Gnargo Bikes: A Love Story

What happens when two artists fall in love over bikes, move to a trail town, and decide to build a better way to move families and elders? We sit down with Elysia Springer of Bentonville-based Gnargo Bike Co to share the story of a pandemic garage project that grew into a community-powered company.

Elysia unpacks how early prototypes and human-centered designs transformed into sustainable transportation, local manufacturing, and practical urban mobility. And then emerges the success of the trishaw. We dive into the design challenges of steering, curb handling, and wheelchair access, and how Gnargo brought an American-made option to communities sidelined by import delays and tariffs. Throughout, we explore Gnargo’s circular model: paying community bike shops for donor frames, turning scrap into cargo haulers, and funding local chapters through trishaw sales. Gnargo's ask is simple —use rebates to shop local and handmade, and help build a mobility ecosystem where joy is a design spec. Learn more at Gnargobike.co.

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Transcript

Beth Bobbitt 0:02

Welcome back to a new American town. I'm your host, Beth Bobbitt, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Alicia Springer. Alicia is one half of Nargo, which is a Bittenville-based bike manufacturing company. And I'm sorry Zach couldn't be here today, but welcome, Alicia. Thank you for having me. Glad you're here. So I've heard Nargo referred to as a pandemic garage project. Let's start at the beginning. What was the inspiration? What brought you to Bittenville? Can you tell us a little bit about that backstory?

Elysia Springer 0:33

I tend to get very long-winded about this story. I told Zach before I came, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna crop it as much as I can.

Beth Bobbitt 0:40

Smart brevity. I love it.

Life On Bikes And Early Influences

Why Bentonville Became Home

Elysia Springer 0:43

So I always joke, like, it's a love story. Yeah. So Zach and I actually met in art school, and I say like our lives kind of started on bikes. So we've always been cycling together, always been advocates for safer roads and infrastructure. Kansas City in the early 2000s was a very scary place to ride. It's gotten a lot better. But lives kind of rotating around bicycles. We've lived in Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis before we moved here most recently. So we were able to see like cycling infrastructure at its best in like very dense metropolitan areas. And in Portland was when we first saw cargo bikes utilized by families just as kind of a minivan replacement. And this was in 2008. So we had like super early exposure to the concept of a cargo bike as this vehicle. Yes. And we had our kids in Minneapolis. So we kind of wanted to do that. We wanted to raise our kids on a bike and be as car free as possible. I had a terrible commute. So I live north of Minneapolis, but I worked in St. Paul every day. So we're talking like an hour and a half to two hour drive one way every day. And that was just not really the lifestyle we wanted. And I grew up in Minnesota, very close to my heart. I hate winter. I'm not a winter person. So we kind of knew probably by year three in our move back to Minneapolis that we wanted to be somewhere we could ride year-round with like weather and not having to invest in thousands with fat biking and pristine powder conditions and everything else. So uh hats off to the folks that still ride year-round, like full-blown winter, negative temps. But we heard about Bentonville and had just gotten introduced to mountain biking. And Dak was like, Well, let's let's check out Bentonville. And this was February. So, like right around this time, seven years ago, was when we first came to Bentonville. Fell in love with it. I was still so early on with mountain biking. I thought the trail we think we rode in blowing springs. I'm like, this is insane. Who would ride on these trails? Oh my gosh. Things have improved a lot in my mountain biking skills, but um, so you can see where the brevity is just impossible here for me. Yeah, no, still good detail in 2019. And I'm gonna hold you up even more because I want to know like, what was the context that you'd heard about Bentonville? Was it bike-specific? It was mountain biking.

Beth Bobbitt 3:18

Okay, yeah. It was just kind of this new emerging place to go to ride mountain bikes. And we love the town, we love the small feel of it. Like we, I mean, we were pretty metropolitan living people. So this was very, very small. Yeah.

