Making Bicycles in Detroit Is an Uphill Ride

By Omar Mouallem
August 20, 2016

Omar Mouallem discusses the bicycle's history in Detroit and the innovative manufacturing that took place. Additionally, he touches on Detroit Bike's story as well as the founder's past.

A welder puts together part of a bicycle frame at the Detroit Bikes facility. The upstart bicycle manufacturer is hoping to spur a revival of a made-in-America industry in the city.

Photograph by Ty Wright / Bloomberg via Getty

If Pashak’s optimism about the hordes of would-be cycling enthusiasts seems a bit dreamy, it was nothing compared to the difficulty of creating a real American-made cycling industry. At least seven Detroit manufacturers have been trying to restore the city’s status as a bike capital, with limited success. Pashak launched Detroit Bikes with an investment of two and a half million dollars, hiring a staff of forty people at an average wage of fifteen dollars an hour. The plan was to produce two thousand bikes in year one. He solicited a design from a custom-frame builder he met online, sourced some local chromoly steel for the frames and forks, and arranged to import the other components. One of the early challenges was the inexperience of his initial hires. “We couldn’t go down the street to some other bike factory to see how they were doing things, or hire people with any experience,” Pashak said. Still, the company’s first bike, the A-Type, an upright model with a matte-black coat, rolled off the assembly line in the summer of 2013.

Mike Duggan, who was in the midst of a successful mayoral campaign, was on hand to receive the very first bike. Then, as now, civic leaders were championing the bicycle’s potential. The number of bike commuters in Detroit has quadrupled since 2000, according to data analyzed by the League of American Bicyclists, and the city, which has thirty-four registered cycling groups, has painted a hundred and seventy miles’ worth of bike lanes in the past decade (albeit largely unprotected and poorly connected ones). Duggan’s administration is also halfway to completing the Inner Circle Greenway, a thirty-mile loop connecting Detroit and three suburbs. In April, the city’s new planning director, Maurice Cox, promised that “Detroit will be America’s best city for bicycling.” Cox told me that Detroit’s affordability, high car-insurance premiums, and depopulation constitute advantages where cycling is concerned. The city’s road network was built for a population more than double its current seven hundred thousand. “We have so much space in our roads that if we came in and laid down a network of protective bike lanes, the motorists wouldn’t even notice the day after,” Cox said.

Detroit Bikes jumped on these efforts. Pashak has been working with St. Clair Shores on a proposed bike lane that would connect the suburb to Detroit through Grosse Pointe Shores, while employees participate in rides and bike clubs. The company’s master builder, whose name is, fittingly, Henry Ford II, has become a minor celebrity in Detroit, appearing in Microsoft and Apple commercials online leveraging the city’s bike renaissance. He’s one of the original participants in Slow Roll, a weekly summer gathering that has attracted as many as five thousand riders.

The environment could not have been more welcoming, but Detroit Bikes struggled. The A-Type was priced at seven hundred dollars—more than most locals could afford—and was perceived as an artisanal product by most retailers. The company cut its daily output from thirty bicycles to ten and laid off half its staff. By the time it released its second model, the B-Type, in 2014, it was selling a modest thousand bikes per year. Other domestic bike companies were encountering similar problems. A few, like AutoBike and Zen Bicycle Fabrication, closed after only a few years, while others have had to focus on expensive, small-batch bikes, or to compromise on sourcing materials. The similarly named Detroit Bicycle Company sells a copper-plated fixie for more than four thousand dollars, while Shinola, which markets popular “Built in Detroit” vintage cruisers for three thousand dollars, sources frames from Wisconsin and other components from overseas.

Detroit Bikes’ response to its own troubles was to implement a national sales strategy, open a flagship store downtown, and expand into custom builds for corporate brands. It also recently landed an important new client: Motivate, which operates bike-share services in a dozen cities. Motivate hired the company to assemble three thousand heavy upright cruisers for the expansion of New York City’s Citi Bike program. This summer, Detroit Bikes will also begin selling the C-Type, a lighter, single-speed bike without fenders or chain guards, for six hundred dollars—on par with similar models produced by Linus, a popular California company that fabricates its bikes in China. Detroit Bikes now projects that it will sell seven thousand new bikes this year, enough that it is employing fifty people.

