This is the bike that will love you back.
So if you happen to find yourself in a supermarket in Billings, Montana or a bookstore in Boulder, Colorado, or the millions of other places where Bicycling Magazine is sold, pick it up and take a slow easy walk to page 86. There’s Natalie hard at work with a quote about why its so rad to build bikes for women. The whole issue was oozing Portland, but it sure feels nice to be recognized.
On the digital front, we got some sweet lovin from Etsy and Cool Hunting. Check it out!
A few months ago Nau approached us and said they wanted to do a video about us for their website. We were honored. This was a company that worked in bold stokes. They were ambitious, talented, and incredibly smart. They wove sustainability into everything that they did, and managed to make something truly beautiful. We are so sad to see them go. This video gives you an introduction to Sweetpea Bicycles, but it is really about Portland: why we ride, why we love it. One last thing: I am not sure if they got our Pant Spec, but they nailed the Skirt Spec. My denim skirt fits a U Lock in the back pocket and rides like a dream.
Quiet confidence and grace, and a sense of style that I can’t really take full credit for. The woman this bike was built for shares that natural ease and refined aesthetic. A natural rider whose exudes an easy strength.
Ultegra parts, Open Pro Wheelset, totally rad Campy water bottle, reflective decals.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
I got up, let the dog out, and jumped into the shower. No sooner had I pulled on my favorite pair of shop pants and an old t shirt, than a voicemail appeared blinking on my telephone. I hadn’t had my coffee, and already I was missing calls. It was Bicycling Magazine. They wanted to ask me a few questions to go along with the photos they took a couple of weeks back. Where is that coffee? Are we really out of sugar?
I returned the call, left a voicemail, and drank some coffee while checking my emails. A customer had a few questions about her bike design which presented some interesting possibilities and a couple of conversations later, we were looking at an intriguing and innovative solution. The computer, which was going to be packed into the backpack to head down to the shop, was now plugged into the wall while I plugged my ideas into BikeCAD Pro to try them out.
This design would be pretty new, so I got on the phone to review some of finer points and a few calls later I found myself talking to Grant Petersen. He asked me a couple of questions to gauge what he was dealing with, and then he asked point blank if I was mostly using carbon (he said “plastic”) forks on my bikes. I said I’ve used them on two bikes. “Well, then you are only going to hell twice.” I hoped he wasn’t the final authority on that, so we moved on to bottom bracket drops for 650B bikes and he offered his brake reach-centric fork designing method.
Back in the kitchen, the dog needed a treat. I administered a frozen treat-stuffed kong, and got back to BikeCAD. Since I was already at the computer, I started digging into some methods of making some of the technical decisions easier on my customers. A little while later, I was neck deep into Basecamp and had enlisted a couple of customers to be guinea pigs.
Uploading pictures of cable routing choices for mixte frames, I got the call I had been waiting for. Bicycling Magazine had questions for Sweetpea. Sweetpea was on her second cup of coffee and was ready for a lively interview. Talking about bikes and why women deserve the best gets me pretty stoked. It gets me thinking about all the really fantastic women who are in line for a Sweetpea, and reminds me just how lucky I am to be doing this.
After the interview I called Michael Sylvester, my bicycle fitting mentor to check in about some of our upcoming Sweetpea fittings. We went over some outstanding decisions and decided to gather some information and meet back for a bike design jam session. Next thing I knew his 4 o’clock appointment was calling. Really? Was it that late? I hadn’t even looked into the lathe purchase I am thinking of making for my new shop, let alone touched metal all day. I spent the next chunk of my afternoon coordinating a shop visit to look at some machinery and getting an education in the benefits of large spindle bore diameters on metal lathes. (To sum it up once and for all, bigger is better.)
By the time Austin came home and the puppy was roused from her slumber beneath the kitchen table, I had packed in a full day and barely left the kitchen. When you come home brushing metal shavings off your sleeves and wiping oil smudges off your forehead, you know that you’ve been making something. On days like this, work is a bit less tangible. Important work? Yes. But it doesn’t quite feel real unless something is getting bent, chopped, brazed or filed. Its days like this where I have to remind myself that if its a small failure not to touch metal, then there are times when you just have to fail harder.
Here is a preview of a rig that just came back from paint. We are calling it Two Bite Curry: the first bite is hot, the second bite sweet.
(Editor’s note: Completely reckless use of linguistic devices ahead.)
Quietly, like a new years eve celebration that goes to bed at 9:30, we celebrated our one year anniversary of being car free.