Discovering Cargo Bikes And Tradeoffs

Pandemic Tinkering And Upcycling

From Prototypes To A Business

Elysia Springer 3:34

And Zach had been working in product design in Minnesota, and I don't know if it was serendipitous, it might have been coincidental, but on our drive back to Minneapolis from Bentonville, we got stuck in Ames, Iowa from a ground blizzard. And for growing up in Minnesota, ground blizzards weren't really a thing to me. And I'm like, the sky's clear, but it was whiteout conditions. They shut down 35. We were stuck in Ames for three days, and that was kind of like the last straw for Zach because he's not Minnesotan. He didn't really care as much for winter. I mean, I didn't like winter either. But he's like, screw this, we're moving to Bentonville. He's like, he was ready to turn around and like just stay. I'm like, well, oh my god, we have jobs, like we can't just not go home. But he must have like conjured some chaos magic in that moment because he was applying for product design jobs with Walmart and suppliers, and we moved by May 2019. So February to May, it was that fast, like quick turnaround. When you know you know, when you know you know. But I had been working in childcare. I was kind of like an art specialist in early childhood ed and then was doing administrative work. So our kids were two and four at the time. And I chose like, well, you know, I've got a year before Gus starts kindergarten. That's our oldest. And like, well, I'll stay home. We can just be outdoor feral kids. We'll do that. And the trail systems were really close, but there wasn't quite the connective infrastructure, and I didn't have the cargo bike yet. So that was kind of in the back of our mind still from living in Minneapolis. I mean, they were so little at the time, it was hard to really think of infants and riding in cold. But once we moved here, it was like kind of this idea that was really growing, and we're like, okay, we test rode every bike you could imagine for like long tails, front load. And I think we decided even before we moved here that we loved the front load. And we tried different bucket bikes, and the Omnium flat platform was kind of a new design too, but we liked that it was more modular. You didn't have the super wide turn radius of the bucket style bikes, and you could pile kids in or you could pile stuff on top of it. You weren't limited with that bucket design, so we're kind of leaning towards something like that. And pandemic hits because we moved summer 2019, so we're rolling in, had an extra couple of years off because we had a kindergartner, and with my background education, I'm like, surely I could handle this. But I really wanted to keep us outside, keep riding as much as possible. That was kind of the whole impetus of us moving in the first place riding bikes. Both kids loved being on two wheels as well. And Zach had started working with Walmart. That's kind of what moved us in product design, and he was volunteering with Pedal It Forward. So we knew about that community connection like from day one. And he was seeing all of these amazing old mountain bike frames getting kind of scrapped or like to the recycling bin or even to the landfill, even worse. So he started kind of collecting. And so when I start us meeting in art school, it's really because we've always been makers and tinkerers. His was more focused in metals and wood with sculpture, and mine was very much textiles. And he was taking the scrap bikes and welding them into tall bikes because it was kind of a joke. So the six-foot distance, safe distancing. We're like, well, we're six feet up in the air. So if you're not familiar with the tall bike, it's like two frames stacked on top. We even built a kid tall bike for Gus, like two kid bikes. So it was pretty hysterical. We would be like the clown family riding around the square on these tall bikes. And it was an accident that Zach, like just over the bar with a tall bike, busted his wrists up really bad. And I'm like, well, can we, when you get better, could you just focus on maybe making a cargo bike now? And I talked about test writing all of the different styles that we liked. And it it really was like price points were very hard for us to get to meet. Like now there's definitely so the market has been flooded since, but in 2019, it was still pretty expensive to buy an electric cargo bike. And especially the bucket style, like bikes and urban arrows were 10, 12, 15 grand. And so we prototyped and iterated and kind of landed on I think it was like version three and four that Zach and I rode around for a long time. And we had, I mean, we moved here for bikes. So kind of everyone in our friend network, which became our family because we had nobody when we moved here that it was all very cycling-centric bike family. And we had a friend introduce us to Phil Shellheimer at U of A, the Gore program he was running at the time, and now he's all over entrepreneurship and innovation. And that was kind of what made us lean into really thinking about being a business. We had to become an LLC. Right. And and then when did Zach officially step away from his own? Well, we both worked both jobs all the time up until I think he's been out two years now, so maybe it was 24.

Beth Bobbitt 9:31

And then when do you say Gnargo was founded?

