Rodeo Adventure Labs was founded as an open-to-anyone team a decade ago by Stephen Fitzgerald and a group of friends in search of less rules and more fun on bikes. Since becoming a production bike company with an emphasis on versatility, customization, and—always—refined design, Rodeo has retained a culture of questioning the norm. Today, Hailey Moore shares a long-form profile of the high points and headwinds Rodeo has navigated over the past ten years, and exciting insights into how the company is thinking about its future. To accompany this Shop Visit, we’re also sharing people-and-bike portraits of the folks behind Rodeo Adventure Labs in a separate Radar.

In 2014, Stephen Fitzgerald was adamant that Rodeo Adventure Labs would not be a bike company. Rodeo was a concept; a vehicle for storytelling and fun; it was an anti-team team born out of an aversion to the too-rigid road-centric and race-focused clubs that he saw as dictating how he should ride a bike. In those early years, Stephen was, in fact, turning away strangers’ offers to buy bikes from him (something that might sound crazy to him today). If you wanted to be part of Rodeo, you could buy a jersey—or not!—and share your adventures with the growing number of “members” around the world. There was no plan and there were no rules.

Even when Stephen bought a few no-serial-number carbon frames from China, had “Rodeo” painted on the downtube, and started taking them to races, Rodeo was never supposed to get too serious. But, eventually, when Stephen realized he was putting more time and effort into Rodeo than his “real” design job, he started weighing the odds. They didn’t look good. Still, when his wife granted him the grace to abandon—or, at least, detour from—the traditional career track, he decided to take a chance.

It’s been a decade since Rodeo’s inception and it is now very much a bike company; it has grown—organically, methodically—and it has also stumbled. And, even as Rodeo has become a serious business, it has never gotten too serious about bikes.

Anything Goes: Becoming Rodeo Labs

Rodeo Labs started as an anything-goes team in early January 2014. When People would ask “What is Rodeo?” Stephen would say, “I have no idea… we just don’t want anyone to tell us what to do, and we’re experimenting.” After racing various disciplines—road, XC, and cyclocross—while growing up in Washington state, living and working as a designer in Los Angeles, and later moving to Colorado, Stephen had a lot of experience with teams that tried to tell riders what to do. The strict rules of one such Colorado team—which included an interview process, a “sketchy dues payback” system, and race quota minimums (“we’re talking amateurs, cat 5 to cat 2 road racing”)—ultimately made Stephen start questioning the authority of such a dictatorial approach to cycling. He also realized that a team was just a construct that you bought into, either financially or philosophically, and he decided to start his own, where the barrier to entry would be of the latter variety. As he put it, “If you get five friends and put your name on a jersey, you have a team now.” And that’s exactly what he did.

After reaching that five jersey order minimum for custom printing, Stephen continued to put his design skills to work and built a website that explained the loose ethos of Rodeo: “Anyone’s welcome, ride with whatever style you want, do whatever you want, there are no rules.” The site also housed the Rodeo blog where Stephen and others would frequently write about the team’s misadventures. And, of course, there was Instagram.

As Stephen explained, Instagram was still in its own “anything goes” phase and Rodeo “totally grew on the back of that.” It’s interesting to consider how the 2010s had a similarly leveling effect on cycling as they did on storytelling via social media: In the US, the cycling industry was turning the corner from post-Lance road disillusionment and embracing the—then—grassroots gravel movement. Athletes were seeing an alternative career path to moving through the pay-to-play cat ranks as the “privateer” track became a viable option, eventually eclipsing the traditional team format altogether (though, the pendulum may already be swinging back on this trend).

Simultaneously, platforms like Instagram were creating a more egalitarian point-of-entry for aspiring writers and photographers; anyone with a story to tell and the ability to wield a camera could try to cultivate a following. For Stephen, the expansion of local communities to virtual ones was pivotal in the success of Rodeo, “That was part of my thinking in going into Rodeo: There’s no such thing as a Denver team anymore. If you can tell a story, you can have a dialogue with anybody in the world and anyone into #cycling can find you.”

In addition to being able to reach a wider audience, sharing Rodeo through online channels imbued the emerging brand with a degree of romantic abstraction. That’s not to say that Stephen has glossed over hardship; if anything he has tended more towards transparency than many brands and Instagram personas. Rather, the newly afforded ability to follow individuals and brands online inherently created the space for projection between the real and the idealized on the part of the social media voyeur; it has, after all, led to the entire concept of a “personal brand” and “Instagram versus reality” is a well-worn trope. In the case of Rodeo, it allowed the brand to stand for something bigger than your local team, something new and audaciously off-road, something we might have called avant-garde then, but now we just call Gravel.