This modest success is a long way, of course, from a wholesale revival of the domestic industry. Pashak would like to manufacture more of his bikes’ components in Michigan, and has been in discussions about making cranksets (the ring to which pedals and chains attach) locally. But the problem of scale remains: no domestic manufacturer produces bikes at the volume required to make wholly made-in-America ones affordable.

However, economic forces like rising Chinese wages apply to the bicycle industry, no less than to the car and appliance manufacturers that have begun to bring jobs back from overseas. In October, 2014, a new plant opened in Manning, South Carolina, with the aim of building mass-market bikes that sell for two hundred dollars or less. The Bicycle Corporation of America factory, which is operated by Kent International, was supported by the state government, and bolstered by a sales relationship with Walmart’s two-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar buy-American initiative. Though the facility will only assemble the bikes, using parts imported from Shanghai and Shenzhen, the company plans to begin fabricating frames in Manning next year. With as many as three hundred thousand bikes set to be produced there in 2016, and a 2017 target of half a million, the Manning plant could increase the number of American-made bikes tenfold almost overnight.

Jay Townley, an industry analyst and former executive at Schwinn Bicycles, told me that Manning could well have spillover effects. “If the low-cost producer, Kent, selling to low-end retailer, Walmart, can come up with a viable way to make money while making bikes in America, you’re going to see more and more of the manufacturing done here,” he said. Townley estimated that sales of a million bikes a year would be required to create a market for a domestic-parts industry.

Recently, Pashak went to Manning to visit Kent’s C.E.O., Arnold Kamler, to pitch him on sourcing additional components in Detroit, which Pashak hoped would resurrect the domestic-parts industry. “Why do you need Chinese companies to do that?” Pashak asked Kamler. “We have the people looking for jobs who can do this very well. Not only that, but we have the factory space.”

Kamler told me that he hopes that a revival of domestic-part manufacturing will happen soon. “If we can bring the costs of production in South Carolina to the same levels or lower than China, we can up our volume to two million or three million,” he said. “If this is going to grow like I hope it does, we’re going to need a better supply chain.”

He did say, though, that he wants that to happen in South Carolina, and responded to Pashak’s pitch by encouraging him to move his operation south, much as car companies did decades earlier. Pashak, for his part, told me that he’s eager to collaborate with Kent, but that he’s firmly set on Detroit. “My dream,” he said, “is to build a bigger factory that’s somewhat of a tourist attraction, too. It would be cool if when people came to town one of the things they thought of was bike manufacturing.”

Omar Mouallem is writer based in Edmonton, Alberta. He won a Canadian National Magazine Award for profiles in 2014. Read more »

Read the article here.

Taking Over Bike-Share Programs

When Zak Pashak’s factory opened in 2013, bicycle manufacturing in the U.S. had all but disappeared.

By Tim Higgins | July 13, 2016

Photographs by Ricky Rhodes

From Bloomberg Businessweek

The Detroit Bikes factory sits on the West Side of the city near scattered abandoned homes and a junkyard full of rusted car parts. Inside, workers are taking test rides through the 50,000-square-foot facility on a fleet of freshly assembled bicycles destined for New York’s Citi Bike bike-share program. On foot, founder Zak Pashak, 36, dodges the riders, navigating a path around the chaotic floor and holding forth on the virtues of American-made chromoly steel—which, in case you’re not a metallurgist, is lighter and stronger than standard steel and is what Pashak uses in his house line. He stops and points to the loading dock, where a tractor-trailer waits to haul the bikes more than 600 miles to Citi Bike headquarters in Brooklyn. “This was my dream when we got the factory—watching semis drive away at the end of the day,” Pashak says.

When his factory opened in 2013, bicycle manufacturing in the U.S. had all but disappeared. The long, downward spiral began in the 1980s, when industry-giant Schwinn shifted work to Asia, a cost-saving move that other manufacturers such as Huffy soon copied. In 2015 only 2.5 percent of the estimated 12.6 million bikes sold in the U.S. (not including those for children) were made here, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association. “A lot of people thought it was really goofy when I first started this,” says the bearded Pashak, who describes Detroit as “a good spot for urban revitalization to take hold” and is prone to similarly grandiose talk about changing the world. If his technology weren’t 200 years old, he could pass for a startup founder.

