Circle A Cycles
Owner: Chris Bull
Type of business: Custom bicycle builder
Location: 299 Carpenter St., Providence
Employees: 2
Year established: 2001
Annual Sales: WND
There’s a Pac-Man-eating-cars decal on the yellow bicycle frame in Circle A Cycles’ workshop. It hangs on a wall cluttered with other frames and bikes – some finished, some waiting for repair.
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A paint booth stands to one side, next to a rack of boxes filled with steel tubing. Unfinished bike frames are attached to a support column in the middle of the room.
It’s not a lot of space, just 1,000 square feet. But that space is home to Circle A Cycles, a small custom bike-building company that claims to make “the best bikes on the bloody planet.”
Love of bikes and what they represent make Circle A Cycles’ bikes the best, said Chris Bull, owner of the 5-year-old shop, which employs two part-time apprentices. That and the fact that each bike is hand-measured, cut, welded, filed and formed to “fit” the customer’s body and needs.
“Bikes can be a political thing,” Bull said, explaining why he loves making bicycles. “They’re about consuming less resources in general.”
They are also about a “human-scaled and -powered future,” which goes along with Bull’s anarchist approach to a market-driven world. As Bull sees it, anarchism would lead to “a society based upon mutual aid, cooperation and free association, without hierarchy or authority.”
Even the name, “Circle A,” comes from the symbol “A” inside a circle, the company’s logo and the symbol for anarchism.
Bull said many of his customers “get” the reference. “It hasn’t hurt, being up-front,” he adds, “because it ties into the philosophy that’s very much about the local economy, keeping things small and democratic.”
Although Bull doesn’t believe in the market, or the “commodification of life,” as he calls it, he has still managed to create a market for his product, through the Internet and by word-of-mouth. He builds and ships steel bike frames and bicycles to customers across the country.
“There’s definitely enough work,” he said, noting that he now has a six- to nine-month waiting list.
About two-thirds of the business comes as orders through his Web site, Bull said. Most customers are referred by other customers.
Circle A Cycles customers are likely to use bikes every day – either as their primary form of transportation or for work, as couriers – or to bicyclists who race or tour frequently, Bull said. One-third of them are local, he said.
“People notice the aesthetics more here,” said Bull, who has lived in Worcester, Mass., Boston and Seattle. He speculated it might be because of the artist community in Providence and outlying towns.
Many local customers care about buying from independents, rather than chain stores, he added. For example, “coffee costs more at White Electric than Dunkin’ Donuts, but I know people who will only go” to the independent shop on Providence’s West Side.
And like White Electric’s coffee, Circle A’s bikes cost more than a chain store’s, Bull said. They average about $1,000 to $1,500 for the frame – minus extras, such as mounts for racks and bottle holders and decals.
Bull said he sometimes builds the whole bike – with wheels, gears, tires, pedals and handle bars – but more often constructs just the frame. His customers generally have their own means of getting and assembling the other parts.
It takes him about one to two weeks to build a frame, Bull said. And it involves about 100 steps. Many customers like to personalize their bikes with decals or quotes or nicknames, which Bull can design, print and cut, using special software and an in-house printer.
Customers are so excited about their bikes, Bull said, that he spends much of his time sending “rafts of e-mails” to customers about their bike’s progress through the manufacturing process. They like to see pictures, and local customers often stop by to take their own photos of their bike at different stages of production.
“Every single [bike] is different,” Bull said. “You start with a box of tubes that all look the same. And it always takes longer than you think, when it’s made by hand.”
Circle A Cycles manufactures about 30 bikes per year, in addition to repaints, frame repairs and other projects, all of which contribute to generating enough money to pay overhead costs and some profit to live on, Bull said.
“No one’s getting rich,” he said. But he couldn’t imagine doing anything else, because “you never know what a day will hold.”
