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Zac Ziegler: I'm Zac Ziegler, and you're listening to Oregon Rainmakers from KLCC. On this edition, I talk with Christina Norton and Jeff Reynolds, the owners of Bicycle Way of Life in Eugene.
Ziegler: In Oregon, May often brings the type of weather that makes people want to get outside: lush vegetation, blooming flowers, and a big increase of blue skies. For many, a great way to spend a good amount of time soaking up the sun and sights is from the seat of a bicycle. May is National Bike Month, so plenty of people have manually powered means of travel on their minds. With that in mind, I recently stopped by Bicycle Way of Life's location off Charnelton Street in Eugene. That's where I found Christina Norton and Jeff Reynolds, two longtime employees of the company who are now also its owners. They start our conversation by telling me how they made the leap into owning the company. Christina starts us off.
Christina Norton: A little over a year ago. The former owners were getting ready to retire, and Jeff and I had each been working here for at least a decade. We were managers of each respective shop, and they offered it all to us.
Jeff Reynolds: Yeah, I started here about 11 years ago and worked with Matt and Virginia, who were the previous owners. I worked solely at the downtown location and got to know Matt and Virginia really well. They had kind of hinted at it a little bit, on and off, that they were interested in selling specifically to Chris and me, and then, yeah.
Ziegler: So what's the process been like going from longtime employee to new owner? What were the things you expected, and, to quote someone from a bygone political era, what were the unknown unknowns that you ran into?
Norton: Well, it was a lot of the same, but more. We each maintained a lot of our store management roles while trying to bring in other employees to fill those gaps. But then we also took on inventory management and the other nitty-gritty of actually running a business: figuring out our budgets, our payrolls, how we can provide benefits for our employees, and how to bring the whole business into something a little more current, a little more up to date, and put our own flavor on it.
Reynolds: Yeah. On the benefits aspect, when you're working at a place and you see how much money changes hands, you start to think, oh man, why don't we have these benefits? And then when you're in the ownership role, you realize it's really difficult to get that type of stuff. You don't think of every single bill until you're the owner. For every dollar we make, that dollar is being spent on payroll and rent and keeping the lights on. So in a really high-volume, fast-paced bike shop, there's not a lot of extra money. But we got together and figured out how we could provide health benefits for our full-time staff this year. It's a struggle, but it's really cool.
Norton: It was a goal of both of ours. That's something we really wanted to be able to do as business owners: provide that kind of thing for employees.
Reynolds: Both of us, like Chris said, managed the stores. Chris had much more solo management on her own at her store for years, while I worked alongside the owners at this store pretty much daily. When they stepped away, I definitely had to fill their shoes a bit more. And Chris took on an additional store as well, so it's totally different.
Ziegler: That was one thing that caught me off guard when I looked at the map. You have two locations, but they are definitely a short bike ride from each other. Usually you'd think of something like that as one in Eugene, one in Springfield, or one in the south and one in the north. How does having the two shops just a handful of miles apart end up working for you?
Norton: I think it works out really well. And since you've visited both shops, you can see they each have their own character. Alder Street is a little more of a neighborhood bike shop. We focus on family and kids' bikes, cargo bikes and commuter bikes. We're really close to the university, so we get a lot of student commuters and that sort of thing. Whereas here at our downtown location, with a bigger footprint, we can really focus on some of the higher-end road bikes, gravel bikes and mountain bikes, and offer a lot more variety on the floor.
Reynolds: Yeah, and I think a lot of our customers like it because we are so close to each other. If they come here and we don't have what they need, they can run down to Alder and grab it. Or if one shop is too busy to do a repair that day, they might be able to run down to the other shop. In a city like this, we have so many shops, and people can just come to us, which is great for customers who really want to stick with us. But yeah, like Chris said, they are two very different shops. We do have customers who only shop at Alder, and we may have customers who only shop downtown.
Ziegler: I can imagine being that close comes in handy. As I was standing out there, I heard you say, oh man, we've got that part, but it's at Alder. And you just make a couple of calls and it's on its way over.
Reynolds: Yeah, and our employees are happily picking things up on their way into work from one of the stores and taking it to the other. We run transfers a couple times a week. Chris works at both stores currently, so that's kind of nice. Back before my time, and Chris can speak better to this, there were even more stores, and they were all very close together, including two stores just two blocks from each other.
