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Consumed
- Biker Chic
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New York Times Magazine, January 14, 2007
To be a bike messenger, a former member of that
profession explains in
the documentary “Pedal,” is to be part of a “whole different culture.”
The messenger feels free, envied and looked down on all at once. “Bike
messengers fall into the realm of outlaw,” he explains. It’s not clear
exactly when people delivering things by way of a bike came to be
thought of as a “culture,” but in recent years it has become clear that
this image is widespread and probably marketable.
For instance, Advertising Age recently included a messenger-bag company
called Timbuk2 in its “Marketing 50”
list of up-and-coming brands. With sales to messengers “in the bag,”
the magazine observed, Timbuk2 has lately “expanded into an
urban-lifestyle brand,” with about $20 million in sales a year and
growing quickly. The company’s roots go back to 1989, when a San
Francisco bike messenger named Rob Honeycutt started making bags and
selling them through local bike shops. When this started to look like a
real business, he changed the original name — Scumbags — got some
financial backing and opened a manufacturing facility in the Mission
District. The brand sold made-to-order bags via the Internet and had a
solid cult following by the time Honeycutt sold his stake to new
investors and left in 2002.
Soon Timbuk2 started to have success with a more diversified product
line. The brand now sells backpacks, laptop bags, duffel bags, tote
bags, yoga bags and even wallets. Macy Allatt, director of marketing
for the company, says that “urban living” is the common thread. While
it is unlikely that bag purchases by actual bike messengers make up
more than a sliver of Timbuk2 sales these days, they’re still “the
reason this company has been successful,” she says. Presumably that’s
both because a bag with messenger-ness in its DNA is bound to be
ruggedly functional and because of courier culture’s harder-to-define
outlaw chic.
Timbuk2 didn’t conjure this chic: the brand is one of many to notice
that messengering seems connected to a more vague, but popular, notion
of “urban” cycling, which carries a whiff of progressive politics,
creativity and preference for the outdoors, even a paved cityscape, to
one of the Man’s cubicles. And of course messengers really do care
about their bags: ReLoad, Eric Zo and other small brands have devoted
followings. But while, for example, messengers have organized
competitions and races for years, it is only recently that these events
have started attracting major sponsors like Puma. Meanwhile, the light
“fixed gear,” or track bikes (which don’t have brakes), that some
messengers use have attracted interest from increasing numbers of
people who five years ago might have been drawn to skateboards. The
makers of a new DVD called “Mash SF” — full of streety stunts (and
painful-looking crashes) in the manner of a skate video but with bikes
— were recently recruited to contribute to the influential Japanese
style Web site Honeyee.com.
This messenger-inspired aesthetic is what Timbuk2 has addressed with
its newer products (one bag is called the Blogger) and by expanding
distribution to places like college bookstores. “We’re still very much
committed to the cycling community,” Allatt says, noting that the brand
sponsors messenger races as well as events like the Bicycle Film
Festival and has produced a limited-edition artist series. And while
many of the new products are made in China, the messenger bags are
still made in San Francisco; the company has also introduced
“sustainable” bags made of hemp. “We wouldn’t want to alienate where we
came from,” Allatt says.
That’s always the trick: as is so often the case, the more popular the
image of the messenger as outlaw icon gets, the more quickly the
reality behind it recedes. One interesting thing about the documentary
“Pedal” — completed in 2001 but recently rereleased with a companion
book of photographs — is that it goes well beyond the popular
cliché of the messenger as a tattooed, vegan, indie-rocking
young man or woman who has made a lifestyle choice to avoid working in
a cubicle. “It’s a nonunionized blue-collar job,” and many couriers are
working-class dads with few other options, says Peter Sutherland, the
director and photographer. “In New York, a lot of times it’s one step
up from rock bottom.” That’s a little different from, say, a leisure
activity like skateboarding. But we’ll take our fresh outlaw role
models where we can find them, even if we find them risking life and
limb to deliver packages for the Man.
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