It probably was really goofy, based purely on economics. But at a time when we want our kale organic and our beer microbrewed, manufacturing bicycles in the cradle of the U.S. transportation industry turns out to be just rational enough. Shinola, which also sells bikes, might have stolen Pashak’s thunder by becoming the face of Detroit’s rebound. Yet Detroit Bikes’ contract with Motivate, the company that runs bike-sharing programs in 12 metro areas, has helped put Pashak’s company on pace to churn out 10,000 bikes this year. It’s nice that in doing so he’ll employ 50 people in a city with 10 percent unemployment, about double the national rate. It’s perhaps more significant that without this Canadian transplant’s operation, options for how busy urbanites get from point A to point B might literally be fewer and farther between.

Pashak, whose former stepfather was an oilman and co-owner of the Calgary Flames, had millions to spend on risky endeavors when he relocated to Detroit from Calgary five years ago. He was used to riding without training wheels: In 2003 he opened Broken City, which became one of Calgary’s premier live-music venues, without having run a bar before. He ran for City Council in 2010, having never sought public office—and lost. It forced him to figure out what was next. He’d been fascinated with Detroit since childhood, when he watched ’80s action heroes such as Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I., Peter Weller in RoboCop, and Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, all of whom had ties to the Motor City. “I had this feeling that cool people came from Detroit,” Pashak says. “I felt a gut draw.” He wanted to be part of its economic rebound. Detroit didn’t need another Broken City, he decided, but a factory made sense. “It’s got a history of manufacturing; there are a lot of people who’ve got skills who haven’t been able to use them in a long, long time,” he says.

It was Pashak’s failed City Council bid that gave him a passion for two-wheelers. While running for office, he studied urban-transit public policy and came to see bikes as a solution for big-city ailments—everything from pollution to traffic congestion. “It’s a highly efficient machine, yet people have this complicated relationship with it,” he says. “A lot of people think bikes are for hippies or people who got a DUI, or for people who are poor and can’t afford a car. Or they’re for kids.” Even more complicated: price. High-end bikes with carbon-fiber frames, suspension packages, and multispeed gears are expensive to buy, let alone maintain. So Pashak thought a basic bike, meant for the nation’s urban jungles, might have marketplace potential. And that was it. He was off to Detroit.

When Pashak arrived, he bought an old house in the city’s historic Boston-Edison neighborhood, just blocks from where Henry Ford once lived. Like any good American entrepreneur, he began tinkering in his garage with a prototype inspired by a 2012 trip to Copenhagen, a city famed for its riding culture. It was a process: “Everything that could’ve gone wrong has done so at least once,” he says, explaining that equipment broke and the factory wasn’t laid out efficiently. In 2013 production began on the A-Type model. The $700 A-Type has a utilitarian, matte-black frame, three speeds, and a rear rack with the Detroit Bikes logo. A women’s version, the B-Type, comes in white and mint.

Production was slow in 2014 when Pashak cold-called New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colo. He had a simple question: Did it need a bikemaker? The brewery is best known for its Fat Tire amber ale, with a shiny, vintage, red bicycle on the label. Every year the company bestows bikes on employees to celebrate work anniversaries and other special events, and for years it had turned to manufacturers in Asia. It just so happened that New Belgium’s bike designer had started looking for an American manufacturer around the time Pashak called. “He was having trouble actually finding a company in the U.S. that could scale up and make 2,500 bikes,” says Bryan Simpson, a New Belgium spokesman. Detroit Bikes had capacity to spare; production began in earnest earlier this year. Pashak says: “It was huge—a big leap of faith for them. They made this company possible.” The contract with Motivate this spring made it a business. Currently, Motivate uses Detroit Bikes-assembled bicycles in New York, Boston, and Jersey City.

Back at the factory, Pashak heads to a corner and shows off a machine that makes wheels. “This is how we won the contract for Citi Bike,” he says. Although New Belgium’s bikes are constructed start-to-finish in Detroit, Citi Bikes technically aren’t entirely American-made. The aluminum frames come from Asia, and Pashak’s crew assembles them. Wheels, however, are more cumbersome and expensive to transport. By making those locally, says Jay Walder, Motivate’s chief executive officer, the company has reduced the number of shipping containers coming from Asia by two-thirds. Better yet, being able to say that Motivate bikes are assembled at home gives it a leg up in negotiations with city governments as the company expands. “If you’re a mayor or a transportation commissioner, it’s nice to be talking about the fact that this program, which is a big part of the community, is creating jobs at home,” Walder says.