Not Gravel, Just Bikes

“Everyone else has sort of told us we’re [Gravel] and I haven’t fought that,” says Stephen. “Gravel is great, it’s ok that we’ve landed in that space.” While Gravel may now be the umbrella term used to define the types of bikes that Rodeo makes, before Rodeo was designing its own bikes and before Gravel was the discipline du jour, the impetus for Stephen’s design experimentation was a search for the aloof and illustrious quiver killer.

In 2015, the Denver-based Rodeo contingent was getting bored with the local roads (“who wants to ride up Lookout Mountain every single weekend?”) and started trying to color outside the paved lines on Road and ‘Cross bikes, but the limits of underbiking quickly became apparent. As is surely relatable to many proto-gravel cyclists of that time, in Stephen’s telling, the story of his rides went like this: “My Bianchi cyclocross bike is getting me all of these places, but I can’t get to the bottom of the hill without my hands going numb, and with an 11-34 you can kind of get up the hill but you’re dying, and you’re riding a 34-millimeter Crossboss—but a 40 would be soooo amazing. Does ANYONE make a 40? But, then, does the frame fit it?” Like all enterprising entrepreneurs, his quest took him back to the internet.

Deep in the forums, Stephen found what was then a wildly revelatory design: a no-brand carbon cyclocross bike that took disc brakes and fit 40-millimeter tires available direct from a Chinese factory. Stephen ordered five frames for himself and friends who had gotten wind of his personal bike project. He had the frames painted to match the Rodeo jerseys, and started showing up with them to races and rides of all disciplines, including Dirty Kanza in 2015 and including some mountain bike races (“very dumb, but also very fun”). Even as the bikes garnered plenty of attention (and snagged some podiums), Stephen was still resolved that Rodeo wouldn’t become a bike company, “People would come up to us and say, ‘that’s the idea I have, too, the quiver killer. Can I get one?’ and I would reply, ‘No, just no’ and give them the name of the factory that I ordered it from.”

Stephen’s reservations about branding and selling more of these generic-framed bikes had nothing to do with being exclusionary; married with two kids at the time (now three), his reticence to make Rodeo a real financially-responsible entity was wrapped up in his own observations of the bike industry; “I’ve been into bikes since I was 13 and bike companies always die; they always go bankrupt. No matter how cool you are, all the cool anodized brake and hub companies and fad brands come and go and then you’re like ‘what happened to them?’” But, gradually, his better judgment was being overruled by the allure of Rodeo’s possibilities. Stephen found himself routinely dedicating up to 30 hours a week to the team and admits that “it was so fun to work on Rodeo and so not fun to work on work.”

Finally, after consulting with a friend, Glenn McCoin, who would become a less-public business partner in Rodeo and getting connected with a factory making bikes in Taiwan, Stephen made the gamble that “a couple years of screwing it up,” wouldn’t cause irreversible damage if he needed to retreat back to real life and a “real” career. Rodeo seemed like it wanted to go somewhere. Still set on the idea of creating the perfect quiver killer, Stephen go to work bringing the first ground-up Rodeo design, the Traildonkey, to life.

Traildonkey

The early iterations of the Traildonkey—Rodeo’s do-it-all carbon bike—illustrate the knife-edge of the brand’s success. There’s a rule of thumb for new, small businesses that if you can make it through the first three years, you actually have a shot at really making it, and this holds true for Rodeo. After starting the team in 2014 and branding the five anonymous 40 mm CX bikes in 2015, Stephen began working with engineers at a Taiwan factory to design a frame and fork from scratch. He admits that with his, “never professional anything, no industry experience, no right-to-be-here type stuff” his role in crafting the original, publicly available Traildonkey (2.0) was more in a Creative Director capacity, stipulating geometry and clearance numbers and tube silhouettes, while relying on the engineers to make the bike work. There was a lot of pushback from the factory along the nobody’s-doing-it-this-way lines when Stephen requested features like clearance for 700×40+, disc brakes, dropper-post compatibility and thru axles, to which Stephen’s reply was, “That’s the point, nobody is making what I want, so I will.” In retrospect, he says that it’s amazing the factory didn’t fire him as a client right then, as he stumbled through the learning curves of the manufacturing process.