Norton: So when I started working for Bicycle Way of Life, it was 2007. I was a freshman in college. We had four locations: Alder Street, two downtown, one on Fifth and Olive, one just across the street on Sixth and Charnelton. We combined those two downtown stores into this location, and then one on West 11th. So between those four locations, we were moving a lot of product around and able to reach a lot of different parts of Eugene and a lot of different parts of the cycling community.
Ziegler: How has the bike industry been going? I can see reasons people would be coming in right now with high gas prices. I can also see reasons why people might be a little hesitant, because I'm sure many of the parts are made overseas, and now you've got added tariff costs. How are things doing?
Reynolds: It's crazy. Chris started in 2007, I started in 2005 or 2006, and things have changed a lot. Right now, we hear everything from shops doing really, really well to shops closing. The cost of everything has gone up, but especially bikes. We do see the tariffs on bikes and bike parts. But I think Eugene is such a bike-centric place that we really haven't seen a downtick in shoppers. We're still selling new bikes, we're doing a ton of repairs, and I think we'll see even more repairs due to gas prices. We even had a family just replace their car with three bikes. The mom was done driving, so she's buying an electric trike and a cargo trike, and then she got her kid a bike and her husband a bike. They're going car-free. She said she'd been thinking about it for a while and finally made the move just this past month. The bike industry as a whole, I think, is OK. And the bike industry in Eugene is great.
Norton: Exactly what Jeff said. Working in the industry as long as Jeff and I have, you see how things like gas prices over the years do influence behavior. When it gets more expensive, we certainly see more people coming in and considering bike commuting. And in terms of tariffs and everything else, it's affected everything, not just the bike industry. But for us it seems to be at an increment we can still work with. It hasn't become prohibitive yet.
Reynolds: Yeah, and we're picking up more U.S.-made brands as well. We picked up Catrike this year, which is built in Florida. Their frames are welded and manufactured there. We've always worked with Spur Cycle out of Bend, and we just started carrying Worksman Trikes, which are made in New York. Wolf Tooth out of the Midwest is another one. Worksman is a very, very old company. Catrike is an older company. Spur Cycle is probably within the last 15 to 20 years. Their pricing is higher, but in the world we're living in right now, it is competitive.
Ziegler: I'm Zac Ziegler, and this is Oregon Rainmakers from KLCC. My conversation with Bicycle Way of Life's Christina Norton and Jeff Reynolds continues. You mentioned earlier that one of the bikes that family bought when getting rid of their cars was an e-trike. The e-bike seems to be becoming more and more of a thing. I can remember one time I was out on a training ride, 50 miles in, struggling against the wind, and here comes this septuagenarian grandmother just sailing past me on her e-bike. I had to check my ego for a moment. I wonder if you're getting a wider range of customers because they're thinking, oh, that sounds like something I can do. Is that extra pedal assist widening your customer base?
Reynolds: Absolutely.
Norton: Oh, totally. Yeah, either from someone who's been on a bike forever but as they age just wants a little extra help so they can keep getting out on longer rides or keep up with friends on climbs, or from people who may be really intimidated to get into bike commuting because it's a bit of a trek for them, so it gives them an option. Plus, just in the last five years, the e-bikes available have gotten so much nicer, so much easier to use, so much easier to work on, and more reliable. Now we can offer a variety of really nice products we can stand behind in the e-bike market.
Reynolds: Yeah, and not just on the e-bike side. We also do adaptive and cargo bikes. We have people who thought maybe they couldn't ride, or couldn't ride anymore, because of balance issues or other medical or non-medical concerns. We have recumbent tricycles, and some of those are electric. I had a woman in here yesterday who donated her bike to Shift six months ago and said, 'I think I'm done cycling.' She came in, test rode a recumbent trike yesterday and said, 'I didn't think I'd be able to get on a bike again.' Now we're talking electric. It definitely opens things up. Like Chris said, it prolongs the lifestyle, but it also opens it up to more people. And then we have high-end stuff, too, like a 26-pound electric road bike for the rider who can't quite keep up with the group ride anymore. It's going to feel like a regular bike when the motor is off, and then you get that extra push when you need it. It's really cool.
Ziegler: I think I've had conventional bikes that weigh more than 26 pounds.
Reynolds: Impressive. It really is impressive.
Norton: Remarkable.
