it was the original un-official Repack races, a Bay Area magazine called 180 Magazine, the National Offroad Bicycling Association (NORBA), the Professional Bicycle Mechanics Association (PBMA), the Interbike trade show, bicycle blogs, bicycle forums, or your friend-group’s local midnight moon ride - each of the best things in our concentric circles only last for a season, and then the sun sets on them all.

The business of buying and selling these bicycle shaped forms - or the dream of living off of a culturally shared feeling - is a tricky thing, there is often no margin in it. Relationships between all of the entity types listed above, are fraught with all the drama of a political election cycle - and life just goes on. We go off to school, start families, raise kids, move away, nurse injuries, and, well, get old.

Performing triage repairs on participants bicycles during Sunday Parkways in Portland, OR

Why did we let someone else group us into a line-item category? Why did we allow ourselves to become a column on someone else’s spreadsheet? Why did we adopt and use their terminology and agree to their terms?

We were not living on a model of business from the 1970’s, or even the 1950’s, but a model actually much older, like, 1800’s older. A time in which you “purchased” goods that did not yet exist, for manufacture or resale, with money you did not yet have. To see what I’m on about, go back and look at the inventor of Pepsi, Caleb Bradham. He created a concoction that his customers first called “Brads drink” building an empire of a business, when suddenly, one single ingredient bankrupted him. He lost everything and got out of the cola industry altogether and went back to being a plain ol’ pharmacist. They were and still are, called “futures”. Only now, the future risky bet is not on price, but on both supply and demand, two things very much out of our control. Vertical integration was also a product of big industrialization.

They called us IBD’s for craps sake. You all obviously know that that stands for Independent Bicycle Dealers, but that is their terminology, not ours. We always just called ourselves “the shop”, and both customers as well as employees all knew everything that that encapsulated. It was all at once a physical space, a meeting area, a hangout, a workplace, a place with tools to build and fix bikes, an information hub, a sales floor. We weren’t buying widgets for re-sale. We were selling a feeling and experience, embodied by the objects stocked in cases and on the floor. We did not initially say, “assemble” bikes, we said “build” bikes. We did not say, “service” bikes, we said “fix bikes”. They weren’t “associates”, or “team members”, they were “shop guys” or “staff”. We were not a “dealer”, we were “the shop”. Then someone else decided to change the very definition of what a bicycle is, once again. But we had to play nice with the corporations, holding companies, and financiers, because, well, we’re in business after all. Yet it wasn’t just a business was it? It was a ministry.

And someone else is now “using artificial intelligence to sell our own ideas back to us in synthetic soulless form.

“We” are still here. The ones who remember the “before times”. The ones who came into shops as a kid, green and shapeable. The ones who learned in real-time, on-the-fly, and by those who had gone the same route ahead of and before us. Many of us either left to make a living elsewhere, retired, or we’re still grinding in someone else’s definitions of the industry we inherited and enjoyed building. Let’s re-connect. Let’s build something durable together. Let’s properly pass on the torch of understanding and wisdom. Let’s bring up and mentor, as we were brought up and mentored. Let’s go for a ride together. Two more, skip the last, and then wind up at the taqueria and brewery swapping stories and memories. Let’s ride again.

Getting a lay of the land while mountain biking with friends. Antelope Island State Park, UT