In this episode we hear from Erik Tonkin, the owner of Sellwood Cycle Repair who celebrates his 30th anniversary with the shop this year.

We first wanted to have Erik on the show as part of our Shop Talk series, but then realized there was much more to talk about than just running a business. In this interview, you’ll learn how he got his start in the local bike industry, why he seriously considered running for a seat on Portland City Council in 2015, and you’ll even hear him say there’s a possibility he might run again in the future. We also talked about his advocacy work pushing for more trail access at River View, helping the City of Portland write new code to prevent fencing of stolen bikes, and working to find new bike race venues.

If you love bike racing, listen closely for the big news about how Erik has been working with Commissioner Carmen Rubio’s office and the Portland Parks & Recreation Bureau to bring his Bridge City CX event to Waterfront Park in downtown Portland. Jonathan also asked Erik for his thoughts on the exciting success of two-time US National Cyclocross Champion Clara Honsinger, a former Sellwood Cycle team racer and employee who’s currently the best cyclocross racer in the U.S. and among the best in the world. Erik also shares his views on how e-bikes might play a major role in the future of his business.

Links from the episode:

• Sellwood Cycle Repair
• Guest article: A personal perspective on riding River View (BikePortland, 03/12/2015)
• Sellwood Cycle Owner Mulls City Council Run Against Steve Novick (Willamette Week, 06/02/2015)
• Portland embraces inaugural Bridge City CX event (BikePortland, 11/25/2019)
• Clara Honsinger is currently the best cyclocross rider from the United States (CyclingTips, (01/02/2022)

This episode was recorded on December 21st at Sellwood Cycle Repair. A full transcript will be available by January 7th.

This podcast is a production of Pedaltown Media Inc., and is made possible by listeners like you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please become one today at bikeportland.org/support. You can listen to more episodes and find out how to subscribe to our podcast bikeportland.org/podcast.

Our theme music is by Kevin Hartnell.

Welcome to the BikePortland podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Maus. In this episode, we hear from Erik Tonkin, the owner of Sellwood Cycle Repair, who celebrates his 30th anniversary with the shop this year. I first wanted to have Erik on the show as part of our shop talk series, but then realized there was much more to talk about than just running a business.

In our conversation, you'll learn how he got his start in the local bike industry, why he seriously considered running for his seat on Portland City council in 2016. And you'll even hear him say there's a very distinct possibility he might run again in the future. We also talk about his work promoting local cycle across events and if you love bike racing, either as a competitor or a spectator, listen closely for the big news about how Erik has been working with the Portland Parks and Recreation Bureau to bring a major cross event to Waterfront Park in downtown Portland.

On a sort of related note, I asked Erik for his thoughts and the exciting success of two time US national cycle cross champion, Clara Honsinger. A former Sellwood Cycle employee and team racer who's currently mixing it up a top of the World Cup Circuit in Europe. Erik also shares his views on Portland bike commuter culture, and how e-bikes might play a major role in the future of his business. Here's our conversation.

Erik, it's good to see you. It's been a while. Thanks for chatting.

Thanks for having me.

So 30 years in business here at Sellwood Cycle Repair, you've been here for 25. Take me back to those early years. How did you get involved with the shop and how did this whole thing get started?

Yeah. So I started working in bike shops when I was a student at Lewis and Clark College. I worked at a small store called Pedal Sports up in the Terwilliger Plaza. I was there for a couple years when that business went under. Jay Graves was kind enough to hire me straight away. And I started working at the Sandy Boulevard store at the Bike Gallery. And then, when he opened up the Lake Oswego store, hired Kelly [Eicher 00:02:00] to run the Lake Oswego store, I went over with Kelly to help him open the Lake Oswego store.

And then, I was there for a few years and then I joined, at Sellwood Cycle, some people might remember that Sellwood Cycle Repair originally was a collective, or offered a collective workspace. So I was a member of that collective workspace and a friend of the owner, while I worked at all the other shops. Because I lived in Sellwood when I was a student at Lewis and Clark. So that was my connection. I eventually just joined him as his first full-time employee.

Cool. And you stuck it out for 30 years and you were just saying that just being committed to it is such an important piece of surviving this long.

A saying I like that if you do the same thing in the same place for a long time, you're going to have a certain amount of success. So I think a lot of it is just being committed to, like choosing to do this and being committed to it. But then the real challenge is knowing that whatever this is, is a changeable thing, and you have to evolve and adapt and just move forward.

Were there moment along those years where you really honestly thought I don't think I can stay owning the shop anymore or I mean have you had doubts over all those years?

Yeah. I have. I think that when it was around, it was 2001. It was honestly shortly before 9/11. In fact, the weekend before 9/11 as it happens is when I made the commitment to sort of double down with the business and not go back to school. And also, it's when I decided to not become a full-time professional bike racer. And instead saying that I want to stick with the business that I thought there was more potential there and that I thought that my elite level bike racing could still go on for a long time and be satisfying without like signing to do that full Time.

