Brooklyn Cruiser President Ryan Zagata with a Driggs 3.

Before founding Brooklyn Cruiser in 2011, Ryan Zagata had a problem.  He wanted a utility bike for the city that was well-built, handsome, functional, practical and affordable. One that had all the bells and whistles that a smart utility bike should have: an upright design with a few necessary gears, an extremely comfortable ride, a chain guard and fenders. He couldn’t find one in his desired price range. So Ryan decided to create one.

Two years later, the 38 year old Syracuse, NY native is at the helm of what Business Insider considers one of the 50 Coolest New Businesses in America. In just under two years, Brooklyn Cruiser has established itself as a real player in the American urban bicycle market, starting with the original Bedford two-speed that introduced the brand in 2011, going all the way to this years  launch of three new models, including a single-speed, a three-speed and a seven-speed.  Also this year, Ryan, along with cycling icon Grant Petersen, partnered with the Museum of Modern Art in New York to launch an special edition of the Brooklyn Cruiser available exclusively at the MoMA Store.

In the past couple of years, I’ve gotten the chance to know Ryan a little bit, particularly since he hired me to be Contributor-at-Large for Brooklyn Cruiser’s blog.  He, along with his wife and young son, live in… wait for it… Brooklyn. On a recent Tuesday in January, we met for lunch in SoHo to catch up on all things us. We also thought it might be a good idea to introduce our readers to a guy who’s been kinda behind-the-scenes until now. So I came prepared with some soul-probing questions for the founder and President of Brooklyn Cruiser.

What were you doing just prior to starting Brooklyn Cruiser?
I was working for a software company. For about ten years, I was selling software for a company based outside of Seattle. I sold to banks and financial institutions here in New York. I was successful in it. It was a good job, a lucrative job, but I never really felt an intellectual draw or challenge. I’d watch my wife who had started her own baking company [which she has since sold]. She’s an entrepreneur, she’s a publicist, and I watched her become massively successful with all sorts of triumphs. She was the biggest encourager for me. But it wasn’t all about success; it was more about doing something I was passionate about, which wasn’t bicycles at first, necessarily.

What triggered the idea to start a bicycle company?
Living in a New York apartment with my wife, I had a mountain bike and a road bike, which I never really rode. I told my wife I wanted another bike, and she said “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. If you want to get another bike, no problem. Just get rid of those two other bikes.” I wanted a bike I could just ride around on – go to the bar, go to the market, go to the office. I was essentially describing a utility bike or commuter bike without really using those words.

Fast forward a few months and we were in Vietnam on holiday, and everyone is riding these upright utility bikes.  They had all their produce in the back or, if it was a linens company, they’d have all their cottons stuffed in the back. And I’m thinking, “This is totally it.” When I wrote my first blog post, I posted all these pictures of people in Vietnam riding these upright utility bikes. It was such an inspiration to me and I was quite confident this was the style of bike I had been describing all along.

I started looking researching some of the bikes, not knowing all of the brands, but I knew that style of bike was relatively expensive. Over there [in Vietnam], they’re all single-speeds, coaster brake and steel frame. Over here you had 21-speed bikes with a Brooks leather saddle, leather grips and a lugged chromoly frame, equating to a $1,000 bicycle. That’s not exactly an accessible bicycle, and part of our mantra was to make bikes that would be accessible.

We had some prototypes made, rode ‘em around, got a general consensus, a lot of good feedback on them.  Then we refined the models, found a way to make them accessible and bump the quality up quite a bit from when we had them made domestically over here.  And then we launched. [The first Brooklyn Cruiser was The Bedford, a two-speed with raised handlebars, a kick-shift and a coaster brake.] We went through them [The Bedfords] pretty quickly and got a lot of good press coverage on the brand.

The first Brooklyn Cruiser – The Bedford – with raised handlebars, a coaster brake and a 2-speed kick shift.

Then we started going to different bike shops, “Would you carry our bikes? Why would you carry them? Why wouldn’t you carry them?” I had no allegiance to the bike. I’d say “If you tell me this is the worst bike you’ve ever seen, I’ll accept that, but you need to tell me why. And what would make it a better bike.” From there, I compiled all of these, refined the bike and that became the Driggs… three speed internal hub, hand brake, etc.

How long were you juggling both “jobs” before you were ready to go full-time with Brooklyn Cruiser?
I had juggled both jobs for maybe nine months. I felt like I had continued to be successful at my sales job despite myself. A came to a point where the business was on such a growth trajectory that I was doing a disservice [to my sales job]. People ask how did you know when it was time to leave… well, you tap yourself on the shoulder and say “I can’t juggle both these things.” It’s scary as hell, jumping off that cliff. But I look at becoming an entrepreneur kind of like learning to ride a bicycle:  you’re gonna fall off the bike many times, and you know it’s gonna hurt, but you know that the joys and pleasures that it will bring you and will bring other people are so above and beyond. But you know that you’re going to get back up again, and you know you’re going to fall again, but you’re gonna get up and keep going and going until, eventually, you don’t fall.

The original Bedford was such a tremendous learning experience for me.

