fossilfool

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2 years 15 weeks

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http://www.fossilfool.com

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Proudest Achievements

I've been working with bikes since 1993, when I was a salesman at Boston's largest and finest bike shop, Belmont Wheelworks. As a teenager working in the shop, I'd see guys from Merlin, Seven, and the now-defunct Rhygin, walking behing the counter, upstairs to the owner Clint Paige's office, with a freshly painted frame of some sort, ready to sell Clint their wares. We also had an in-house frame-builder named Peter Mooney who made classic lugged frames.

I was inspired by those guys to someday start a small, high-quality bicycle company. I wanted to have the feeling of turning out unique bicycles with a small crew of employees, drinking beers on Friday afternoon after a hard week (like we did back at Wheelworks.)

So in 2001, after graduating with a computer science degree from Harvard and working for an internet companies in San Francisco, I got heavy into the bike.

I started working for Worldbike , which has its headquarters in the Berkeley Center for Appropriate Transport in Berkeley, CA. I remember when I first visited the BCAT. The place was like the anti-cubicle. So much bike stuff hanging from the ceiling, bookshelves suspended by brake cables, the faucets on the sink were old campagnolo shift levers. Outside was a huge lot with old bikes ready to be picked over for parts or hacked and rewelded into a new prototype frame. My job was to crank out a web site for Worldbike, but while I was there, I got myself a little private workshop space. I shared it with Rock The Bike co-founder Nate Byerley, who was volunteering for Worldbike and prototyping bike blenders at the time. When I wasn't cranking out HTML for Worldbike, I was in the workshop, making myself a Soul Cycle and some Down Low Glow.

In the Summer of 2003 I paid a visit to my oldest childhood friend, Eric Battle, in Washington, D.C. I knew that Eric is a passionate long-board skateboarder. So I wanted to make him some Down Low Glow for his Sector 9 board. The problem was that my design back then was far too bulky; it would never fit under a board. So in the weeks before my visit to D.C. I tried to redesign it to be smaller and tough enough for a skateboard. Eric is a guy who really focuses and flows in his favorite activities. Put it this way. If you're tossing a frisbee in the park with Eric Battle, and the frisbee happens to fly into a tree, Eric won't even bother to shake the branches. He'll kick his shoes off and run straight for the trunk, to climb up to the branch and extract the disc. I really wanted to show up with a nice set of lights for his long board, and the day before my flight, I thought of the design that would work. I didn't have time to prototype it but I brought a few supplies with me, and Eric and I went to hardware store and bought the rest. We borrowed some tools from his neighbor, installed the lights with hot glue in his kitchen, and drilled through the deck to install a sweet foot-activated tap switch. Then we hit the best hill in his neighborhood and cruised together on a bike and the newly glowing Sector 9. A few hundred feet into his first run, he hit the switch and the Ice blue light flooded the street underneath him. He smiled big, and threw the light cloud left and right on the street as he carved.

It was a month before the bike industry's largest trade show, Interbike, and after the experience with putting the Down Low Glow on Eric's longboard I decided to get a booth and sell the Down Low Glow to bike retailers. The booth was so expensive. I remember walking around the vendor area at the San Francisco Grand Prix the next weekend, trying to find another business to share the booth with. We put together an amazing photo shoot with BMX pro Pete Brandt and photographer Chugrad McAndrews. We redesigned the Down Low Glow to be 70% lighter and stronger. We rented the ugliest SUV known to man (Pontiac Aztek) and drove to Las Vegas. As luck would have it, my Interbike booth partner cancelled at the last second, leaving me and my girlfriend with a half-price 10x10 booth and three days of demonstrating the product.

From the beginning, we started having these little strokes of good luck, little signs that let me know we're on the right track with the business and the journey. For example, one morning at the booth, my girlfriend disappeared for about 45 minutes. I was doing my thing in the booth, wondering where she'd gone, when she returned with two big cafeteria trays full of gourmet food and the executive chef of the Venetian. Apparently the Down Low Glow had caught his eye when he was passing our booth on the way to the kitchen. We traded him a set of lights for his cruiser in exchange for breakfast and lunch for th remainder of the show -- easily the best trade we've ever made!

My goal was to sell 500 units of our product the trade show. Well, it took a couple years to actually achieve that goal. Then sometime early in 2006, Fossil Fool crossed the 1000-customer mark. I started dreaming a little bigger, and partnered up with the Juice Pedaler to get our message out at a new level.

I want to say thanks very much for the support we have received from the bike community. Bikes are all about community. We build our products right here in Berkeley, California, in a workshop that adjoins the local community bike organization. We don't have a sweatshop in China. We make it with our own hands. When we have a big production run, we hire young people from the Bay Area bike community. I'm proud that many of them have chosen to take their payment in the form of Down Low Glow lights for their own bicycles! We market our products through the bike community -- by showing up at Critical Mass and organizing our own ride series, The San Francisco Cruiser Riie. We can't do what we do without your support! Our products are designed to help you stay safe, have fun, and raise the profile of biking in your community. I hope you'll considering purchasing them. They're American made, satisfaction guaranteed, and genuinely life-changing. But if you never spend a dime in our Rock The Bike store, I still hope that our message reaches you well: Rock the Bike!