When Walder’s tenure at Motivate started in October 2014, finding a domestic manufacturer became a priority. But he struggled to find anyone who could handle a 3,000-unit order built to Motivate’s specs. “The industry is not set up to do anything like this,” Walder says. Before Detroit Bikes, “there were no bike-share bicycles that were being made anywhere in the United States.” This year, Motivate plans to add 8,000 bikes, bringing the total to 28,000. Pashak—whose factory has gone from pumping out 20 bikes a day to 80 since signing on to make Citi Bikes—wants as much of that business as possible. He estimates that he, his mother, and an investor named Bernard Sucher, a native son who’s worked for Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, have put as much as $4 million into Detroit Bikes. Pashak is on pace to break even this year, he says.

With the New Belgium and Motivate contracts providing some stability, Pashak is looking to expand his retail business. Earlier this year he hired Scott Montgomery, a 30-year industry veteran whose father co-founded Cannondale, to head national sales. The move signaled to industry watchers that the quirky company is emerging from Shinola’s shadow. “If they expand their lineup, they’ll appeal to a lot more people,” says Pete Kocher, who’s sold a few Detroit Bikes at Ride Brooklyn, with shops in the borough’s cyclist-dense Park Slope and Williamsburg neighborhoods. “They’ve got a load of potential to grow.” Montgomery says he wants Detroit Bikes in 100 more stores by yearend, for a total of 400 retail outlets in 150 U.S. cities. The company plans to start selling a new design, the racing-oriented C-Type, later this summer. The A-Type and B-Type will soon get more gears and colors.

After walking through the factory, Pashak looks for a quiet moment away from the banging of metal and lingering smell of welded steel. Outside, the street is calm and empty. “Having a factory that impacts the community directly is very cool,” he says. Some of his workers even walk to work: “As an urbanist, idealist kind of guy, that’s the coolest thing.”

Detroit Bikes to build thousands of bikes for nation’s largest bike share operator

Detroit, MI – May 4, 2016 –Detroit Bikes, North America's only large-scale bicycle manufacturer, and Motivate, the nation’s leading bike-share operator, announced that Motivate’s bikes will now be assembled in the United States.

Detroit Bikes will assemble 3,000 Motivate bikes in its 50,000 square-foot factory in Detroit.

The manufacturer will also build wheels and oversee local partners to paint frames and forks.

As a result of the increased workload, Detroit Bikes has added ten workers and a built a new assembly line.

“This contract makes a huge statement about what Detroit is capable of” said Zak Pashak, Founder and President of Detroit Bikes. “It is fitting that American bike-share bikes will be assembled here in America and we’re proud to work with Motivate to make it happen,” he said. “Detroit Bikes is looking forward to working with even more cities and systems as we hone our capabilities.”

“It’s terrific that Motivate, a growing national business has selected a Detroit company for this manufacturing work,” said Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, “It’s another good sign of the strength of Detroit business. This initiative will create jobs in a Detroit neighborhood and help power an innovative new form of transportation.”

Motivate operates the largest bike share systems in the country and nearly 70% of the entire bike-share fleet in the U.S. Moving the assembly of its bikes to the U.S. allows Motivate to ensure quality control and fulfill orders for new bikes more quickly.

“I can’t think of a better place to have our bike assembly operations than Detroit,” said Jay Walder, President & CEO of Motivate. “With Detroit Bikes’ help, Motivate will be able to meet the growing demand for bike-share operations in cities all across the country, getting more bikes to more people more quickly.”

Carrying forward with this success in bike-share partnerships, Detroit Bikes is thrilled to announce a subsequent partnership with CycleHop, the nation’s fastest growing bike-share provider, to bid on the recently announced City of Detroit bike-share RFP, operated by the City of Detroit Department of Transportation (DDOT) and the Downtown Detroit Partnership (DDP).

“If we’re going to making thousands of bikes for some of the biggest bike share programs in the country, it only makes sense that the city of Detroit would also look to a local manufacturer when sourcing bikes for their new program” said Zak Pashak. “We would love to be able to contribute to the city’s program and have partnered with some of the most well respected names in bike-share to put together a rock solid proposal”. The City of Detroit bike-share RFP was announced in November of 2015.