But, there was a lot riding on those initial 25 production 2.0 frames and subsequent larger orders. Along with his friend and single investor Glenn, Stephen had invested six figures in the tooling needed just to make the frames, taking out a second mortgage on his house. Each run of frames was funded through pre-order sales, but getting people to buy your bikes does not automatically equate to business success. For two years following the first run of Traildonkeys, Stephen didn’t take a paycheck and kept borrowing more against his home. But, he knew that maxing out the second mortgage was the absolute ceiling of what he could put into Rodeo, and as each month passed that ceiling got closer.

In a cruel Instagram-versus-reality juxtaposition, Stephen described Rodeo’s perceived position during this time and the behind-the-scenes collapse he felt was imminent as one of the brand’s early “near death experiences”:

“We had revised the fork and were retesting to ISO standards, and it wouldn’t pass. For like four months we tried and tried again. We were one of the first, or the first, company to hit the market with a fork with flat mount brakes, exactly when the new standard was released. We had all these frame and fork pre-orders, but the fork wasn’t passing testing. People were canceling Traildonkey pre-orders because I kept saying ‘Next month, next month, it’s coming next month,’ because that’s what the factory was telling me. Meanwhile, I’m borrowing to pay company bills and personal life expenses up to this max mortgage number and I finally got to that number and I was like, ‘We’re done. No more money. Rodeo is dead.’ But, publicly—externally—everything was, and had to be, very positive. People would high-five me on the local group ride and say ‘You’re killing it with Rodeo, so fun to watch—awesome!’ And I’m thinking ‘Cool, I’m going to lose my house.’”

In the end, Glenn convinced Stephen to write himself his first Rodeo paycheck—money that Stephen was saving to refund pre-orders—and take it to the bank to save his house. Because, as Glenn said, “If you don’t pay yourself right now there won’t be a Rodeo next month, so let’s figure out next month, next month.” Stephen wrote the check. The fork passed the next week. People stopped canceling pre-orders. Gravel happened and there was a name, and sporting phenomenon, to describe the types of bikes that Stephen and the Rodeo team had started making. More “near death experiences” were to come, but Rodeo operated in the black for the next seven years.

Running the Machine

“I have not gotten my mortgage back out of Rodeo,” said Stephen. “I pay myself now, but I’ve never paid myself back for that initial investment. When you invest in a company, that money pretty much just sits in the company, either until it is sold or dies. That money builds all of this [gestures around the Rodeo headquarters]—right now, I am sitting in a chair that we own. I never understood that [in the past]; when you build something, you put all this money and time into it and it gets bigger, but it’s not like you’re wealthy, but you have this machine that you built that can do things. That was a really important lesson.”

Since 2017, Rodeo has done a lot with that machine. The company moved into a larger work space (and has since moved again to the even larger space pictured here) and hired employees: Rodeo now employs seven full-time staff. Planning for the second Rodeo model, the Flaanimal (so named, jokingly, after the array of hearty animals the Rodeo team saw on a past trip to Flanders, i.e., ‘Flanders Animals’), was started in 2015, and that model has continued to see updates.

Designed to be a more classic compliment to the Traildonkey, the Flaanimal is a steel platform designed around versatility. Originally coined the “Unsinglespeed,” the Flaanimal is meant to offer its owner complete creative freedom in the build process with its sliding dropouts, dropper-post compatibility, rack and fender mounts, custom yoke for increased clearance, internal routing (for a clean aesthetic, geared or SS), road q-factor and a healthy tire clearance. These features are more generally the norm in the category these days, but at the time of the Flaanimal’s inception not often all found in a single frameset.

Receiving the initial batch of production Flaanimals was another near-death experience for Rodeo. The team put together an introduction video for the upcoming model to drum up enough pre-order sales to meet the factory minimum (much higher for steel than carbon), but when the bikes came, they were all wrong: the frame tubing wasn’t butted and somehow the factory had copy-and-pasted one head tube angle across all sizes after the correct final geometry had been locked. Rodeo sent the bikes out to the waiting customers, along with a mea culpa that they would be sending each customer a second, correct bike once the factory made a “do-over” run.

