Questions for Aaron Hayes of Courage Bicycle Mfg.

Close readers of the captions on Core77 photo galleries may already be familiar with Courage Bicycle Manufacturing from the North American Handmade Bicycle Show spread from earlier this year. Although only mentioned in one frame, Courage made a good-sized splash at NAHBS, taking the coveted Best New Builder award for their clean, subtly retro, fastidiously detailed works of rolling art. Like a lot of custom frame shops, though, Courage is really just one guy: Aaron Hayes, a 33-year-old Portlander, who is of exceptional interest to Creative Seeds because he's also an Industrial Designer.

There's plenty of precedent for this sort of shift. Designers who do studio work--especially in consultancies--rarely stay there for an entire career, often moving on to start their own companies after a few years. The hectic pace of the studio environment is a frequent explanation, as is a desire to see a more solid relationship between the design process and the finished product. For those reasons, moving into a field like custom fabrication can make perfect sense for an experienced designer, though the furniture builder with an ID degree is perhaps a more familiar example.

Aaron's particular choice--frame-building, a highly specialized discipline--combined with his rapid success in the endeavor makes for an interesting spin on the "what else can you do with a design degree?" story, and he was kind enough to answer a few questions via email earlier this week.

There seems to be an unusual fondness for bikes among designer-types, and Industrial Designers in particular. Why do you think that might be?
I think that stems from many designer types wrenching on their bikes as kids. I fondly remember completely disassembling my first real road bike, and struggling to get it back together. It taught me a lot about how stuff works.

Before founding Courage, you worked as an Industrial Designer here in Portland. Can you give us a quick timeline: school, work, and freelance?
I graduated from ASU with a BS in Design in 2000, then moved to Portland to work at Ziba. I'd interned there for a year in school, so I had the luxury of a job waiting for me. Ziba was like a kind of graduate school--we worked hard and lived the "designer" life-- but I got burned out after 3 years of late nights and uber-cool t-shirts.

I took some time off that summer to ride the bike park in Whistler BC, then came back and started contract work. That lasted another 3 years, and I started to burn out again. This time, I really put some thought into finding work that I could get excited about, and latched onto the idea of making custom frames. There was the added bonus of a pressing national hand-build show timeline--I had just six months to set up shop, learn to build bikes and launch a brand.

Would you say that your move to start Courage was more of a reaction to the "designer" life, an expression of your love for bikes, or just a desire to build things?
It was really a combination of all three. I was no longer interested in just being a designer and I wanted more of a stake in whatever was next. And it seemed like such an obvious opportunity that it only took a couple of days of contemplation to fully commit to it. The idea of working in a shop all day manufacturing components that you designed yesterday was just the thing I could get excited about again.

Did you have much of a background in fabrication before you took the leap?
I worked in an R&D lab of a medical supply company for a couple of years after my first year of college. We made custom products and tooling for the factory, so I got a lot of experience with different materials there. But working with steel is new to me; I've had to learn a lot through trial and error, and a few flesh wounds as well.

What aspects of your design training and ID experience have you found useful in your current career? Were there any new skills you had to learn that you weren't expecting?
I use my design background every day to communicate and develop novel products. It's much the same process, too: sketching, model building, prototyping, CAD, you name it. One critical difference is that I'm really constrained by my manufacturing processes and tooling. I have to really focus on developing solutions with a good idea of how I will craft each one.

The main skill I had to learn was how to actively sell myself and my brand. So many opportunities have come up from getting to know people in the industry, and making sure to meet and remember all of those folks. It feels a little awkward sometimes (this coming from a guy who can file on a frame for 10 hours and not speak a single word) but it's an integral part of the business that you ignore at your peril.

What sort of CAD do you use, and how does it fit into your build process?
I use Rhino mainly to create 2D frame drawings, and also to create surface models for machined parts like dropouts and stems. I also use it to refine paint schemes in 3D, and use those renderings to show clients what their frames will look like. This is especially helpful since most folks are not accustomed to reading 2D drawings.

It's very unusual for custom builders to model up a frame in CAD first, actually. Some dabble with SolidWorks, but I'm the only one I know of with any depth of experience in 3D, so I'm trying to leverage that as a competitive advantage.

How much time do you spend on various aspects of the business?
The amount of time NOT working on bits of metal is enormous! Probably half of my time is spent on other things, like managing the race teams, ordering parts, talking to the painter, fixing tools, ordering tubes and frame components. Just specifying and ordering parts for a single frame can take an entire day! And there is the pipeline of new frames, each with a new customer that need to kept up to date. Every customer is unique and demands unique information to stay happy with the process.

Is there anything you miss about consultancy or freelance ID work?
I miss always being surprised by the ingenuity and insights from my peers. It can get a little lonely working by yourself day after day, and it's easy to start second guessing things when everything goes through one filter. I also miss the comfort of a direct deposit paycheck--the financial risks for starting any business like this are enormous, but I can't imagine going back the 9-5 routine at this point in my life!

Top photo: David Regen
All others: Aaron Hayes

>>See Courage's Flickr stream here<<