About Motivate:
Motivate is a global leader in bike share. A full-service bike share operator and technology innovator, Motivate works to re-envision how people experience and move around cities. Motivate currently manages all of the largest bike share systems in the United States and many of the largest systems in the world, including Bay Area Bike Share (California Bay Area), Citi Bike (New York and Jersey City), Divvy (Chicago), CoGo Bike Share (Columbus, Ohio), Capital Bike Share (Washington, D.C.; Arlington and Alexandria, Va.; and Montgomery County, Md.), Hubway (Boston, Somerville, Cambridge and Brookline, Mass.), Pronto (Seattle), Bike Chattanooga (Tenn.), Bike Share Toronto, and Melbourne Bike Share in Australia. Motivate will add thousands of bikes to its current systems and launch the new BIKETOWN bike share system in Portland, Oregon in July 2016.

Scott Montgomery to lead Detroit Bikes Sales Team

Detroit, MI – March 15, 2016 – Detroit Bikes, the American bike manufacturer, has hired Scott Montgomery, as National Sales Director.

Montgomery brings more than 30 years of experience in the bicycle industry to Detroit Bikes.

His career includes a long tenure with Cannondale and returning Scott Sports to North America.

He will split his time between Nutcase helmets as CEO, and Detroit bikes.

In his role at Detroit Bikes, Montgomery will guide national retailer sales and marketing.

“Detroit Bikes has made a lot of progress within the bike industry in a short time," Montgomery said. “They’re appealing to a broad audience of urban, commuter, hybrid and casual cyclist’s with a high quality American made bicycle.”

Detroit Bikes is continuing to expand its retailer initiatives. The rapidly growing manufacturer builds its signature bikes in a 50,000 square foot factory on the city’s west side of Detroit. Its distinctive, quality bicycles can be seen everywhere from cities and corporate campuses to bike trails and parks.

“Scott’s expertise is a very welcome addition,” said Detroit Bikes Founder and President, Zak Pashak. “We’re growing quickly and his experience working with companies like ours will be a big advantage.“

Detroit Bikes debuts new models

Sacramento, CA – February 9, 2016 – Detroit Bikes will debut its New Belgium Brewing Fat Tire bike at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS), the world’s largest consumer show for custom-built bicycles.

Joining hundreds of bike makers from across the United States, Detroit Bikes will also display its growing line of production bicycles as well as offering new products and services to fellow bike builders.

The Fat Tire bike, manufactured exclusively for New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, CO, is part of a multi-year contract to produce thousands of bikes to promote the beer maker’s Fat Tire Amber Ale.

In addition to contract manufacturing, Detroit Bikes has begun working as a key supply chain partner for a major US bike share provider. This agreement includes wheel building, powder coating, assembly, and shipping for more than 3,000 bikes.

Detroit Bikes’ capabilities have grown to also provide new services and products to others. The company offers painted or raw frames, frame kits, and specialty items like bottom bracket shells to bike builders.

“We’re excited to show the hand built community everything Detroit Bikes can do,” Said Founder and President, Zak Pashak. “Through a traditional assembly line approach, we’re able to manufacture a high volume of quality, hand built frames and components available to everyone.”

Detroit Bikes Hires New COO to Direct Major Production Increase

Detroit, MI – January 20, 2016 – Detroit Bikes has hired Chris Kiesling as Chief Operating Officer. Kiesling will focus on strengthening and expanding Detroit Bikes’ manufacturing operations to meet growing customer demand.

In addition to manufacturing its own signature bicycles in 2016, Detroit Bikes will also manufacture thousands of bikes for New Belgium Brewery, in concert with other custom manufacturing contracts.

Detroit Bikes also recently entered into an agreement to act as a key supply chain partner for a major US bike share provider. This agreement involves various aspects of production for several thousand bikes annually.

Kiesling joins Detroit Bikes from DTE Energy where he served as a plant manager. In his new role, Kiesling will greatly improve employee engagement and manufacturing efficiencies for Detroit Bikes. Drawing on more than ten years of experience leading safety and process engineering efforts at DTE, Kiesling will guide Detroit Bikes through its growth.

“This is a critical time,” he said. “Now we transition from a company that produced a thousand bikes a year into one that can produce thousands each month. ” “The Detroit Bikes factory is configured in a way that is well-suited to an increase of this scale,” said Kiesling. “We need to analyze throughput and effectively use the tools we have at our disposal to ensure successful growth. “

To handle the Increased workload, Detroit Bikes is adding additional positions including welders, wheel builders, powder-coaters, and bike assemblers.