Yeah. Without like dedicating every minute of your life to like being the best racer, which is definitely what it takes. Right?

It does. Yeah. I feel like I walked that line pretty well. I'm pretty proud of that, but whenever you make a decision, it means that you're not making other decisions. You're choosing something over something else and I think that was, for me, I think when I was in high school, even a younger guy, I had a pretty strong sense that I kind of fell in love with small business with the summer job I had back in Minnesota.

And I remember leaving that job the second year, the second summer I left and I remember telling the owners that I'm going to Portland and I'm going to have a bike shop someday.

No way.

It's a true story. Yeah.

Oh, that is so funny. And I think suffice it to say the shop has lasted and will last longer than any cycling career in terms of being competitive.

Yeah. It's pretty great. I like that it's… I think the thing that I'm most happy about with Sellwood Cycle Repair overall is that it's not eriktonkin.com. It never has been. I mean I think that it has its own identity far beyond myself, because so many important people have put so much effort into this place and have like left so much of their own like DNA here. And I'm really happy to be in a spot where I can still own it, but I'm always welcoming that energy in there. And it's a place where… It's like a canvas, everybody to gets a paint on it.

Pretty good. And you've always been located right here on this corner, right? Around 13th or so?

Yeah. This is our third location and we've always been right in… Yeah. Like in between either Milwaukee and 13th and always north of [inaudible 00:06:19] and always south of Bybee.

Yeah. I kind love that about your sort of like career in this town as you've stayed true to Sellwood, you're still here. You're kind of like Dame Lillard, Kobe Bryant. I mean you've always been on the same team or something it seems like. Can you describe for me what Sellwood Cycle Repair is like as a bike shop? What kind of bike shop is it? Like if you met someone at Inner Bike or some bike show and they did no idea who you were, what's your pitch? What is Sellwood Cycle Repair?

Oh yeah. No. That's pretty easy for me to say. I always tell people that it is a repair focused service, like kind of first brick and mortar retail sales and service business. I mean like at the end of the day, it's very much a, it's the basic stuff is getting, you got to get the basic stuff, right? It's retail, sales and service. It's customer service. It's fixing bikes first.

We invest most of our payroll is invested in, I think 75% of my payroll or 70% is tied up with just people who work on bikes all the time. And of course, for a business this size when you have close to 20 employees year round, you clearly don't make money fixing bikes, right? So you make your money like selling new bikes and selling parts associated with those bikes and accessories associated with those bikes. But the bike come first.

I made a decision a long time ago that I don't want to really, really focus on selling or servicing anything if you're not sort of, if it's not physically attached to the bike. So for me, everything kind of emanates out of the building, and the building of the new bicycle or the repair of the used bicycle or just the repair of the customer's bicycle.

Yeah. And you've been doing that long enough where you've seen people come in, get a bike, maybe they're young in town, and then they've had kids and like the kids have come in, get a bike. What's that like to see that kind of change over time?

Yeah. I had a conversation about this with somebody in the neighborhood the other day and we were just kind of looking at each other and laughing and we were, and I was remarking them how like that I remembered, I said… I ran into this couple, right? And I said, "I remember when you guys weren't dating and your child is in college now." And I'm only 47. So I'm like, "Holy shit." That's pretty awesome actually.

It gets back to what you said before about just staying committed to the same thing. And I can't speak for you, but I can kind of relate to that in the sense of there's some satisfaction with being around a while. Right? Can you describe what that's like to you? Just to, in some ways, I mean, personally I get pulled. I'm kind of like sometimes I'm sort of like FOMO about, wow, look at all these different things everybody else is doing. They're kind of like getting hired and fired and exploring new parts of their career and going down different paths where I saw them wholly formed in one sort of career. And then, they've actually ditched that and started something new and here I am still just doing basically the same thing in the same place a lot like you. So do you ever think that? Like what…

Yeah. That's a great question. I was hoping you'd ask me that question, because here's the thing about it. For me, is that I feel like I've had so many different jobs while I've done this one job in the same place. So for me, it's been this gift to kind of evolve with the business and like for example, like I don't really… It's been a few years since I've really, I don't really do a lot of bike repair anymore. I mean essentially none. Right? Like that's not what interests me about the business anymore. It's very much what interested me early on.

Right. So there's so many facets of your shop and you've been able to do different ones, right? It's not like you're like a cobbler replacing soles for 30 years in a little a closet shop like, right?

No.

So you're saying you've done different parts of the business and kept it interesting.

Yeah. And I appreciate that. And I need staff. I need friends and staff and employees who want to fix bikes for like the broad part of their working adult lives in some cases, but we need people who really do just like one or two things. Right? But it's been great that having grown this small business enough that I'm not the only one, either who has been able to grow and adapt within the business. I have numerous employees who started here doing one thing and are on to very different work lives at the same business.

