In this installment of For A Change, we meet Gnargo Bike Co.. They reincarnate old steel mountain bike frames into high-quality front-load electric cargo bikes. Their bikes are made to order in northwest Arkansas, are more affordable than off-the-shelf alternatives, and every one of them comes standard with a soul. Travis talks to founders Zach and Elysia, who credit their unique community for Gnargo’s success, but believe their business model is bigger than Bentonville.

We’d like to thank Schwalbe for sponsoring these stories…

Some of today’s most established gear trends began life as DIY bike hacks. 1x drivetrains, tubeless tires, and 29-inch wheels all have rich histories in off-label use. We once had to rely on clever workarounds like sneaking a bigger cog behind our cassettes to widen our gear range, or laying a rubber strip into our non-tubeless rim to seal our tires, or grinding material out of our fork to fit a larger wheel … Maybe that last one wasn’t so clever, but at the time, nobody made an aggressive 29” fork. Sometimes, you gotta take matters into your own hands.

Experiments like these are what got us where we are today. It’s an important stage in a trend’s early days. They’re often the only way that an untested concept can finally be tested, and later, perfected. Individual innovators and small manufacturers can quickly improve on new ideas as riders make new demands and discover new applications. But as soon as there’s a widely available off-the-shelf option, there’s less motivation to experiment further.

Interesting concepts might get passed over in the name of convenience. The pace of innovation begins to plateau, at least until the next major disruptive change comes along. And it’s a little sad when there’s no longer a need to improvise. We lose the satisfaction of riding something custom. Something uniquely ours. But maybe it doesn’t always have to happen that way.

The front-load cargo bike is one of those established gear trends, but it’s still a long way from reaching the saturation point of the tubeless 29-inch tire. So, there’s a lot of room for growth. And Gnargo Bike Company, a small upstart in Bentonville, Arkansas, is pushing that growth in fascinating new directions. Their cargo bikes are manufactured in Bentonville, which is fascinating in itself. But it’s how they’re manufactured that got us so interested.

The literal backbones of those bikes are high-quality steel frames that Gnargo purchases from community bike shops across the country. Think ‘90s classics like the Trek 820 or Giant ATX. Gnargo reclaims the top tube, seat tube, bottom bracket, and rear triangle fully intact. Then, they weld that to custom-made front cargo modules. Add a disc brake mount, slap on a 20” fork and front wheel, wire in a battery and rear-hub motor, and you got yourself a Gnargo bike. You’d never know they were once somebody’s daily driver or Sunday shredder. Even if this were only a one-off garage project, it’d be a hell of a story. But Gnargo Bike Company has got bigger things planned. They’ve already sold over 220 bikes, and they’re just getting started

Gnargo Bike Co. was founded in 2022 by Zach Springer and Elysia Contreras Springer. They weren’t exactly the cycling nerds you might expect to go on to start a bike company, but bikes were always in their lives. Elysia did some advocacy work in college to improve cycling infrastructure around Kansas City, and Zach grew up cobbling together bikes out of parts harvested through his mom’s antique business. And they’ve both spent time living in cycling meccas like Portland and Minneapolis. Plus, they’ve got a couple young kids, so bikes are crucial. But the path to Gnargo wasn’t the game of bike-industry chutes and ladders played by so many other founders.

Elysia’s background is in early childhood education with a heavy focus on the value of art. And her graduate thesis was a project that found people with crazy project ideas, and connected them to people with the capability to make them a reality. Currently, alongside her work at Gnargo, she still runs a company she founded that makes sensory toys for young kids, and is also the National Science Foundation Grant Director at Northwest Arkansas Community College.

Zach’s background is in product development and in an equally diverse array of fields. After grad school, he engineered interactive exhibits for children’s museums. If you think about it, there’s probably no better way to learn how to make stuff that can survive prolonged, unpredictable abuse. Later, a shift into creating retail displays led Zach to designing office furniture and other home goods, eventually for Wal-Mart’s in-house brand. Wal-Mart famously encourages (and sometimes requires) its upper-level employees to live in its hometown of Bentonville. That’s what drew Zach and Elysia out of Minneapolis and into Northwest Arkansas … That, and the abysmal Minnesota weather.

Bentonville’s mild, semi-southern climate was good not only for Zach and Elysia but also for their kids. Not being stuck inside or in snowpants for half the year was liberating. Plus, it opened the door for integrating bikes into their family routine. In the late 2000s, when they lived in Portland, they had a front-row seat to the beginning of the cargo-bike boom. People were bolting Xtracycle add-ons to their rear triangles, then bolting two kids’ seats on top. And a Dutch front-load cargo-bike brand called Bakfeits had just started showing up stateside. Americans’ eyes were slowly opening to what a cargo bike was capable of. But these bikes were (and still are) very expensive, so Zach and Elysia took matters into their own hands.

“We’re definitely tinker-minded people,” Elysia tells us. Instead of breaking the bank to buy an off-the-shelf cargo bike, it was only natural that they’d just make their own. “We don’t idle very well,” she says. “There’s always something we’re going to be working on.” For example, Zach would make tallbikes out of frames donated to Pedal It Forward, a Bentonville community bike shop where he volunteered. But a tallbike crash inspired him to try making something a bit more down-to-earth.