“Things are moving very fast for Detroit Bikes,” explained Detroit Bikes Founder and President, Zak Pashak. “Bringing Chris aboard strengthens our management team at a crucial time. His leadership, and process engineering skill are what we need to continue to grow.”

Kiesling graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in chemical engineering before earning his masters of business administration from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining DTE, Kiesling worked for National Industrial Maintenance and the National Steel Corporation.

Detroit Bikes Crowd Funds Latest Bike on Kickstarter

Detroit’s only Bike Factory Will Manufacture Limited Edition Bikes in the Motor City

Detroit, Mich. – November 4, 2015 – Stimulating the local economy and advancing the made-in-America movement, Detroit Bikes has launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowd fund its newest bicycle, the C-Type.

The fan-funded campaign aims to raise $100,000 by November 30. Visit the campaign HERE. After opening its retail flagship in the heart of downtown Detroit earlier this year, America’s fastest growing bike manufacturer has set its sights on expanding its global reach.

“Kickstarter is a great way for us to launch a new model,” explained, Detroit Bikes founder and president, Zak Pashak. “Our supporters get first access to limited edition bikes or unique Detroit Bikes items and experiences. At the same time, funding this campaign enables Detroit Bikes to configure our factory for increased production and hire new staff.”

The C-Type is the latest addition to Detroit Bikes’ line of high-quality and affordable bicycles. Retailing for $599, it’s a simple and solid single-speed road bike. Without derailleurs or other gearing systems, it has fewer parts that require maintenance, making it ideal for city commuting or recreational riding in all weather.

The C-Type is the latest edition to the company’s line of American-made bicycles. Joining the A-Type and B-Type, all three models are manufactured in Detroit Bikes’ 50,000 square-foot factory in Detroit. Available to Kickstarter supporters only, funders can grab limited edition, numbered collectors editions of the C-Type in six unique colors - hunter green, fluorescent yellow, flat black, royal blue, mint green or chrome.

To find out more, go to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1202301321/the-detroit-bikes-c-type-the-american-single-speed

Cycling and Cider

Detroit Bikes to Manufacture 1,000 Cycling-Inspired Tap Handles for Virtue Cider

Detroit, Mich. – October 20, 2015 – Detroit Bikes has announced an agreement with Virtue Cider to produce 1,000 tap handles for use in bars and restaurants across the United States.

Detroit Bikes, North America's fastest growing bicycle manufacturer, will make the tap handles in its 50,000 square-foot factory in Detroit.

Designed by the Virtue Cider team, the Tap Handles will be constructed from the same American-made steel tubing that Detroit Bikes uses in its bikes.

“This deal is very exciting for us,” said Detroit Bikes president and founder, Zak Pashak. “Not only do we get to partner with a growing Michigan Cider Brewery in Virtue Cider, it’s also an opportunity for Detroit Bikes to demonstrate another side of our manufacturing capabilities.”

Located in Fennville, on Michigan’s west coast, Virtue Cider makes its distinctive beverages from heritage apples grown on the local orchards that surround Virtue Farm.

“We source all our apples from Michigan and we all ride bikes, so why not have our friends at Detroit Bike make our tap handles right here in Michigan?” Said Gregory Hall, co-founder at Virtue Cider. “It’s a perfect solution. Plus, they are going to be the coolest tap handles out there.”

About Virtue Cider:

Virtue is the hard cider venture launched in June 2011 by Gregory Hall, former brewmaster at Goose Island, and co-founder Stephen Schmakel.

The company’s mission is to make European-style ciders from fresh heirloom apples – never from concentrate – and employ traditional farmhouse production methods that include native and secondary fermentation, use of wild yeasts, and an expansive barrel-aging program.

For more information about Virtue Cider, head to http://virtuecider.com/morsel-info/?morselid=2757

Is Motor City On Its Way to Becoming Cycle City?

Written by Dana Mcmahon September 22, 2015

There's a new spin on the Motor City—and it's on two wheels. Long synonymous with American auto manufacturing (and its demise), Detroit is now home now to a scrappy start-up determined to bring handmade American bikes to the world.

Building on the manufacturing prowess of this rebounding city, Detroit Bikes is turning out stylish and utilitarian bicycles from a sprawling, long-abandoned factory on the west side.

Hands once tuned to auto-making now craft two commuter bikes: the A-Type, with a matte black frame, and the glossy white step-through B-Type. These are the onlybikes wholly manufactured in Detroit, all within an honest-to-goodness factory where red curtains shield employees from the sparks as the bike frames are hand-welded.