That's not something that you can offer every employee in a small business, especially, again, I always remind everybody like, "Hey, let's not forget, it's a retail brick and mortar, retail, sales and service bike shop." We have to remind ourselves that it's pretty basic. It's very important. It's real work. And we have some high minded ideals that we strive for all the time. But let's not forget what it really is at the ground level. Because if you forget that, you're not going to do the job well.

I hear you. You mentioned you went to Lewis and Clark. And I know for you, riding in those Riverview trails was always a big deal.

We've talked about that.

Tell me what was it like in those trails back when you first started riding a lot in like early 2000s? What was Riverview like? And for folks that don't know this is a patch of land between like Lewis and Clark, so like to Terwilliger basically, and then Highway 43, is that what's up there?

Yeah.

Yeah. And then, it just south of like Riverview Cemetery basically. So it's that patch of hill there. What was it like riding in there?

Well, I mean, for me, it's was just this tremendous sense of place. I discovered those trails when I came to visit Lewis and Clark.

Oh, before you even enrolled.

Yeah. And I'd never been west of Minnesota before, and I like stumbled upon those trails on a rental MB3 from the Bike Gallery downtown by the way.

Well, they must have loved you because if it was in the fall or anything-

It was in the spring. It was very muddy-

… must have been muddy [crosstalk 00:12:20]-

It was very muddy when I returned it. Yes. But the trails, there were a lot of trails. They were just kind of scattered all over the place, really, really technical, really messy, obviously, a lot of fall line stuff, but also just, I mean just beautiful, beautiful woods in there.

But they were like handmade trails from other riders, nothing formal.

Men hikers just, yeah.

Yeah. It wasn't like a city property or anything?

No. It was just kind of this land in between the cemetery and the campus and we would just kind of recreate and play in there.

Nice. Nice. So yeah. In addition to like finding new and exciting things for yourself personally to do in the shop and keeping it interesting that way, I mean you've also obviously been involved… Well, not obviously for people that don't know you, but you have been involved with a lot of other things in town. I mentioned Riverview, we don't need to go into it, but you got like really involved with local trail advocacy for a while.

You want to speak to that really quick? I know both in Forest Park trying to get better bike access there, and definitely with Riverview, which I know must have been and what such a personal thing for you trying to get… So what happened is the city ended up using it as like a water bureau or environmental services facility, because it's a watershed and there was this whole hullabaloo about. Almost 10 years ago now. I think it was eight years ago, eight or nine years ago, there was a big controversy in how they should, or if they should increase bike access. So what was that like getting involved with advocacy sort of leaving the shop?

Yeah. The great thing about being so deeply involved with the Forest Park kind of process first, and then the Riverview process was really which, and by the way, the Riverview one kind of came out of the Forest Park. There was a lot of the same players too.

I feel they were trying to say, "Hey, let's look at Riverview instead of Forest Park."

To a degree maybe yeah. I thought that I really enjoyed the people that I got to work with, honestly, at the city, and whether, and from other interest groups, even if they weren't maybe like "on the same side as me." I mean that genuinely. Like I really, I love people and it was an… For me, it was an opportunity to learn a lot about the city. I didn't like everything that I learned and I didn't really, I didn't care for the outcome, in particular, the Riverview one. I felt pretty… That was more personal for me.

I was more detached about the Forest Park stuff. Riverview was pretty personal. That was a tough pill to swallow with the outcome there, but maybe nothing's ever really over. So we'll see about that. But I will say that I think the greatest thing about it was learning so much about the city and how it works and having an opportunity to meet other people with levers of power in the city.

Yeah. And that wasn't the only… I've worked with the Revenue Bureau and the police department too on a few occasions about-

Bike theft stuff. Right?

Yeah. Rules governing the sale of used bikes. And honestly that was some of the, that's some of the proudest, like that was a couple years really quietly behind the scenes. There were a couple times and it bubbled up into the public, but, boy, working with the Revenue Bureau, you think the Revenue Bureau, who are they?

We have one of those?

Oh yeah. And they're fantastic to work with. And the police, they were just absolutely, absolutely fantastic to work with.

And you got some real stuff came out of that in terms of how shops have to catalog these bikes in sales of them. Right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And like we have a pretty good set of ordinances in place right now that I think that have been working for a long time. They haven't needed to change. And on top of that, some people don't really know this, but some of those rules are, and I think this is very important for the bike, the Portland bike industry.

Those rules have kind of protected our very unique market from… I'll just name it. From the companies like the Pro's Closet.

Interesting. Because it handles the… So for folks who don't know, I think what we're talking about are these policies that anybody who sells with pawn shop, bike shop, if you're selling used bikes, you have to go through a certain process. And am I right to say that it's sort of emanated through a huge, the huge concern about theft of bikes and people fencing stuff that was stolen. Right?