The Flaanimal (now in its fifth iteration and also available in titanium) has seen numerous tweaks along the way and is now Rodeo’s best-selling frame. One of the most notable updates to the current steel version is the replacement of the steel seat tube with a carbon one, a move that shaves about 170 grams from the frame to offset the heavier custom steel chainstay yoke, while also lending the classically inspired frame some modern flair.

Rodeo has also continued to iterate on its flagship model, the ever trusty Traildonkey. The sixth generation Traildonkey (the TD4, released in 2023) simultaneously seeks to embrace the bike’s racier DNA while increasing its all-terrain capabilities. The TD4’s new sliding drop-outs are the primary design vehicle for achieving these at-odds goals. The slider allows the bike to run on shorter chainstays (425 mm) when using more moderately-sized tires, yet increases the bike’s max clearance to 700×2.2 / 650×2.4 when pushed all the way back to the 460-millimeter position. In 2021, Rodeo also changed factories and the TD4’s carbon construction changed to a monocoque construction, as compared to the bonded carbon layup used in all previous versions.

Rodeo 2024 Unbound Beach Cruiser

However, as their origin story illustrates, Rodeo was never meant to be just about their bikes. Over the years, the brand has deepened its commitment to adventure by bike while also expanding what that means. Before lining up at the event in 2015, Stephen remembers hearing whisperings about what racing one’s bike for 200 miles in the Flint Hills entailed; heat stroke and flats and white-road delirium. The distance itself seemed inconceivable. Stephen now has eight finishes at the Unbound 200. (After riding his first six on geared Traildonkeys, he changed it up in 2023 and went singlespeed. For the 2024 edition of Unbound, he and two other Rodeo team members bought Walmart beach cruisers, spray-painted them the night before the race, then covered the rugged 200-mile north course on their sub-$200 steeds. They did not change the stock pedals. The internet loved it.)

Single-day racing has always been a motivator behind the Rodeo team—as is reflected in the Traildonkey’s design—and staff, core members and sponsored riders regularly show up at popular off-road races. But, in recent years, the brand has embraced more diverse challenges and non-racing events. As proof-positive of the Traildonkey’s ATB inspiration, Stephen and Rodeo staff have tested its legs with trips to Moab’s iconic 100-mile White Rim mountain bike loop, on the Kokopelli Trail, and on many ambitious from-the-Denver-doorstep routes. In 2023, Rodeo hosted the 1,100-kilometer (680-mile) Ascend Armenia bikepacking race, a project finally realized after two-plus years of reconning and development, during which Stephen and a handful of staff made a trip to Armenia, and Rodeo funded continued route-scouting missions for Evan Christenson and Bo-Shan Go.

In spring 2024, a handful of Rodeo riders traveled to race the 560-kilometer distance at The Traka in Spain. That distance was canceled by rain and flooding, but the group decided to ride it anyway, completing the 340-mile waterlogged course in just under 33 hours. And, this summer, the youngest Rodeo team member, Edyn Teitge, completed the Tour Divide at the age of 15 on his Traildonkey in 19 days and 14 hours. The company has also hosted summer campouts and collaborated with members around the US to organize destination rallies, like the Southern Migration bikepacking rally in Florida this past January. Turns out, Donkeys fly south too.

Anyone with an idea of small-brand marketing budgets will see much of the above as categorically unnecessary—and expensive—if the goal of a company is to simply sell bikes. But storytelling—specifically, telling an alternative story about what riding bikes can be—was where Rodeo started and is where it still draws breath. Stephen is proud to say that the company regularly and intentionally steps away from the act of commerce to go ride bikes together. In talking about those first years, before Rodeo was making bikes, Stephen says, “That was probably the best thing we did, and maybe sometimes still is the best thing we know how to do: just communicate what we’re up to.” While Rodeo rode out most of the COVID wave unscathed, more recent repercussions from the global pandemic upheaval have given it a chance to reconnect to, and reexamine, its core storytelling values.

COVID and Post-Pandemic: Happiness on EPO

“Late 2019 might be one of my favorite times of Rodeo,” Stephen said, pointing to the fact that the Gravel cycling market was not yet overly saturated and Rodeo’s product line still felt highly unique. The brand’s Traildonkey 3.0 was still a novel addition to the off-road race space and the Flaanimal 5.0 had recently launched. The brand was selling all the frames it could manage to make. “Not that we’re talking thousands of frames a year,” Stephen qualified, “as a cash-flow company, we would only make as many frames as we could pay the bill for, but we were moving towards having more in-stock bikes.” Yet, even as Stephen describes late 2019 into early 2020 as one of the most fulfilling times at Rodeo—”This is all I want: to imagine the products that I want to exist and have support from people who wanted them too.”—the world had other plans.