Sourcing Locally And Sustainably

Elysia Springer 9:35

December 2022. And we were, I think, version one, our non-electric wood-paneled bucket bike that was like the most beast of a bike to ride. It's kind of it's still floating around. It was at pedal it forward. You still have come back. It was back at pedal it forward, it's come back. Uh be a little piece of history. Yeah. We still have that. So, how has that shaped the way Gnargo approaches product design? Like just the history of you figuring it out. I gotta go back to art school and just really thinking about craft and aesthetics and like everything, every little element that goes into it is like very well thought through, but also kind of in an experimental way. We also, Zach and I both have a lot of training in human-centered design. Like, I've gone through like full master design thinking training with IDEO. So, like really thinking about who that end user is ultimately and like what challenges they're having specifically. So, like initially it was kind of our own problem we were solving for. It was like, I want to get my kids around. Like, we have growing infrastructure, we have these trail systems, we just need to get there. And then it became that was a shared problem with friends and family and neighbors in our community. So we really focused closely in on Northwest Arkansas and Denville specifically because a lot of folks had the same needs of we're this close to the trails, we're this close to the razorback, like how do we get the whole family there? Or how do I not have to drive my car a mile to just get a couple of things or do a whole grocery load and at an affordable price point? And we also wanted to solve for how can we not let these amazing bikes go into the landfill when we repurpose? Yeah, that's a lot of goals. Really impressive. You touched on it a little bit, but why was sourcing such a core value? I hate to give Walmart the credit for it, but it definitely drove the idea of like, well, this Titanic here is wanting to have like this major initiative for sustainability by whatever date. I didn't work there, so I don't know the specifics, but I know Zach really thought about that really hard and looking at taking out styrofoam from their packaging because he was over grills. And that being like something he was so motivated to do, but also saw how like a Titanic like Walmart had to move so slowly and make such slow progress to make that possible. Whereas when we were small and agile, we could do it like instantly, and to be able to have our like main frame source across the street from us, like what an amazing like example of circular like all the pieces were just in place, both like from a resource perspective, but also a knowledge perspective.

What A Trishaw Is And Why It Matters

Beth Bobbitt 12:44

Right, yeah, it was meant to be. It's amazing. So uh we're gonna touch on the evolution of the products, and we you already have a little bit, but I wanted to ask you about how you landed on building a trishaw and what is a trishaw. What is a trishaw?

Building Joy: Elder Mobility And Community

Demand For American-Made Trishaws

Elysia Springer 13:03

Yeah, it's wild because this product like a year ago barely existed. So like it has just been good. I don't feel so dumb for not knowing like a rocket ship to the moon and like totally different industry. So let me go back to like November 25. And Dan and Jan Carr, you are amazing people. They came to, I think it was Jessica Pearson with Bentonville Moves or now Arkansas Moves Coalition, asking, like, do you know anybody that could like build a bike? And they'd had a different brand of Tri-Shaw that they'd imported. And this was from their involvement with cycling without age, with which is an international nonprofit, but there are individual chapters, like thousands of them across the world. In Bentonville, it's Dan and Jan Carr kind of running our local chapter, and they work with greenhouse cottages right across from the Amazum. And they were offering tri-shaw rides to their elders there. So this is kind of aging communities, folks that might have mobility challenges, but really specifically our aging, our elders who have the right to the wind in their hair, which is part of the mission statement and really amazing. But they had gotten I think it was a woman who was celebrating her 100th birthday out on a ride over to the amazing. Amazing staff came out and sang happy birthday. Just like this amazing tool to connect intergenerations, connect people with their community. Isolation is such an issue with our aging community as well. But this was kind of Dan and Jan's passion. And they had a lot of challenges with the current model that they had, like tipping points and not hitting the curb right. You couldn't put a wheelchair on it. There were a lot of things, but the main theme of what was so good about it was joy. Like joy kept coming up and up over and over again. And this was, we were running kind of a traditional like empathy mapping experience with Ideo, interviewing them from the very beginning of like, how can we make this the best product that it can be? And so our wizard fabricator, John, I will always refer to him as a wizard because he's just got this engineering brain that like I can visualize things really well as an artist. Like, yeah, I know that that could get put together, but like he understands the mechanics of it and just like it's amazing. But he and Zach kind of put their heads together over the winter of 25 and prototyped, kind of got through multiple versions. The steering was really interesting because it's the tri-shaw what differentiates it from a rickshaw is that it has the two wheels in front with the passengers in front versus two wheels in back, gotcha rear passengers, and it has the same connection. I guess we're looking for that connectivity with your passengers, just as like cargo bikes. Yeah. You have communication, you're not having the pilots not looking over their shoulder, trying to yell at the people behind them. Like we're all able to have very shared experiences with the rides. Right. That was important to us. And we learned that it is called a try-shot. Like we weren't even knowing what we were making or like terms to put with it. And so April 25 was when we came out with the finished product, who kind of delivered it. KWA did a really quick coverage story because there was like a ribbon cutting ceremony too over at the Water Tower Road over by NWAC. And that was kind of when we were like, look at them. And from that point on, we had connected with Edelborn pictures, and these are the sons of John, and I'm blanking on his last name now, but I've only ever heard of him as John. And