Yeah. And it came out of nothing to do, the overhaul of it had nothing to do with bikes per se. It all came out of when the Oregon Secretary of State's laptop was stolen and it landed in a pawn shop in Portland area. That's what triggered all this stuff, because guess who got involved when that happened? The FBI.

Oh I didn't realize that was the genesis. But so, yeah. That's great. You helped in terms of that advocacy, you helped get in some of those policies that have made it harder to sort of be shady around selling used equipment in our market, which has probably helped local bike shops ultimately.

Yeah. Yeah. And a couple of years ago the companies like Pro's Closet, which I'm a fan of Bicycle Blue Book and Pro's Closet. But I also as somebody who wants to like protect what I've worked for and what many of us have worked for here in our Portland market, I didn't want to allow a national level player or at least a company that had clearly national level ambitions to come in here and set up shop in whatever way they thought they were going to be able to do it. Like to hell with our rules or not.

And having develop such a positive relationship with the, again, the Revenue Bureau of all people, don't mess with them. And Portland Police telling them that was in the works and working with them to make sure that these new players, we thought they were going to come into town and do this or that, well, I guess we knew how that worked out, because they protected their interests here and kept, made sure that those new players would have to come in and do business exactly the way that the rest of us did, and then they chose not to.

So I got to say, your answer to sort of what other advocacy you've been involved with and learning things from the city, that sounded like a really, like an answer that a politician could give. I really think. And a couple years after that, if I'm not mistaken, you considered a run for city council and I'm curious, why'd you decide not to, could that happen in the future?

Yeah. Yes. It could. Why it didn't at that time, so that would've been-

Like 2015 [crosstalk 00:19:16]-

… [crosstalk 00:19:16] 2015, so it would've been for 2016 and the seat in question was-

Novick.

… the Steve Novick seat.

Steve Novick.

Yeah. Yeah. And for one thing, I was a fan of Steve Novick. So that was one reason why I chose, eventually chose not to run. And for those people who remember, he did end up… He ended up losing in the runoff so that was interesting. But I guess the reason why I didn't was, I know that for me at the time, I felt like I was in not the healthiest personal space to be totally honest. And while there was a lot of momentum and a lot of interest, I kind of put together like an exploratory team and I did retain a campaign director and fundraiser, somebody who-

Oh, it got further along than I had thought.

Yeah. Somebody who had run numerous successful city council campaigns did like volunteer, honestly, to be a part of it. So-

That's a good sign.

… I chose them. Yeah, it was good. It had traction. But for me, I had to have a pretty honest conversation with myself. It's like, it's not good enough to just want to do it. You have to actually be able to do it. And I just don't, I don't know if the world needs another like passionate and maybe capable, but ultimately not ready for prime time politician.

Oh gosh. It's funny saying that in 2021 where literally everybody and anybody just throws their hat in the ring and it's just been such an interesting political time since then.

Yeah. It is, to answer your question. I mean it is in the last, I suppose we can talk more about the pandemic too, but in the last-

We'll get to that one.

Yeah. Yeah. But in the last year and a half, in particular, for the first time I've taken a pretty significant step away from the daily operation of the business. And one of the reasons for that is so that I can free myself up with the time to pursue some other interests. Right? And now, I've been away from the daily operations of the shop enough that I know kind of battle tested the business and it's running fine without me here. I don't really have "office hours" anymore.

Okay. So to put a finer point on it, there's a good chance you may run for council in the future sometime?

I am interested in public service and have been able to spend a lot of my time in the last couple years, traveled quite a bit for bike racing and just for personal reasons. And I think being away from the city, honestly, I've traveled so much in the last like three or four years and being away from the city a lot has allowed me to see it with a fresher eyes. And I think that, and to love it again, and that's another reason why in 2016 I think that I was in a place where I wasn't, I don't know if I loved the city enough to want to do that.

I was like, if that makes it… You want to do it for the right, I want to do it because I love it. I put on bike race events in town, because I love the city and I see people having fun. That's why I do it. I don't make any money doing it.

Well, there's also a lot of hard work. So if you're going to dedicate to that-

It's hard work. Yeah.

… you better love it. Just like running for city council, it's a lot of hard work. You got to really commit to that if you're going to do it. I totally get it.

I mean, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

But you've definitely found other ways to sort of serve Portland. And you just mentioned putting on a bike race. So for folks who don't know, Erik was one of the sort of, well, was one of the foundational pieces of sort of like early cycle across in Portland before it really blew up. There were people racing before you got here, because Portland has such an awesome legacy for bike racing history that goes way back. So Erik had a lot to do with sort of popularizing it I'll say in terms of getting the, setting the foundation for the crusade, and you started a bike racing team 25 years ago that's still super strong today, recently just, I think helped launch Clara Honsinger to the top of the World Cup standings in races. But I want to talk, 2019, you gave something back to the community that I think is just such a treasure, which is Bridge City Cross.

That was great.