Since launching with the prototype, which was constructed near a house where Henry Ford once lived, the plant now builds 30 bikes a day—and can ramp up to 100. Among the final hands to touch the bikes at the plant is an employee named (no joke) Henry Ford. After the bikes are born on the west side of Detroit, they head for retailers around the world.

Cyclists looking to own these modern examples of Detroit workmanship may track down both A- and B-Types in Europe, Asia, and North America; the flagship store, of course, is an intimate boutique downtown, Detroit Bikes 1216. All crown molding, crimson flocked wallpaper, and rich oak paneling in a restored historic building, 1216 is a jewel box rather than a simple bike shop. est rides are encouraged and it's on two wheels—especially these two oversized-for-comfort wheels—that's the best way to take in the changes evident in the neighborhoods of the "D."

Cruise along Dequindre Cut—a former rail line turned greenway—or join Slow Roll, one of the largest bike groups in the country and a weekly community bicycle ride focused around urban exploration.

These bikes were designed for city riding, and with three speeds—all you need—and combo hand/pedal brakes (remember those?), they swallow up the blocks. With $699 price tags, these bicycles are not merely luxury showpieces.

Don't let their elegance fool you; these are workhorses that reflect the capability of the city in which they're made. You'll spot book-laden students in Midtown, briefcase-toting workers in the Necklace District, evening exercisers on the paths of Belle Isle, and other Detroiters hauling home a bounty of local goods from Eastern Market on the bikes. It's evident that two wheels, not only four, are fast becoming a fresh symbol of the new Motor City.

http://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2015-09-21/motor-city-cycle-city-detroit-bike-company

Motor-less City?

Jen Wieczner

Oct 09, 2014

Before there was the Model T, there was the Quadricycle. Henry Ford fashioned his original automobile from four bicycle wheels and a chain at the height of Detroit’s 19th-century bike (yes, bike) manufacturing boom. If Detroit rose and fell on for four wheels, its past—and potentially its future—was built on just two. As the city wends its way through bankruptcy court this fall and its core industry lurches back to solvency, the Motor City is revving up to become a manufacturing hub again, this time for a vehicle that has no motor at all: the bicycle.

Over the past several years, at least seven bicycle makers have set up shop in the Detroit metro area, touting sleek, artisanal models. “Everybody in this town knows somebody who worked for the Big Three,” says Steven Bock, a Ford Motor Co. clay sculptor who is now applying his car skills to bicycles. “It’s kind of in the Detroit DNA to build things.” Bock founded Detroit Bicycle Co. in 2011, where he makes custom handcrafted single-speed and fixed-gear bikes ($4000 to $6000) when he’s not sculpting full-size clay models of cars for Ford.

When he's not sculpting clay models of cars for Ford Motor, Steven Bock builds bikes by hand under the moniker Detroit Bicycle Co. This copper single-speed bike sells for $4,400. Photograph by Ackerman + Gruber

Joining Bock is Slingshot Bicycle, a 30-year-old Michigan-based company that moved into its new Detroit-area manufacturing facility in June as it repatriates production from Taiwan. Then there’s 313 Bicycle Works, started recently by Detroit firefighter Mike Sheppard and named  after the Motor City area code. Not to be left out, Shinola, a manufacturer of trendy watches and other goods, assembles Wisconsin-made bikes at its new Detroit storefront.

The biggest Motor City bike maker, though, is Detroit Bikes. Founder Zak Pashak invested $2.5 million in a 50,000-square-foot factory (staffed by former engineers of General Motors (GM) and other carmakers) that mints about 10 bikes a day and has sold nearly 1,000 so far. Eventually he aims to produce as many as 50,000 a year.

Based in a 50,000-square-foot factory, Detroit Bikes is gearing up to become one of the only mass-producers of bicycles in the U.S. today. Staffed by auto industry veterans of GM and other carmakers, the company manufactures about 10 commuter road bikes daily (priced at $699 apiece)—and plans to increase output by at least tenfold. Here, Henry Ford II assembles the company's A-Type bicycle. Photograph by Ackerman + Gruber

If its plan is successful, Detroit Bikes alone would double the number of two-wheelers manufactured in the U.S. today. The industry largely disappeared a generation ago when Schwinn, Trek, Huffy, and other American brands moved most of their manufacturing offshore in the 1980s and ’90s. A mere 56,000 bicycles were produced in America last year, the National Bicycle Dealers Association estimates. “Hopefully we can see the rebirth of the bicycle manufacturing business in this country,” Pashak says.