Beth Bobbitt 17:05

he is like the embodiment of a tri-shaw pilot. And he runs the chapter out of Santa Barbara, California. And his sons did a documentary called The Cycling Without Age, the movie kind of about their dad, John, and taking them around. And that connection kind of opened this door into all of these people wanting an American-made tri-shaw. Because with tariffs, with imports, with wait times, it's just been more and more challenging for people to get tri-shaws to their communities. There's a lot of desire and want to get elders out and no tools to do so. So we kind of just had this door open like, here you go. How fast can you make them? And who'd have thought? Like that, that would be the thing. Um yeah. I want to also talk about your community give back model because I think this is really special. Can you share a little bit more about how that works?

The Give-Back Model And Donor Frames

How Listeners Can Support

Elysia Springer 18:02

Sure. So with our upcycled bikes, we we refer to them as our donor frames. So we get a donor bike in that style. And each donor frame we pay $50 to whichever community bike shops. And we've kind of connected with probably eight of them now across the country. Originally it was just pedal it forward and 816 bike collective out of Kansas City. And we were kind of like, well, we have a ceiling at some point with how many donor frames we can bring in. We haven't hit that yet. Like, there's still way more that we could do. But we've also gotten a lot of customer feedback in these builds too about wanting a ground up model. So we've kind of expanded and grown really based on our community feedback and experience on the bikes. But the give back is that $50 donation for the donor frame goes towards building, it's usually about two bike builds or repairs at pedal it forward or one of these bike shops that they can then give two bikes out to community members in each. And that's kind of what we've always gone on. Like it's kind of been a flat, like, all right, this is what we're giving for each frame. And then we also have another bike that has like complete new life as a cargo bike, too. And now that we're working with cycling without age chapters, there's kind of this give back initiative with money raised from tri-shaw sales to go into the local chapters there. It's so new that we're navigating, like doing Friday rides at different communities. And so there's lots of opportunities for how we can kind of continue to show up and give back because Nargo has largely built on our community. Like we wouldn't be here without the people just having the vibes, having fun on our bikes, giving

Beth Bobbitt 20:02

us a chance, yeah, and really, really getting behind the brand and the well, and props to you for just staying so true to those core values that we're getting.

Elysia Springer 20:13

And I feel like we're gonna have to do a part two of this because there's so much more I want to dig into, but we're out of time for today. I do want to plug any ways that the community can support you if if there are any. Zach and I were like, how should we answer this? Like, not don't tell a friend, like, come buy a bike. We have awesome rebate programs happening. Like, really consider shopping local, buying handmade. Use that rebate to invest in something handmade and local.

Beth Bobbitt 20:48

Yeah, love it. And we can learn more at is it Gnargo.com. Gnargobike.co.

Elysia Springer 20:57

Gnargo bike code.

Beth Bobbitt 20:58

Amazing. Thank you so much for your time, Elysia. You're very welcome. More to come on the next episode, hopefully. Thanks for being here. Don't forget, Visit Bentonville is here to help you navigate things to do, where to eat and stay, and what's going on in our new American Town. Check out the show notes to follow us on social, sign up for the newsletter, and go to the website at visitbentonville.com. Thanks for listening.