Sweetpea Bicycles

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.