Stephen signed up to do the Atlas Mountain Race in Morocco in early March of 2020. Stories about the ‘weird virus’ that was spreading started hitting the news in January and February, but as Stephen prepped for the trip, attempts among friends at nonchalant coronavirus jokes (“Have you seen Contagion?”) were turning to real stress. When the race organizers said ‘Go’ he thought, “‘Is there even going to be a world to come back to?” But then he forgot about it for the week and enjoyed the escapism of the race.

He barely made it out of Morocco before the country shut down. With lots of buzz circulating about the new ‘flatten the curve’ recommendations, he returned home to things getting quickly and exponentially weirder (“What?! They canceled the NBA?”). Fortunately, before having to enact any lay-offs, bikes were deemed essential and Rodeo retained all its staff.

Following a few dark weeks of the initial lockdown, Rodeo experienced the unchecked demand that swept the cycling industry: suddenly, everyone wanted a bike. The pandemic was certainly peak economic Rodeo, but Stephen said it never felt good; “There were four people for every frame, we didn’t have to be good at customer service (though we tried). It became like the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. What felt good was late 2019, healthy Rodeo. We were already happy and then COVID happened and took ‘happy’ and hit it with EPO and you know it’s not healthy and you didn’t even want to dope, but you’re doping.”

Meanwhile, their factory lead times just kept getting longer and longer as bigger brands, with bigger orders were prioritized, and Rodeo’s frames kept getting kicked down the calendar as the firehose of demand stayed on. A few customers asked for their money back, but almost all stuck out the wait. Stephen recalled the longest wait time being 13 months, for a customer in Alaska who had gone all-in on a fully custom, $10,000 build; he planned to go on an extended tour in his home state during the pandemic tumult. He finally got the bike in 2022.

One of the most frustrating things for Stephen about the COVID disruption in relation to Rodeo was the way in which it seemed to dismantle the slow, steady stability the company had been building. Though they routinely experienced shipping delays with their Taiwanese factory pre-COVID, on the cusp of the pandemic, he felt like Rodeo was finally able to start taking more risks on inventory, without borrowing money, and move beyond the pre-order model. COVID wrecked any kind of predictability in forecasting and also exacerbated an already tenuous relationship with their first factory over shipping timelines. According to Stephen, it was “no real control over supply chain, or QC—you get what you get, if you don’t like it, fix it on your end.” The brand ultimately moved on to another factory in late 2021; they were still floating on COVID-crazed demand, but that bubble would eventually burst.

The Next Chapter

The COVID pandemic has arguably been the best and worst thing to happen to the cycling industry this century. The initial rabid demand for bikes and components saw many companies and shops quickly sell out of existing inventory. Millions of people acquired bikes and, at least for a time, rode them. While trying to stay ahead of the demand curve, many brands increased orders to overseas factories in exponential terms. But the bottlenecked supply chain, and limited production capacity of the suppliers, kept a lot of these goods from reaching the customers during the time they were most desired: while the world was stuck at home. The disconnect between the time of these orders being placed and their much-delayed arrival has had catastrophic impacts across the industry.

On top of that, the market for would-be-new bike owners (at least in the US) got severely shrunken in an incredibly condensed span of time. In short: there was no way the COVID growth was ever going to be sustainable. In an episode of the Escape Collective’s Overnight Success podcast about the resultant boom and bust, one industry interviewee said that, if COVID levels of growth were to be sustained for the next five years, either every existing bicycle owner would need to be buy a new bike, or the industry would have to enlist the entire third-world population to buy a bike. To make matters worse, the US has been navigating complicated economic waters (read: “vibecession”) for the past two-plus-years, turning many consumers off from making unnecessary purchases (read: bikes and other recreational goods).

Through early 2023, Stephen was hesitantly optimistic that Rodeo would make it through the post-COVID ramifications without taking any major financial hits. Among customers, there appeared to be enough affinity for the brand to wait for a COVID bike because that bike would be a Rodeo. The newest Traildonkey (4.0) had also launched at the start of the year and the hype around it seemed to be carrying the company. But as the year stretched on, numbers started to fall off—drastically. When the brand’s 2023 Black Friday week sales numbers totaled all of $176, Stephen thought: “We’re dead.” 2023 was the first year the company ever borrowed money, and that winter seemingly normalized the need to borrow. Still, Rodeo carried on with its intended plans to move to and remodel a new, larger space in late 2023—like buying your kid a jacket a couple sizes too big, Stephen is setting the brand up for growth that he is willing to come.