Which happened just not too far from where we're sitting, just across the Spring Water trail path, right on the river. And it was just such an amazing event. Unfortunately, COVID knocked it off the year, but it came back so victoriously this year. I think it really hit this sweet spot.

It was good. Yeah.

Tell me about Bridge City Cross. What did it mean to you to be able to give that back to Portland in the form of a cross race?

Man, yeah. I just absolutely loved it. I had been kind of half acidly working on that venue for many years, trying to get something going there, and then finally got a good bit of traction, and then just went for it. And it came together really late in that 2019 year and couldn't have happened without the support of, well, lots of pieces fell into place. But one of the things that was really great about it was that our whole cycle cross community got behind it. So it wasn't like it was just me putting on the event.

I mean I was the promoter of it, but like the amount of help and support that we received from other promoters, other event promoters and race promoters, everybody came together to make that happen, because they kind of realized that, well, this is really, it is kind of important. We don't have a marque cycling event like right, or bike racing event, I should say. Of course, we have cycling events, but bike racing event, like literally in the city.

And again, this was when we were losing Alpenrose the venue too. So this was very, it was very timely.

It's like people just sort of knew this visceral feeling that they knew how important a bike race could be in the context of having Alpenrose [inaudible 00:25:34] were ripped out of all of our hearts. Here's Bridge City Cross right on the river at Oaks Park so that probably tapped into some of that.

I think so. Yeah. It felt great to do that for ourselves right in our own neighborhood and-

Back again, again to Sellwood. I mean it's-

Yeah. Yeah. It was excellent. And when I was thinking of a name, I finally landed on Bridge City because I did want it to, I did want the name to travel. I didn't want to give it a name that was too Sellwood focused. Right? Because I kind of have this vision for the event being, maybe it'll always be down at Oaks Amusement Park, but maybe it will be in other marque locations along the river and waterfront in the Portland area. Right?

Please, help us get Waterfront Park, Eric. So get elected, city council, and so we could do the real [inaudible 00:26:24] call, people lined up on the Hawthorne Bridge watching the best cross racers go at it right there.

I was down there working on the course last week actually so looking at that.

Okay. We'll get into that. Well, that's good to hear, because, yeah, I've been… I don't want to get down this road too far, but boy, it's frustrating how Portland parks in Portland with all of our legacy around cycling and racing and just being a cool town that we haven't been able to do more in terms of the Parks Bureau letting people use venues. And it just recently looks like PIR got kicked down a few notches in terms of a race venue even. So I hope you can keep working with them and have some good news.

I think there will be good news. I think the city needs some victories and some positive looks. And I know that Portland Parks and Recreation is, that they're interested so.

That's great. Okay. One last thing on racing. How does it feel to you to see Clara Honsinger doing so well at the World Cup? I mean you've competed at that level. I mean no offense to you, but she's competing at that level, at a high-

Oh, off course.

I mean she's won race. She's come in second. What does it feel like? I mean do you feel like you had something to do with, in terms of helping her with the team that you have and getting her on that and just kind of like… I mean what was your relationship like with her? And can you talk a little bit about Clara?

Yeah. I do feel like the, so people who don't know, Clara also, she worked at the bike shop as well. She joined the team in, I want to say it was 2016. Gosh, maybe it was 2015. She was a student at University of Portland at the time. And when she was young, I want to say… I think she's 17, just not long out of high school. I typically don't work with juniors closely. I wait till they're kind of like out of the nest is when I like to work with younger riders.

It's a tough time to navigate your competitive sport or it can be when you've left the nest in the comfort of home. And now, you're kind of on your own to a degree in the world, especially if it's a sport like cycling, which isn't always, you're not going to… It's not like football or one of the big… It's not a team sport that you're going to find at a college level as commonly. Right?

It was pretty tremendous to spend just the, like those formative years with a young person like [inaudible 00:28:38]. I mean right from 18 up to like… I mean it makes me kind of teary. Like up to where Clara is now. I mean just to watch somebody just grow up. It was amazing.

And I mean I would look at it and think that what Clara is doing now in bike racing sort of illustrates the strength in a lot of ways of sort of what you created here in Sellwood Cycle. What you bring to cycle cross and what you bring to shop, in general, being a nest for Clara had something to do with her getting enough good vibes around bike racing that she decided, like we talked about earlier, she decided to actually throw all the dice and actually commit to it and do it. And now she's doing it, it must be just amazing to see.

Well, a couple of things, like I mean I remember the first, the very first national championships that we traveled to together would've been in Hartford. That would've been January of 2017. And we had traveled to some races together before that to kind of field test things. And we hadn't launched our new Team [inaudible 00:29:40] program yet. So this was like leading up to when I was deciding, "Am I going to do that or not?" But when we went to Hartford and she was an under 23 rider, and I remember her there, and I think she finished fifth or sixth that day. So she had a pretty good race.