Long before they knew it would become their business model, they resurrected a couple old steel frames into cargo bikes. Zach welded the modifications freehand in their garage, and the concept was proven. “Just riding around on our prototypes was all that it took,” Elysia recalls. “People would be like, ‘what is that? I want one!’”

But that’s not all it took, of course. Building bikes in the US is already difficult. Building cargo bikes in the US ramps that up quite a bit. Gnargo Bike Co. isn’t Moots or Framework or Speedvagen. No disrespect to art and craft, but Zach and Elysia wanted to make something affordable. Plus, building a cargo bike requires extra space, special tooling, and for most customers, a motor. Doing this right would not be cheap. But help was available, and it was close by.

“There are so many awesome little cycling-related startups in Bentonville and Northwest Arkansas,” Zach explains. “And it’s because there’s this whole ecosystem of startup assistance.” He and Elysia got help from places like the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Arkansas, the Heartland Forward foundation, and the Greenhouse Outdoor Recreation Program (GORP), to name a few. These programs run the gamut from mentorship to staffing help to direct funding. Zach and Elysia were paired with industry experts and data analysts who could thoughtfully steer their strategy before it left the stable.

One particularly unexpected revelation came very soon after they started working with GORP. Zach and Elysia learned how much Gnargo Bike Company’s liability insurance was going to cost, and it put things in perspective. “There’s no halfway point where you’ll be able to afford a $15,000 a year insurance policy, and just be a one-person pursuit. It’s going to require a team,” Zach explains. “That was an awakening for us.”

So, it was big-league-or-bust for Gnargo. And that makes it all the more inspiring. Building cargo bikes out of a co-op’s cast-offs might sound like a Portlandian Eagle Scout Service Project. But it adds meaningful efficiency and cost-savings to Gnargo’s operation. Cutting, mitering, jigging, and welding a rear triangle is a time-consuming multi-step process. But Zach and Elysia can skip all those steps so they can focus on putting the “cargo” into Gnargo.

They run a well oiled machine that has continued to gain momentum. Gnargo has relationships with community bike shops across the country, and offers easy to follow guidelines on what types of bikes they can use. Simple requirements like derailleur hangers, threaded bottom brackets, and of course, steel frames. The frame sizes Gnargo needs will often fluctuate, but it’s pretty simple otherwise. And it naturally tends to be the high-quality steel bikes that community shops hold onto instead of rushing out the door. “These are the bikes that were sick because they were from Grandpa who barely rode it,” Zach explains. “As a bike mechanic, you take more time and more care with those than you do a Roadmaster.”

Zach often collects the frames in person, and in bulk. He strips off the parts in the parking lot to leave with the shop, along with a check for $50 per frame. That goes a long way at a community bike shop and fits in perfectly with Gnargo’s belief in feeding a circular economy. The frames are brought back to Bentonville where Gnargo’s powdercoater burns off the grease and paint so they can thoroughly check for damage and start construction. “It looks like it just came off the manufacturing line in, like, 1970.” Zach says. Then, for their Looploader and Classic Cargo frames, they cut off the head tube just in front of the top tube, along with the down tube just in front of the bottom bracket. For the slightly more traditional Schoolie, they’ll still cut off the head tube, but they leave part of the down tube. They use brand new disc-brake tabs, brand new extra long head tubes, and on the Looloader and Classic Cargo, a signature square down tube that is cut and mitered to suit the size and shape of frame they’re working with. Next, it all just has to be welded together.

Gnargo uses a frame jig often seen in motorcycle frame assembly. A cargo frame isn’t exactly your standard diamond-shaped hardtail, but assembling one still just requires a bunch of adjustable fixtures that can firmly hold a bunch of tubes. Gnargo’s solution came from a maker called Chop Source, who sells various clamps that you connect with your own cut-to-size 2×2” or 2×3” square tubing. This modular, user-generated approach makes it easy for Gnargo to suit their unorthodox shapes, and at a fraction of the price of the sleek black aluminum instruments we’re used to seeing. It’s also a “rotisserie” style, which makes it more quick and convenient for their welder to access. That welder, by the way, is one of those onlookers in Bentonville who once stopped Zach and Elyisa to talk about their bikes.

“We’re riding through a park, and there’s a guy in a wheelchair playing pickleball,” Zach says. “And he stops us and asks ‘Did you guys make those? Man, I’ve been really wanting to make a bike!’” John Shoffner was an experienced welder in the furniture business. After a few meetings, he’s now Gnargo’s Chief Product Developer and Frame Builder. And he’s made a number of improvements along the way. “We still have a lot of our early bikes sitting around, and he took that early design that we landed on, he’s built two new models off of them, and has built a lot of really amazing efficiencies around different parts of the bike.”