Aside from selling bicycles, is it fair to say you had an alternate agenda of doing your bit to contribute to a more appealing city “cyclescape,” as it were?
I don’t make any secrets that my wife is a publicist. When I first started the company, she came to me with the “So What” factor: Who cares? You’re doing a bike company. That’s great. How are you going to differentiate yourself? There was an element in our refining to figure out what are we going to do about our bicycle to make it stand apart from other bicycles. I could just put a diamond frame out there, put a head badge on it, leather grips and saddle, but it would be like 90% of the other utility bikes that are already out there.

Between the double-top tube, the cream-colored tires, I wanted the bike look distinctive, but also we were fine sacrificing margin to make our bike successful from a price perspective. We could charge more for our bikes, probably, and I could even argue quite confidently with a lot of evidence that our bikes are better than bikes that are priced higher than ours from a component perspective. But at the same time, I get the biggest kick in the world out of seeing somebody on our bikes. And it’s happening so much more now than it was twelve months ago. And twelve months from now, it’s going to happen probably five times as much.

I wanted to differentiate our bikes, but I didn’t want to differentiate them so much that they became $1,000 bicycles. I also didn’t want to ‘up-sell’ our bikes. I wanted to pick a price point that I thought was a fair price point for our bike, and pack as much value into that as we could from a bike perspective. You could buy another bike for $70 more than us, but it’s not going to come with a rack, it may not come with an internal gears, it may not heave a leather saddle or leather grips or a chain guard or fenders. Those are all ‘up-sells’ and that’s not what I wanted to be about. I want it to be a utility bike in every way.

One time, when I was out with my wife, I saw a guy with one of our bikes. I chased him across the street and said ‘Excuse me… what do you think of that bike?’ And he was raving about the bike. A very profound warmth came through to me that I was doing the right thing. This was someone who paid $549 for a bicycle. He didn’t know who I was but he was pretty confident that he got a great deal and it was obvious from seeing him that he enjoys the bike.

When my son grows up, I want him to be able to see our bike from fifteen years ago. That’s something I can be proud of.

The Driggs-3, with 3-speed grip shift, hand brake and a coaster brake. Introduced in 2012.

Once upon a time, bicycles going all the way back to the 1950s (and even earlier) were upright bikes and pretty standard with features like raised handlebars, three speeds, chain guards, fenders, coaster brakes with handle brake assists. Then, in 1979, the hit film Breaking Away inspired Americans to get on a 10-speed racing style bike. With the help of racing culture, racing style bikes (merging with mountain style) have dominated the bike culture. Were the simple aesthetics and features of Brooklyn Cruisers inspired by that “old school” bike and perhaps an effort to bring some of that back?
I think our inspiration was European utility bikes, but also far Eastern utility bikes. The Flying Pigeons? They’re beasts! They’re heavy, they’re tanks, but they’re utility bikes through and through. You could ride that thing through a war zone and you’re not gonna have any issues. They’re just made to withstand a beating.

I had a Fuji road bike. I had a Trek mountain bike. There’s a reason I didn’t ride them in the City. They’re not a practical bikes to be riding around the city. The mountain bike has the knobby tires; on the road bike, the tires are too skinny. It’s not a comfortable bike and not something that I would necessarily feel safe on. You’re sacrificing the utility point, because you have knobby tires and shocks. A utility bike is kind of a hybrid between those two, in some capacity.

I want a bike that’s comfortable. I don’t think mountain bikes are necessarily comfortable. The mountain bike is not a utilitarian, here-to-there bike. You don’t enjoy riding a bike when you’re not riding an upright bike, and you don’t know that until you ride one. When you’re riding an upright bike, it doesn’t really feel like you’re exerting as much energy. You very well may be, but I feel like it’s much more of an enjoyable, relaxed ride. As soon as you start hunching over, the need to exert yourself comes into play. As soon as your weight shifts forward, you’re putting weight on your hands, your wrists, your forearms, whether it’s a mountain bike or a road bike. As soon as you sit back (upright), your weight is all on your butt. We spend most of our day in this upright, sitting position. It’s the most comfortable, common position. Why would I change that?

What do you think sets Brooklyn Cruiser apart from other modern city bikes?
We work really hard to build our brand and tell our story.  We could talk about the bicycle, we could talk about the company. But the company itself…is quite unique.  In the traditional bike shop model, you go in to a bike shop and ask for a bike to ride up and down and get around in. They’re going to sell you what they have. That bike may be a great bike, maybe twenty companies make a similar bike – maybe better, worse, more expensive, less expensive.  But they’re gonna sell you whatever they carry.

We try to flip that model upside down and our customers go into stores asking for a Brooklyn Cruiser by name. One of the things we get patted on the back for is that we drive traffic into stores. Not many people go into a bike store asking for brands by name, but I think about 75% of the people who buy our bikes go in knowing they’re going to buy a Brooklyn Cruiser. They test ride it – it meets or exceeds their expectations – and they go ahead and buy it.