Several factors seem to be driving the renaissance of the bike industry in Detroit. Beat-up by the Great Recession, Detroit’s vacant factories and cheap rent have lured young entrepreneurs and artists to set up shop in the city. The vestiges of car manufacturing—leftover machinery, abundant powdercoat shops and of course, skilled auto industry veterans seeking work—have proven a treasure to bike makers and other craftspeople.

Detroit’s mean streets have also grown friendlier. As the population has shrunk, so too has the number of cars on the city’s wide roads, which seldom see traffic jams anymore—making them a haven for cyclists. Since 2006, Detroit has added 150 miles of new bike lanes, including some transformed from old railroads like the Dequindre Cut, says Todd Scott, head of the Detroit Greenways Coalition (and local bike historian).

Meanwhile, deepening poverty and joblessness in Detroit may encourage biking as a more affordable alternative to driving. While the number of Detroit workers commuting by car has fallen by 20% since 2007, those commuting by bike has surged 43%, according to Census data. Detroit has had the biggest increase in bike commuting of any major American city since 1990, reports the League of American Bicyclists.

Now, nascent bicycle makers are hoping to capitalize on continued growth and enthusiasm for biking in Detroit—as well as demand for products that are not only American-made, but homegrown in the Motor City itself. Pashak of Detroit Bikes, for one, is looking to raise $1 million from investors to accelerate the factory’s current output more than tenfold and become a true mass-producer of bicycles. And Bock’s Detroit Bicycle Co., which has a bike on display at the Henry Ford Museum, is also seeking at least $200,000 in investment in order scale up his one-man operation with additional builders and a showroom.

Jay Townley, co-founder of the Gluskin Townley Group who studies the American cycling industry, sees a rekindling of the Ford-era biking boom in Detroit. Between growing ridership and a rebirth of two-wheeled manufacturing, he says, “All of a sudden you’re in what turns out to be the bike city of the country.”

The original version of this article is available here.

An abbreviated version of this story appeared in the October 27, 2014 issue of Fortune.

Selling the Model T of Bicycles

Heather Smith of Grist writes about the history of Detroit, bicycles and how Detroit Bikes fits in. Tracing history back to 1896 when Henry Ford built a "quadricycle” out of a tiny sofa mounted on four bicycle wheels. Also mentioned are Detroit Bicycle Company, Shinola, TechShop, and Slow Roll.

When I first found out about Detroit Bikes, I assumed that it was pulling down massive subsidies from the city. The idea of moving manufacturing back into cities is trendy right now in urban planning circles, and the product — bikes, made in Detroit — seemed tailor-made for a grant-making committee. But there were no subsidies or tax breaks.

It’s not that he’d turn such help down, Pashak says. “I just didn’t want to come here looking for a handout.” When he began thinking of leaving his hometown of Calgary, Alberta, he settled on Detroit because it seemed like the logical endpoint to the sprawl that he saw developing around Calgary and other cities. “Detroit feels like the apocalyptic future that some cities will face if they continue to keep growing,” Pashak told Canadian Business earlier this year. “I feel like there’s something to learn here.”- Heather Smith, Grist

Read the whole article here.

Cycling in the Motor City

How a former DJ from Calgary moved to Detroit, built a bike factory and found opportunity among the ruins

Photos by Matt Barnes

Jason McBride of Canadian Business talks about various details of Detroit Bikes. From the factory to the background of the owner and president.

Broader topics are discussed that include the realities of owning a home and operating a business in Detroit, manufacturing in the US, as well as similarities found in Calgary, Canada.

“In Pittsburgh, we’re sitting on the prime example of the transformation from industry to knowledge,” says Don Carter, the director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Carter attributes Pittsburgh’s particular transformation to a genuine, forward-thinking public-private partnership, but one that also recognized the increasing importance of quality-of-life to urban populations. Of Detroit and its burgeoning creative class, he says, “The last thing in the world you want to do is discourage the bottom-up stuff. It’s not going to create 50,000 jobs overnight, no. But it is a spark. You need to nurture that, blow on it, get some tinder under it, and build on it. You just never know what thing is going to take off.” - Jason McBride, Canadian Business.