I have observed and participated in the bike industry for nearly three decades but I can say with great surety that this year has been my least favorite.  I’ve worked harder than ever to earn less reward than ever… and I don’t merely mean financial reward.  There was no expectation that I would become favorably wealthy running Baker Bicycle Works, it has always been a labor based in both love and passion for a particular machine and a peculiar belief about it.  But there was hope that I would find reward in carving out my corner of it in a comfortable way.

It has been difficult to watch the industry falter and stumble in the wake of a post-Covid world.  Companies that once were strong have folded, bankrupted, and run aground as the tides of commerce have ebbed in a way that should have been obvious to so many.  I have watched the bike shops of my youth evaporate before my eyes.  The proliferation of electric bicycles has become an industry focus for many companies that are cash strapped and looking for a messianic source of money to redeem them from their own missteps.  I personally decline to see them as bicycles.  They have their place in the world, and I’m happy to see people adopting them as an alternative means of transportation.  They just aren’t… bicycles.

I came up in the industry working for an old German man named Albert, and Albert taught me everything he knew about the bicycle. Honestly, looking back now, it wasn’t that much… but where he lacked in knowledge he led in ardor.   Where Al’s knowledge ended, my thirst for more became a personal quest to uncover as much about the machine as I possibly could, and I don’t think that quest ever ended.  The bicycle is a machine of tremendous efficiency and elegance, both a challenge to mankind’s physical limits and a celebratory triumph of our capabilities.  It has always been crusty little shops and family businesses that have championed and beatified the miraculous simplicity of the machine.  Some of us have worshipped it in silent sanctity, sharing a quiet communion with thousands of other martyrs and saints of the last century who have felt a similar reverence to the instrument.

Somewhere along the line, the industry itself lost its way.  It became another mechanism of capitalism rather than a service to the glory of the machine.  Corporatized interests began devaluing the core of what made bicycles captivating, compelling… seductive.  Maybe it’s foolhardy to romanticize two wheels and a pile of tubes in such a way – but why else would I have stuck to it this long if I wasn’t foolishly romantic about the essence, the ipseity of this thing?  Love, as they say, is blind.

But I am no longer blind to the direction that the industry finds itself drifting.  Cardinal coordinates of careful craftsmanship and the painful ache of hand-wrought ingenuity are side stepped in the interest of mass production deadlines, warehouse logistics, and the juggle of supply chain politics.  The erosive nature of the modern economy has not discriminated against or in favor of any one elemental aspect of my industry.  It just is as it seems it must be.  Carbon fiber bicycles, press-fit bottom brackets, foreign supply chains… all just matters of keeping things moving.  

Oft attributed to the ancient mind Heraclitus, but more realistically a universal observation of life’s flux that we prefer to credit to one concrete individual, he mused “One cannot step in the same river twice.”  Even if we elect to remain motionless and stand stolid in the river of our choice, we have no effort to exert that allows us to experience the same river indefinitely.  Here I find myself today, looking at my business and the decay of every enterprise I have endeavored over the years, and I see a wealth of experience that has prepared me for the next mutation of what Baker Bicycle Works will become.  A bit heartbroken to dismantle what I built it to be, but happy to reach back into the parts bin and reassemble something even better going forward. Onward the river continues to flow.

It has been nothing short of a community full of support and encouragement that has kept me forging ahead for the last four years, and it will be the same that sees me flourishing in the future to come.  I’m thankful for everyone who has afforded me the opportunity to run my business and be a small part of the bicycle community here in Denver.  Although I am turning the page for now, the plot is far from stagnating.  I look at a potentially fragile forthcoming few years and I am fraught with the same anxieties and paranoias that many of us share as neighbors and members of the same, strange citizenship in these states that feel less united than ever.  I am grateful to remember that a sliver over 5 years ago I came to Denver with nothing but a beater car and a duffel bag full of worn out t-shirts.  As I wind down this iteration of Baker Bicycle Works, I feel blessed to have so much support from everyone who has shaped what it became and what it allowed me to become along the way.

While I shut the doors on the Lipan Street store and look towards what the business will become in the next half a decade, I am filled with tears at all the memories of amazing interactions I’ve had with everyone along the way.  Whether I repaired the bike that some other shop refused, or built a one of a kind creation from thin air, or just made your ride feel a little less rickety and a little more reliable – I am thankful for all of it.  But I am also buoyant with the belief that what comes next for me will be even better yet.  I am excited to dig in and expand on the skills I have built through the years, and nervous yet ebullient about what’s next for my career and Baker Bicycle Works.