One of the hardest lessons to learn growing up is that when you make a mess, it’s your job to clean it up.
We spend years of our lives testing the boundaries of this rule: Just what kind of fury will Mom unleash if my room is mostly clean? What constitutes a “real” mess anyway? If a tree falls in the forest and it falls on my dirty laundry, is there a problem?
As we get older and become more responsible, we learn that if we spill the milk, we best clean it up. But we also learn the impact of other decisions: Don’t waste water. Drive less. Buy organic when you can. And lately, we have been looking at our larger footprint to realize that just because we own a business doesn’t exempt us from this rule: Steel tubing from Japan designed for smaller riders, sweet dropouts from down under, shipping bikes to Colorado for a high quality durable paint job. Our bikes are built with love in Portland, but they are sourced from all over the world.
And while we make the best decisions we can, there is an unavoidable environmental cost to building bikes. That is why today we would like to announce that Sweetpea Bicycles is joining 1% for the Planet. This means that we will donate 1% of each sale directly to environmental causes. 1% of each bike, t-shirt, parts kit, everything, will go directly to the people who fight for the health of our planet.
We believe that just because we build bikes and just because we are the tiniest little bike company, doesn’t get us off the hook. While this will be a humble contribution at the outset, we are approaching it as a mindfulness practice. By marking each bike with the 1% logo, we will be forced to ask ourselves if we have done our best to build clean. We also hope that the logo will remind our customers that every time they ride, they are shifting the balance, they are adding to the positive impact of the bike in the world. And that, after all, is why we build them.
Michael has been up to some interesting things.
I love this time of year. We aren’t quite out of the rainy season, but nature just can’t wait to throw some pink at ya and let you know what’s coming.
This was the inspiration for Natalie’s Cherry Blossom Block Print: Blue sky, windy spring weather, blossoms on the trees:
If you want a Cherry Blossom Block Print, click the cart below.
So there we were, sitting in an Indian restaurant off of Hawthorne talking about architecture, bikes, design, and big ideas. One of us raised the question: “If you could do anything you wanted, what would it be?” The raw divergence of our answers surprised us both. I had always dreamed of starting my own business. Natalie went to architecture school only to notice that all her projects involved bikes. A couple bites of curry later, Sweetpea Bicycles was born. 
We knew right from the start that we wanted to build bikes for women. And knew that women seem to have a different relationship to their bikes than men. Guys tend to dig the specs. Women fall in love. It doesn’t matter if the bike is 20 years old or brand spanking new; the same feeling is there, and that is half of what we wanted to capture with our name. Sweetpea – a term of endearment.
But as we were testing this idea on our focus group (Mom and Dad), we started to get the nagging feeling that maybe the name was just a little too cute. And we just couldn’t see some of our super tough women friends riding something that screamed Hello Kitty. And while women love their bikes, they are also strong and powerful while riding them. So we decided to throw in a cup of toughness and the Sweetpea logo came into being:
Cute as a button. Tough as nails.
But there was some bad business was out there, and we wanted to avoid it. So last April we filed for a federal trademark, and I am happy to announce that the word “Sweetpea” is now a registered trademark of Sweetpea Bicycles covering frames and forks.
Incidentally, the picture above is of our new headbadge. It took a lot of thought, revisions, and help to come into being, but we like it and hope you like it too.
After Natalie stormed out of that interview on The Factor, we swore that we would never do another interview again. Once we had a chance to cool off, we decided to give it another shot.
Listen to Natalie talk bikes for the ladies on the KBOO Bike Show this Wednesday with Sara and Ayleen. 90.7 on the FM dial at 9:00 AM, or afterwards on the interwebs at PortlandTransport.com.
It’s easy to get veggie blindness in a town like this. Whole Foods is piled high with every kind of apple, kumquat, and matsutaki you could ever hope to need and the year round farmers markets stock leafy greens hearty enough to thatch a roof. And with The Economist calling vegetarianism the new Prius of the ecologically inclined, I suppose we Portlanders are just going to have to come to terms with the difference between the sweet potato and the yam, the cilantro and the flat leaf parsley. But after a while, the bounty is enough to make your eyes glaze over.
That’s why I was so excited to see a cardboard box on the porch when I came home yesterday – my first delivery from Organics to You produce delivery. The “Bin for One” included a remarkable volume and variety of produce: pears, apples, bananas, blood oranges, a grapefruit, avocado, onion, spinach, lettuce, mushrooms, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and yams. This was bounty on a small and personal scale and each item packed up for me in that box looked more like a gift than if I had endless choice. I didn’t squeeze thirty avocados to find just the perfect one. I didn’t decide between 18 varieties of apple. I didn’t shy away from the challenge of a plus-sized head of cauliflower.
I will meet my bag of carrots with courage and new soup recipes. I will take bike light batteries out of my crisper to make room for leaf lettuce. I will find myself humming “Amazing Grace” in the kitchen. I was veggie blind, but now I see.