But I remember her looking at her competition and just, and they were all about her age. And I remember her just being kind of so overwhelmed and looking at the other riders and just thinking like, "I'm never going to be… Like how can I ever…" They're only like, they were the same age and they're already this much better than me. And she was just like, "How am I ever going to catch up to them?"

And I remember in that moment just being pretty quiet, and I just told her, I said, "You just got to wait. You just got to keep doing it and you'll catch up." And like those riders she was talking about, one of them retired this year, and the other one isn't racing. So it's like-

Yeah. And you always had kind of the traditional shop team, a great shop team, you're competing really well locally and probably regionally. But then you stepped it up with this more focused cross program that was women only, right? If I'm not mistaken.

Yeah.

Is Clara the reason you did that or were you already thinking about it? Did she help convinced you to kind of take that extra leap to make a really… I mean this was a, basically a pro level team. You really committed to this.

Yeah. Well, with having somebody with a young rider like Clara with that athletic potential, which I've been around athletes enough to know when I think when somebody has some of the mental and physical markers that could be successful. But the truth is we already had other pieces in place. We had [Brena 00:31:19] here at the shop who wanted to do this with me as a manager and mechanic. And we had Beth Ann Orton, who was a long time Oregon cycle cross racer. Also, a Lewis and Clark grad. Like somebody that I knew, she got a bike from the shop many, many years ago. So we had a plan we'd been talking about it all year.

Speaking of making plans and best laid plans. Let's fast forward a bit and I'm glad that all the stuff with Clara and the team solidified before COVID, but let's fast forward to, I guess February 2020, everything is pretty okay. You're probably recovering from a Christmas season and looking ahead to the year. And then, you're probably reading the news thinking, "What is this thing called COVID? What does this mean?" And then, I always think of like the governor in March declaring that we're locking down as kind of the moment. Like what went through your mind at the early, when COVID just came, as a bike shop owner, looking at everything? What were you thinking at that point?

Yeah. We were in Europe. I was actually with Clara and Brenna in Europe into the first week of February. And I was hearing about it over there a little bit and figured something was brewing. I remember also talking to my younger brother, who's a surgeon in Northern Minnesota. He was in the healthcare field. And he was aware of the early rumbling of this too. So I was like, "Well, we're going to have, something's going to happen here."

So we started, we did start planning some stuff pretty, like pretty… I sort of had the panic… The panic button for me was on in early February is what I'm trying to say. So my goal was to have really no change, as much as possible throw on at the staff from the business.

They have enough change in other parts of the world at that moment that you thought you'd make it as stable as you could?

Yeah. And I thought we were successful at that. Like people loved coming to work, even when they didn't know what was happening. It was the only place that they could go to a degree, and everybody stayed healthy throughout the whole thing too. But we really like coalesced as a staff and people felt really…. I think they felt, I think the employees felt really safe here and they were just taken care of and they just didn't have to a degree worry about their work. That was a big goal of mine.

Well, but then they also pretty quickly got really busy and there was a ton of work to do. Right? What was that like having the boom show up?

Yeah. Well, that was, I learned a very important painful lesson. I have a tendency to need to be taught the same lessons over and over again. I'm not smart.

There's a bike racing metaphor in there somewhere.

Yeah. I'm not smart enough to you learn them the first time. [inaudible 00:34:08] can help as an athlete, you have a, you forget easily how much that sucked. "Oh let's do it again. Great." I know what happened for me is that, of course, things did change. It did get pretty chaotic. I felt it necessary to really reinsert myself, and it probably was necessary, but to really reinsert myself as the day to day on the ground floor manager of the entire business, not only like sort of the sales-ish team, but also the repair [crosstalk 00:34:44]-

So you kind of went back and took the controls of the ship again where you'd started to kind of leave a little bit on the day to day?

I essentially like took back over the reins of the service department, in particular. Right? And that was good, because I think that I had enough of command of what the business needed and what our customers needed to make the changes that we needed to make. But the problem with doing that, and this is the lesson that I learned is that it also made me miss some cues for, being so reinserted meant that I wasn't doing my other job as well as I could have been, which was like looking just bigger picture.

And I definitely missed some opportunities to buy inventory and bikes when I could have, because I was so deeply reinserted. And some of that stuff was happening very quickly. Like I mean not even like days lead time, some like hours of lead time-

Which became, and all that became really important as the supply chain stuff quickly followed the boom and then this headache of not getting parts or bikes. Right?

It did.

And I was going to say, I hear what you're saying about it taking you away from maybe like the forecasting and the back office stuff that's so important and the buying, but then again, you did get to get like a, in the trenches, on the floor view of maybe how your customers were changing and what that means for your shop going forward, because it wasn't just COVID necessarily. It's like, obviously we had the racial protests of 2020 and all these social upheaval that's going on. So in the last 18 months, two years almost now, how has or has your clientele changed at all? What's that been like in terms of the people that come through the front door?