There was less fuss to going car free than I would have anticipated - the lease was up, so I put the bike in the back, went to the dealership, gave them their car back, and rode home. That was pretty much it. Not a lot of planning. A little gearing up in terms of a good rain jacket and gloves. We did go big on the fenders now that we didn’t have car or gas payments.
A couple of days into it, we were still pretty pleased with ourselves to the point where even the steady spring drizzle didn’t seem to dampen our moods. When you need to go somewhere, and you can only go by bike, then you go by bike. The simplicity was oddly comforting. When we didn’t ride, we found ourselves walking around the city noticing things we hadn’t really noticed before.
The first hitch came when we dearly wanted to cash in a coupon from the Portland Nursery across town. How were we going to haul plants and mulch? That is when we discovered the beauty of the Zipcar. Like 823-BUMP, Zipcar filled the hole in our transportation options in no time. We took those big trips to the store, and ran luxuriously quick errands on dark rainy nights. We went to the coast when we wanted to. We got a puppy - who we now haul around in a Burley.
We admit that we have it lucky: we are close to a lot of services and there aren’t kids to schlep around. And while we miss hitting the trails as much as we used to, we now have a closer relationship to our travels. Like living on a farm, we know where our transportation food comes from.
I saw an interesting comment the other day, about the cognitive disconnect that people feel when they start to really understand the impact of cars. But I don’t feel any smugness in being car free, nor do I feel like I have escaped the disconnect. We use cars, and might have to buy one someday. But I can say that going car free was easier than I thought. Kind of like taking off the training wheels.
(Art History coming in handy.)
Some of you may recognize this road bike bike from North American Handmade Bike Show where it was on display at the Spectrum Powderworks booth. I can’t really overstate this - this paint job is incredible. These guys went all out. It has a 51.5 cm seat tube and a 52.5 cm top tube and a carbon fork that takes 650c wheels. Available frame/fork for $1500, or we can help you put it together. If you are around 5′5″ and have a 31″ inseam, this could be the bike for you.
Call or contact us for details.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
This bike is amazing. Steel, leather, wood, and canvas all working together, not for good, but for awesome.
A couple of notes about the build: S&S couplers, Campy parts, dual lighting, Brooks saddle, Rivendell Lil Loafer Bag, and Full Wood Fenders. Sweetpea design, frame, fork, and rack.
Oh, and the decals are reflective.
You can see the full build in the slide show below:
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
I love welding stores, but they can be a little trippy. There are always products on the shelf from way before I was born (apparently some aspects of melting metal haven’t changed that much) and the inexplicably fashion-forward welding bandanas (da-glo florals and patriotic variations on the theme of eagles). I tend to regard them as places apart from the rest of the world, unburdened by pesky advances in gender equality or merchandising finesse. I usually march in, find my goodies, and leave, no more noticed than the guy in the gorilla costume you didn’t notice because you were busy counting how many times the basketball was passed among the players.
So imagine my surprise, when the welding store clerk engaged me on the topic of bikes. He rides to work when he can, but also drives a truck. He questions whether riding on certain streets is really safe. And few observations of bike/car dialogue later, I felt Portland seeping into the welding store experience. Then he dropped the bombshell: “I really think that these Bike Boxes are a great thing. It’s good that bikes can pull in front of cars so that they can see you, and how you can’t turn on a red. It’s going to be a lot safer…”
Bike love knows no borders. Not in this town, at least.
There are a lot of interesting questions around creativity. There are also a lot of interesting questions around business. And sometimes, the two questions mix. I had, of course, heard of Twyla Tharp and seen some of her work, but had never thought of her in a business context until I read a remarkable conversation with her in the Harvard Business Review. Copying. Failure. Mentoring. Pain. This woman covered it all, so we are adding her to our list of infrequently updated Business Heroes.
Maybe its just me, but there is so much deep wisdom and tough effort, it is hard not to be impressed. In one section she notes that to get creative, you need to start copying. Not because copying is right, but because “real learning comes not from taking someone else’s solutions, but by taking someone else’s problems.” She talked about the need for movement and how it changes the mind, and also about her mentor of 20 years, who she met only three times. “I recognized that he was the person who knew the most about what he was doing. . . so I tried to learn as much as I could from him. I mentally parked him in the corner of my studio and the insistence on thoroughness that I saw in him became my standard.” When you start talking about bodies and creativity, you invariably see a lot of parallels to designing and building custom bikes.
But one of her main points is this: creativity takes discipline, and that you have to prepare for it with routine. (More on that here.) But at the same time you have to take risks and you have to fail. Otherwise you stagnate and your work gets less interesting. Good lessons for all of us no matter what we do.