Ziegler: Yeah. Those road bikes, I always joke that mine weighs about half of what my wife's mountain bike weighs, but man, that's pretty impressive. And I can see how people would say, oh yeah, I can keep going on this now.
Reynolds: Yeah. Even our heavier high-end road bikes that are still 30-plus pounds, I've had 67-year-old guys say, 'I rode it without the motor on yesterday and it felt fine. And then at the end of the ride, when I needed to get home, I just turned the motor on.' It extends the range. It's almost limitless if you have a lightweight bike with a motor.
Ziegler: You have both sales and repairs here. Have you noticed any trends? Are people starting to think more about just getting something fixed rather than buying a new toy? Has that side of the business increased as inflation has gone on and wallets have gotten a little tighter?
Norton: We've always had a robust service business, but when times do get a little tougher, you see a lot more people who are keen to just repair and keep what they have on the road. And we're absolutely happy to help with that. Both Jeff and I started as mechanics, so we definitely have a soft spot for just working on a bike and getting it running for you. You're always going to have folks for whom the repair would cost more than the bike is really worth, and that's when we might have a conversation about a new or used bike. But if someone wants it repaired, we're happy to do the work.
Reynolds: Yeah. We definitely have an uptick in service this year, early in the year. I think part of that is weather, but I do think price consciousness and getting old bikes back on the road is also a factor. Like Chris said, a lot of people in Eugene don't want to throw away something that's repairable, even if it does cost more to repair than to buy a new bike. There are a lot of people out there who are really conscious about their footprint and keeping that bike on the road. We have a lot of people who are, for lack of a better word, extremely stubborn about it. And that's OK. We'll happily tell you it's going to cost more than a new bike, but we'll fix it.
Ziegler: I've got an old contractor buddy whose favorite saying is, 'Oh yeah, I'll spend your money however you want me to.' So, last topic. I won't promise last question for you, because you might spur a follow-up. You talked about learning the business side: the taxes, getting your employees benefits, and all that. But what was it on the bicycle side of the operation that, when you took over as owners, made you think, wow, I didn't think about that? What was the lesson you learned going from manager to owner?
Norton: Coming back to that quote, 'I'll spend your money however you want me to.' Before becoming owner, I did all the ordering for parts and accessories at Alder Street and just tried to keep it within a budget while getting whatever looked good or customers were asking for. At this point, though, I'm a lot more conscious about what I'm spending our money on and what I'm bringing into the store. I try to make sure to bring in things that are quality, affordable, things there's an interest in, and honestly things I can feel good selling to people. I don't want to carry something that's just going to break in two months.
Reynolds: Yeah. I do the majority of bicycle ordering, and, like Chris said, we were doing orders with other people's money. We did a good job at it, obviously, because they allowed us to do it and then sold us the business knowing we could continue. But when you actually sit down and watch those bills, it is a lot of money. That's a big learning curve, actually seeing how much of your own money is changing hands to bring bicycles into the store. That includes shipping, and we don't want to pass the shipping cost on to our customers. Of course, they could buy online and pay shipping to their house, but they come here for a reason. If we're saying it's that price plus shipping, that's just one more reason they might not want to come into a brick-and-mortar. So sometimes we have to spend a little more to get those shipping costs down by bringing in a couple extra bikes and hitting minimum orders. You look at it and think: shipping is $150, but it's free if we spend another $500. Is it worth it?
Ziegler: Lord knows how many times in my life I have ordered two or three more products just to reach that free shipping threshold.
Reynolds: Yeah. And when you're looking at bikes that cost $500 to $1,000 and you have to add five more to your order to meet shipping minimums, you have to figure out if it's worth it. Is it worth it on your bottom line that week? That's something we knew was happening, but when it's your own money, you look at it a lot differently. You have to think: do we want to bring in five extra bikes? It's easy in May, June and July, but in November and December, do we want to sit on those for a few months, or do we just want to eat the shipping cost? Yeah.
Ziegler: Well, thank you both for inviting me in and chatting with me.
Reynolds: Yeah, thanks for coming.
Norton: Oh, yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the opportunity to chat.
Ziegler: That was Christina Norton and Jeff Reynolds, the owners of Bicycle Way of Life in Eugene. This has been Oregon Rainmakers from KLCC. I'm Zac Ziegler. Thanks for listening.