Yeah. A lot of new people, which I've heard other shop owners talk about that. And again, just being, we were… It's a rare opportunity when you're an established, mature business to suddenly be given this, like just the data entry alone in that first year of COVID from adding so many new people to our like, "Have you been in before?" Everybody like, "No." And it's like, "Oh my god. Having to add [crosstalk 00:36:49]-

Didn’t even think about that.

… [crosstalk 00:36:50] sales system." I'm like, "Oh my god." It takes time. Right? And especially in the moment.

Usually, that was maybe like 10%, 20% of the people would say-

Yeah. It was a huge share. And what a gift that is to have all of a sudden, like, even if you don't have anything to sell them, you can smile, have a conversation, you can like meet somebody and ask how they're doing, even if, how's this thing treating you? What's your life like? You can have a five minute conversation even if you don't have a bike to sell them or something.

So you think some of those new folks are going to stick around? I mean I know that's a big conversation in the bike world, some of these COVID boomers, are they going to be customers for life kind sort of thing?

I think some of them will be. I doubt it's going to be anything that is like everybody, but I think that there will. I have to be optimistic about it. Right? Because it felt like such a great opportunity to meet new people and make new customers. Like I got to at least think for the sake of our industry that we're going to retain these people. Like if we already think that we're not, then I think we're… I think that's a real unfortunate loss leader.

You and I were talking before where we had the mics on, like one thing that I was really reminded of during the pandemic days was don't decide for other people what they're going to think or do. Let them do them.

Right. In terms of having maybe fresh eyes for what Sellwood Cycle could be and what you could offer them as a business and what a new bike rider would want.

Yeah. We changed so many of our… We made so many fundamental changes that I had… Most of them, not all of them, most of them I had thought about. And I was like too afraid to make those changes. They seemed way fundamentally too much to change.

Can you name one or two of them?

I'll give you a couple of examples. I mean we started closing on Thursday and that was because of how the repair volume was so insane. We were having a hard time. I remember there was a day when I checked in nearly 30 bikes in the first hour of business for repair. I mean you think about 30 bicycles and people attached to them in an hour is, that's an awful lot of bikes and people to come in. And I was just like, this is like… We need a day to catch up the process of those things.

So we've stuck with that. We're still closed on Thursdays. The staff loves it. It's like an in-service day for catching up, and then planning for our busiest days of the week, which are Friday and Saturday. Customers don't seem to care that we're not here on Thursday, because we communicate it to them that we're not going to be. They're allowed to pick up stuff, but we don't use Thursday to generate new business.

Like John Moss would come in, my repairs ready I was told. I'm going to pick it up. But you wouldn't be scheduled to drop it off for a new repair on Thursday.

Right. The shop's not dark.

Right. But we are fully staffed.

Yeah. People can clean up their workspaces and organize.

Yeah. And Thursday was traditionally been our slowest day of the week anyway. So that was kind of like a win, win. We also did something where we started opening an hour later each day, same thing. Instead of having employees show up at 9:59 for work or 9:45, because we open the doors at 10:00. It's like you're here at 10:00 and we open at 11:00.

So every day we had that hour to… We started that because of, in the early days of the pandemic, it was like, well, we have to clean things every day. So that's why I made that change. But then it quickly evolved into like, "Well, actually, turns out the cleaning part of it as we've all learned was not really that essential." Right? So important, but not really essential to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But we stayed with it, because I just noticed that it gave everybody a chance to get their ducks in a row before we opened for the onslaught.

And then, it also gave us this time every day where we could have group staff meetings without having to schedule those in a way that would interfere with normal operation hours.

So it sounds-

Fantastic.

Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like almost no matter what happens with the Omicron variant or whatever else COVID stuff that sticks around, Sellwood's in a pretty good spot to sort of weather those storms.

Well, we hope so. I like our system for running the business right now. And if it needs to change, we'll change it. But like right now we're going to stick with those changes and even as things "return to normal" for a while, we still stayed with those, all those changes. And people didn't, they didn't mind.

One thing that's important that customers don't want to get jerked around, nor do employees. Make a plan and stick to it.

Right. And kind of on that note. I read an article or I read an interview with you from 2015, I forget where… It might have been Cycle Cross Magazine. But this quote really stuck out to me. And I wonder if you could just expand on it. But you said, in terms of running the business you said, "I've tried to set aside cool in favor of being good."

Oh right.

I know the sort of bike industry, and there's a lot of, there's the baggage around bike shops being too cool for school and people coming in and not feeling welcome, but like is that what you're getting at? Like what were you getting at by saying that?

I think that, yes. I think that I was addressing that issue, because culturally that's always been a problem for our industry, unfortunately. And I see it being a problem in any specialty retail. It's a problem in the coffee world. It's a problem in the beer world, big time problem. But for me, cool is not always good. Good is always cool. And that's just a real fundamental thing for me so yeah.

