Bike designer finds muse
GoChic Bicycle is at home in Taiwan,
TAIPEI , TAIWAN Alex Chou’s bespoke bicycles have drool-worthy designs that would give them pride of place in the hipster scene in Brooklyn or Portland, Ore. But he’s set up shop in Taiwan because “it’s got the most amazing supply chain for bicycles, you can’t get it anywhere else in the world,” the 33-year-old designer said.
Which is how his tiny company, GoChic Bicycle, came to be born.
Chou grew up in Los Angeles, but his parents come from Taiwan. He studied automotive design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and worked for Pininfarina USA in Florida, an Italian design firm.
He was on his way to China to take advantage of his education and Mandarin skills when a stop in Taiwan led to a job at Miniwiz, a sustainable engineering company in Taipei.
Once settled in, his design antenna went up when he realized that Taiwan was one of the world’s great bicycle manufacturing hubs. It’s home to Giant Manufacturing Co., the largest bike company in the world, as well as Merida Bikes, another global player in the bicycle world.
“The whole island has this very complete supply chain for bikes, the manufacturing technology here is very mature,” said Chou.
But what it lacked, he felt, was the kind of small, high-end bike design that’s taking off in the United States, where $5,000 “fixie” and “mixie” bikes are handbuilt by companies like SweetPea in Portland, Horse Cycles in Brooklyn and Republic Bike in Dania Beach, Fla.
Taiwan’s biking culture is small but growing, benefiting from a government push to get Taiwanese out of their cars and onto human-powered transportation. However, most riders are recreational, and they tend to favor the massproduced bikes made by Giant and Merida.
Chou set out to build bikes that were beautiful and a bit fanciful, with the best accoutrements available. He designs them himself, and most are built-to-order. Many feature Gates carbon belt drives instead of chains, which give an ultra-smooth ride and are grease-free.
Working in Taiwan instead of the United States gives Chou tremendous freedom as a designer and head of a start-up company.
“Because all the manufacturing is available here, I can produce a bike in half the time it would take if I were based in the United States,” he said. “We are able to develop new products and bring them into market with much lower initial costs.”
GoChic bikes retail for between $1,200 and $1,800, though prices can rise depending on the colors, finishes and accessories the buyer requests.
Chou’s small staff of three sells about 100 bikes a year, mostly to Taiwanese buyers but increasingly to visitors from Beijing, Shang- hai, Australia, Europe and the United States.
He set up shop in Huashan 1914, a former abandoned wine factory in the heart of Taipei that was first colonized by a theater company and then transformed into a vibrant art and design center full of eclectic artist studios and shops.
The only problem with having his storefront there is that sometimes people who come into the shop don’t believe the objects on display are really bicycles.
“A few wonder if the bikes are art pieces on display,” Chou said. “They think these bikes are simply too beautiful to ride out on the streets and ask whether they are actual functioning bikes.”