The annual Big Dam Bridge 100 is in its 11th year. I’d think, ‘I did that to that person.’ I love that.” … I loved selling bikes to people like you,” he said, nodding to this reporter, “because I’d teach them about bikes and see that that customer would come back and buy a better bike and then a better bike and within two or three years be doing the Big Dam Bridge 100. And I loved the equipment and I loved selling bikes. “It gave me a home and it was really cool. So I grew up in bike retail in Little Rock.”īy age 16, Karklins - who didn’t even ride a bike before he began working at Chainwheel - had purchased a third of the business and become manager. They knew I was going to get in trouble in the afternoons if they didn’t plop my ass in Chainwheel. “My parents had been saving money for a minivan - they were both social workers - but instead they figured out a way to buy a small piece of Chainwheel so I could get a job.
Why bikes? “Because I was a troublemaker growing up,” Karklins said. MAKING A CARBON FRAME: The manufacturing of the Alfa bike frame requires the placement of hundreds of pieces of carbon fiber into a mold that is heated, coated and heated again before it moves to the final stages of sanding and painting. That would be $50,000 to $60,000 in Southern California.” The factory space “costs $6,000 a month to rent here. “I knew it could be done very economically here,” Karklins said. Why in Little Rock? Because it’s Karklins’ hometown, where he’s been in the bike business since he was 11 years old, when he had a job at Chainwheel fixing flats. The process - from bringing the factory to Arkansas in March 2016 to putting out five to six bikes a week now - has been accomplished at “hyper speed,” Pickman said. Then you hire another 25 to cure the frames, machine them, sand them, paint them, put them on a rotisserie so the paint doesn’t drip and ship them out, either fully assembled with parts ordered by the customer or the frame alone. You spend your first year in business putting in about 100 hours a week developing the frame, hiring and training dexterous workers to place the 351 small and weirdly shaped pieces of carbon fiber that go into the making of the frame. Jim Cunningham, founder of CyclArt, knowing nothing about humidity, agrees to move from San Diego to Little Rock to create the amazing paint finishes on the bikes. Guru’s mechanic, Olivier Lavigeuer, decides he’ll join you, moves from Montreal to downtown Little Rock. You fly Specialized bike company engineer Sam Pickman to town from California and put him up at the Capital Hotel (“with all the upgrades,” Karklins says) Pickman immediately buys a house in Hillcrest. (The $400,000 loan you get from the Governor’s Quick Action Closing Fund and the $50,000 grant for training helps, too.) Then you haul the factory to Arkansas in six semi tractor-trailers. So here’s how you become a quality bike frame manufacturer in Arkansas: You raise close to $3 million from some well-heeled folks - they trust you because of your 36-year career in the bike business - and buy at a bankruptcy auction a factory that had been in business for 24 years (Guru) in Montreal. “He understands what it takes to make a quality bicycle.”