Yeah. And I'm struck with how kind of what you just said. Cool is not always good, but good is always cool. I'm sort of struck with like how you run your business and your outlook on that and like the kind of racer you are and kind of like what your own sort of personal vibe is as a racer. Because for folks that don’t know, Erik is known as just like, I don't know if it's… Well, there's more to it than just how you look.

You've always had the beard. People call you caveman. You never shaved your legs like everybody else did. But this sort of blue collar ethic, and even the bike that you made with Kona the Honky Tonk, to have a bike essentially made after you in the biking world talk about cool. I mean it would have to be super high performance. Right? I mean nobody gets a bike named after them that's not… But yours wasn't like that.

It was the opposite.

It was the opposite. Right?

Right. Right. And that was kind of the, that was part of the message that we wanted to be, we wanted that to be like one of the least expensive bikes you could buy at that time. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So it's funny. So it's like that same approach, I mean that's kind of like how you are as a racer in a way. I mean I'm sure there's people that towed the line with you. They're like, "That guy is not cool." But at the end of the race, they're like, "Shoot. That guy's good and he's cool and I'm going to talk to him."

Yeah. No. Well, I hope so. Yeah. Well, I appreciate the compliment for sure.

Okay. So, yeah. One thing I want to ask real quick, just sort of the last bike shop business thing. And I'm super curious because like the City of Portland isn't, doesn't do like detailed counts anymore and I'm super interested just like as a shop, and actually, I know you're not around a lot, but I'm assuming you talk to your staff like-

Oh, all the time. Yeah. Daily every day. For sure.

Have commuters come back? I mean I know that was probably a big ebb and flow of like AM peak, PM peak, and then COVID happens. And I'm just curious from your perspective, and I know you're not necessarily in a commuter corridor here on 13th, but are you getting people coming in buying lights and fenders because they're riding to work or no? What do you think?

My quick answer to that is twofold. The city is growing tremendously and I doubt, that I highly doubt that the people that are moving here, that the percentage of the new people coming in here are picking up the mantle of bicycling. So my sense is that it's a dwindling share of the public. That's my sense, but that also mathematically still means that there's more. So more is good I think.

I also am really, I'm really feeling like the commuter aspect of bicycling in Portland is changing a lot due to e-bikes. Commuter bikes and e-bikes are kind of like, they've got what you kind of need on them when you get them is my simple, especially e-bikes. And I think that's happening in a world that's parallel to our independent bicycle dealer landscape. It's parallel universe.

We're talking as we walked up to this room that if you were starting a bike shop today, you would definitely make it more sort of an e-bike shop.

Oh yeah.

We have this sort of empty space next to the shop and I guess your, there's a different future for that. So what's it been like adopting to that e-bike wave from the Sellwood Cycle Repair perspective or are you still watching it very closely and trying to figure that out?

Yeah. I'd say the latter. It's been slow, because what we were doing with e-bikes is basically we're selling e-bikes that are our new bike business partners, Kona Bikes, Giant Bikes, Yuba. We're selling what they have to offer. What's so far been successful about e-bikes from my like 30,000 foot view is direct to consumer sales has been effective, and then stores that are specialty retailer for e-bikes.

So I think if I were to make, so a DNA change that could potentially happen with Sellwood Cycle Repair, if I ever have energy like I used to have years ago, which I don't know if that's ever going to happen again. Anyways, if I were to have a second location, it would be very e-bike focus. That's really the only thing I have in my mind for a DNA change for the business. Second location, e-bikes.

Yeah. And maybe that's the store where you could convince or approach some of these new Portlanders who've moved here that you said may not be willing to pick up the mantle. You could use that location and your seat on city council to convince them to bring and carry that mantle forward. Because I agree with you but.

Thanks for sharing, Eric. Is there anything else that you want to mention that we haven't talked about?

Oh boy. I could probably go on and on about lots of things but…

Where do people follow your campaign? I mean how can people stay in touch with Sellwood Cycle?

Well, fortunately, I have much smarter people here than myself run our social media. So I tend to stay out of that-

But they have great-

… pretty easy to track down though.

Sellwood Cycle has great social media and you always have really fun merch, because I know you, you, as a shop owner, have actually invested in really smart graphic design people that make cool things. So everybody go check it out. And thanks again, Eric. Appreciate the time.

Thank you so much. It was really fun.

That was Erik Tonkin owner of Sellwood Cycle Repair. Be sure to check out our show notes for links to the shop and other topics mentioned in this episode. The BikePortland podcast is a production of Pedal Town Media Incorporated and is made possible by listeners just like you. If you're not a subscriber or a supporter yet, please become one today at bikeportland.org/support. You can listen to more episodes and find out how to subscribe @bikeportland.org/podcast. Our theme music is by Kevin Hartnell. I'm your host, Jonathan Maus, until next time, thanks for listening and I'll see you in the streets.