The various sizes of cargo platforms can be prefabricated and bolted onto the mainframe after both are powder-coated to the buyer’s taste. Gnargo bikes are generally made-to-order, so you can choose from an Adobe gradient’s worth of shades. Then, of course, there’s also the motor. While there may be an assumption that high-end e-bikes have mid-drive motors and entry-level ones have hub motors, the hub motor is by far the more practical choice for this application. Not only does it allow for the upcycling that is at Gnargo’s core, it also concentrates a cargo bike’s often extreme forces at the wheel instead of running them through the drivetrain. And the motor itself is pretty special. Zach worked with the manufacturer to create a hub that favors torque over speed.

The result is a complete front-loading e-cargo bike for between $3,500 and $4,000. Although these aren’t exactly apples-to-apples comparisons, Yuba’s front-load e-cargo bike starts at $5,000 and Urban Arrow’s starts at $6,000. Trek’s should start at $8,500, except the post-COVID slump has it on sale for $6,000. Gnargo Bike Co. is far from slumping. Production has moved out of Zach and Elysia’s home and into a dedicated space just north of town and literally across the street from the Pedal It Forward community bike shop.

Though after talking to Zach and Elysia, I can’t say I’m all that surprised by their success. All the ingredients are there in abundance. Zach has his design and manufacturing background, while Elysia already runs a business and is literally a pro at harnessing synergies that help get good ideas off the ground. Add their earnest desire to do good in the world, and these are the perfect people for this kind of endeavor. They’ll make it a point to say that they’re also in the perfect place, which I’d mostly chalk up to their humble nature. But Bentonville is pretty unique.

“There’s definitely some magic sauce here,” Elysia says. You don’t need us to tell you this, but bikes are kind of a big deal in Bentonville. Even though the whole “Mountain Bike Capitol of the World” thing was a bit cringe, it’s definitely a good place to ride bikes. There are flow trails along sidewalks, a mixed-use greenway that stretches the length of the city, and a growing number of protected bike lanes. At least by Midwestern standards, it’s the cyclist’s version of a grade school with Cherry Coke in the water fountains. That’s attracted countless visitors and events to Bentonville, and Gnargo Bike Co. is always there.

“You show up, and things happen,” says Zach. “We have a lot to thank for things happening around us, and we’re just showing up.” But it’s not just pure bike-industry things that are happening. Among all the topics and tangents that came up when we talked to Zach and Elysia, what got them the most animated was a project they did with a managed care facility in Bentonville. A Danish organization called Cycling Without Age helps facilities like these in choosing a suitable pedicab, and in training caregivers to take elderly residents out on rides. But the ones they recommend cost over $14,000 and have to be imported from Sweden.

“For the cost of one of those bikes, we could prototype three of them,” Elysia tells us. So, Zach and John started working on how to apply the Gnargo upcycling method to a pedicab, and Elysia joined in as they educated themselves in making the best one they could. “This was where Zach and I were able to geek out on our human-centered design process,” Elysia boasts. “Like ‘tell me your pain points!’” And sure enough, after three prototypes, they came up with a design they were happy with and sold two of them to the facility. Soon after, Cycling WIthout Age reached out about potentially adding Gnargo Bike Co. to their catalog, shared with more than 1,600 managed-care facilities across the US.

At its very beginning, Zach and Elysia’s vision for Gnargo was significantly smaller-scale than it is now. But after a few short years, they already have reason to start thinking about scaling up. And the business model is uniquely well suited for it. “Imagine four different community bike shops across the united states who have a Gnargo across the street,” suggests Zach. “Building their framebuilding talent and building up a small business environment around what are essentially artists.” And according to Zach, that’s entirely practical. “You could start a franchise for about $20k”

The speed and efficiency of Gnargo’s bike manufacturing means these expansions would be studios, not stockhouses. It isn’t a matter of ramping up production to amass bottomless inventory. It’s a matter of meeting people where they are. And we’re not being schmaltzy when we say it’s people who have made Gnargo what it is. Because, they literally have. “Our customers have shaped so much of the previous generations,” Elysia explains. “Every single one of the add-ons on our website was inspired by a customer, like wow, this is really cool, let’s just have this as an offering.”

Zach adds that this back-and-forth has been informing their design process from the start. “The upcycled components to our manufacturing process has led us to having 200 early adopters that have let us know along the way what they like, what they don’t like, how it’s made their lives different in ways they never expected,” Zach says. “Without doing it this way, it would be nearly impossible for us to have an iterative approach to bicycle design.” There’s an excitement in Zach and Elysia’s voices when they talk about this aspect of their process. On top of their pride in the fact that giving new life to old bikes is working, you can tell that they respect the history of the bikes themselves. They are beautiful objects that still have a lot to give…

Maybe it’s a bit manipulative to invoke Shel Silverstein, but it couldn’t be more appropriate. Gnargo’s frames have past lives. Maybe several past lives. Somebody’s mountain bike then became their daughter’s college bike. And now, decades later, it can become somebody’s grocery-getter or kid-hauler.

Even though Gnargo is open to someday offering a frame made of 100% new material, they see no reason to eliminate their upcycled models. Those will likely always be faster and cheaper to produce. And again, they’ll allow for further experiments as each bike reaches new markets and new people who will have new uses and new ideas. But also, each one will have a story.

See more at Gnargo Bike Co.

We want to thank Schwalbe for sponsoring our For a Change series…