I don’t want us to be a model/year company. I don’t want to be going back to shops and saying “Oh, look what we’re doing this year.” We’re going to make small refinements, but when we get to a place where we feel like our bike is in a really good place, that’s our model. From an industry perspective, model years are very self-serving for the companies. To the bike shops, I’d be saying “Guess what? We’ve got new models coming in. You better dump the ones you got.” They cut into their margins. I want to be a dealer’s friend. My customers, ultimately, are 1) you as a rider; and 2) the bike shops, really. These are good people. They have good business, they’re small business owners, and, as a bike rider, they’re people you want to know when you stumble into their bike shop.

I think our bikes are a tremendous value. If you look at other bikes in our price point, none of them have leather saddles. I think one of them maybe has leather grips. A lot of these bike are pretty standard diamond frames, what have you. Our double-top tube adds some aesthetic perspective, but also adds some rigidity. One of the reasons I wanted Grant [Petersen] on board is that Grant is a bike geometry wizard. Something about the drop on a bike may mean nothing to you. He’ll add an extra millimeter. And you ride that bike and you say “This bike rides better than the bike that has one millimeter less drop.” You wouldn’t know that if someone didn’t tell you that, someone who’s been in the industry for 30 years and learned from trial and error that this is a better riding bike. There are reasons that bike geometry is the way it is. When you come to a stop light with a well designed upright utility bike, you can put your toes on the ground, as opposed to hopping off the bike or the saddle.

Our bikes were designed exclusively for utility riding, right down to every single millimeter in the frame design. We build them to last. We don’t skimp when we put in components; we spend the extra .40, the extra $2.00 for a component. At the end of the day, I don’t want someone calling me with a problem with their bike. I don’t want bikes returned to bike shops. If someone buys a bike, I want that shop to have the confidence that they’ve sold that person probably one of the best bikes they can for that price point.

Maybe the number one thing is that it’s a very unique and distinctive bike. There are other bikes out there that maybe look good and ride well, but you’re not going to remember that. Nobody’s taking pictures of those bikes. Our bikes are very photogenic.

Where did you get the idea to go with buttercream tires instead of black or even white walls?
I’m going to hand that to my wife, with the “So what” / what needs to be different. When we saw the first prototype with those tires on them, we said “That is a brilliant look.” Very elegant. Why does a tuxedo look so good? Black and white. That is our signature model: black bike, cream-colored tires, double-top tube. It’s very distinctive.

The first Brooklyn Cruiser, the Bedford in 2011, was a two-speed cruiser with a kick shift, a coaster brake and raised handlebars. The following year, in 2012, you launched the Driggs 3, which has a three-speed grip shift and both a coaster brake and a handle brake. What’s coming for 2013?
We’re doing an internal 7-speed, the ‘Driggs-7′. Driggs-3 is going to get some refinements. All of our bikes are going to have a double kickstand [except for the re-launch of the new, single-gear Bedford]. All the nuts and bolts are going to be stainless steel, and the rims are going to have machine brake surface so it brakes very smoothly.  We’re going to have a longer stem so you can raise the handlebars up a little bit more if you want to and we’re also introducing multiple frame sizes.

We’re also introducing some partnerships. We just announced a partnership with MoMA (Museum of Modern Art); we did a bike for them [available at the MoMA Store now]. Bloomingdales is doing a bike pop-up in a couple of stores, and we’ll be in about four or five Bloomingdales shops. We’re in six shops in Canada. So the brand is continuing to expand.

The MoMA Brooklyn Cruiser, designed by Ryan Zagata and Grant Petersen. Introduced in 2013.

I don’t see it as having to introduce so many models. You want to get your models right, and let them speak for themselves. We don’t have to sell 10,000 bicycles a year. I’m very happy selling 3,000 bikes a year. We have a very good brand and I enjoy it. If I see an opportunity that makes sense, I’d pursue it, but I don’t want to continue to grow and expand our SKUs just for the sake of expanding the number of SKUs.

How do you see Brooklyn Cruiser in a year? Two years? Five?
One year, I don’t see us being that much different than we are now with the exception of accessibility. One year from now, we’re going to be in more shops than we are now. In 2013, we’ll be in about 60 shops as opposed to something like 24 last year.

We’ll make little tweaks that people wouldn’t even recognize. We may introduce a higher-end model with a fully-lugged frame, go a little bit more classical. But I don’t necessarily think we need to change what we’re doing or our lineup. We’ve been approached about partnering with a couple of bigger brands, where we would either fill a gap in their portfolio or be an entrance point into the U.S. market.

But I don’t look out on five years and say “This is where we need to be.” In reality, that’s a lot of hocus-pocus. We take things one day at a time. I have an idea of where we want to be, but that idea doesn’t mean having 70 different models. I just want to be known as a company designing high quality and accessible bikes at a good value bike, and I want to see more of our bikes in the streets.

Our core competency is a bike company. I want to make sure we’ve mastered that before we start dipping our toe in other waters.

What was your first bicycle?
My first bicycle was a banana seat Huffy. I loved that thing. Coaster brake, chain guard, front and rear fenders, upright riding… You could actually ride someone else on the banana seat. Nothing thrilled me more than pedaling as fast as I could, then skidding out on the tires.

George Hahn | @georgehahn