Hasta La Ideas

Bamboo bikes have apparently been documented as early as 1894, but there seems to be a recent surge of interest in the concept, which takes the sustainable appeal of cycling to the next level. The Bamboo Bike Studio (BBS) was founded by Marty Odlin, Justin Aguinaldo, and Sean Murray in 2008. Located in Brooklyn, NY, the BBS teaches workshops on bamboo bike building. We had a chance to talk to them about where they come from and where they’re headed.

Core77: What exactly is the Bamboo Bike Studio?

Marty Odlin: The Bamboo Bike Studio is a collaborative workshop for bicycle design and bicycle making. We have shops in Brooklyn and San Francisco, we are opening in Toronto this summer, and have launched a build-at-home or build-at-school kit. It is built around the idea of giving access to the bike making to as many people as possible. We are a social venture, and have set up the world’s first mass production bamboo bicycle factory to provide low-cost bicycles to local markets in Kumasi, Ghana. We have also taught dozens of high school students how to build a frame from scratch.

Where did the concept come from?

The concept for the Bamboo Bike Studio grew directly out of my experiences as a product designer at K2 Sports. I had an incredible experience getting products made, pulling together a diverse supply chain, traveling around China and Korea, seeing the factory floors. When it came time to ship the products back to the States, we stuffed everything in cardboard boxes and containers and just stripped all this value, all the stories and experiences of the makers, out of the product. On the other side of the ocean, the marketing group had to work doubly hard to try to put value back in. It just seemed like a system that left a lot of value for the customer on the table.

At the same time, I was looking to get back into fabrication (I am a lifelong maker and fixer). I had a really bad experience at a bike shop with the typical bike snob, and it seemed so silly to me that someone could make me feel so terrible when I could make all the stuff that they were selling. So as a personal F-you to this guy, I decided to build my own bike. I needed to prototype and bamboo seemed like a cheap way to iterate. After my first bike, a good friend of mine asked if I could show him how to make one… and Bamboo Bike Studio was born.

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