Rodeo Adventure Labs prototype Show Pony at the 2022 Philly Bike Expo; photo: John Watson

Juggling the outsized customer-to-bike demand ratio, supply chain mayhem, and component sourcing was not the only thing that Rodeo was working on during the COVID years: the team had started planning a design for a hardtail. They even brought a prototype of their working model, the Show Pony, to the 2022 Philly Bike Expo. But that project has been visibly throttled way back. Two things happened during the pandemic that may explain why the reins have been, metaphorically, pulled in on the Show Pony’s production. In 2022, amidst their surging sales, an employee left Rodeo with a cutting rebuke; “I used to think that Rodeo was magic, but now I think you’re just like any other bike company: you just want to sell bikes.” While Stephen disagrees with that claim, he acknowledges that maybe they’d let some complacency creep—COVID was making it too easy to sell bikes without a deeper sense of purpose.

The second thing that happened is more nebulous. The global shipping crisis meant that Rodeo had little-to-zero control over its product during COVID: as Stephen alluded to, the quality of some of their bikes (finish, etc.) was also dealt a blow during the pandemic’s slapdash frenzy. The flip-side of being a creatively minded person is that you often chafe at real, or perceived, attempts to limit said creativity; put differently, submitting to external limitations means giving up some amount of control. Going back to his early Colorado road-team days, Stephen readily admits to balking at (road) cycling’s culture of conformity: Rodeo was started as a “no rules team.” During the pandemic it seems, as the brand’s credibility was threatened by missed shipping dates, and quality in some areas started to slide, Stephen realized that if they could bring more in-house, they could regain some of that control.

Rodeo has already started doing this. A decade in, the brand is working to reinvent its process with the hopes of someday releasing their own mountain bike; they’re calling this locally-focused campaign Project Denver. The first step in the overall change was slowly taking product design and engineering from mostly-out-of-house to almost-entirely-in-house. They’ve also been doing their own custom cerakote finishes for three years — as Stephen said, “a rare rare trifecta of success that brought down costs, increased control, improved quality, and vastly shortened lead times”— and they now in-house CNC face all of their forks after customer complaints about brake-mounting issues. Additionally, they’ve hired a fabricator, which should be a pretty clear indicator of their future aspirations. But control for the sake of control is hardly the main point: Stephen also wonders what story the brand is telling, or selling, by continuing to engage in the current trans-oceanic manufacturing process:

“Many people in cycling feel inherently virtuous because they’re riding a bike; but the real product story of that bike is often not virtuous at all. I think the more durable and functional a bike—the longer it lasts—the more virtuous it becomes over its useful life. On a deeper level, virtue also extends to how a bike was made, what it is made of, where it was made, and how it traveled from the factory to the end user.”

He went on to describe how timeless design features and geometries—over white-hot trends that will run their course in a year or two—versatility, repairability, and the energy cost and waste associated with manufacturing a product all contribute to its virtuosity. In reference to Rodeo’s latest prototype of their mountain bike, he also reflected that “mountain bikes are too good” so “why even show up in that space?” The answer: “If we can make a mountain bike in the US and build a novel, local, and scalable manufacturing process around the bike, then it would have a right to exist. That’s a contribution, not a product.”

Rodeo’s desire to bring more in-house and vertically integrate its manufacturing process stands in contrast with a large part of the US-based framebuilding scene: we’re seeing more and more builders outsource stock-model production abroad in an attempt to streamline the process, thereby cutting cost and labor hours. But many of those outsourcing are tiny—one or two person—operations. The reason given is that places like Taiwan and China already have the existing infrastructure and expertise to churn out reliably well-made frames. However, companies like Mosaic with just a few more employees (still less than 10) and a tested process have been able to make it in the US. Stephen seems to be willing to take the calculated chance that investing in Rodeo’s own infrastructure will yield the same successful results. Just like when the brand’s early odd-ball experiments ultimately coalesced with the Gravel trend, only time will tell if the industry will abide this deviation from the norm.

It isn’t lost on Stephen that the current Rodeo lineup is still built on overseas production just like much of the larger bike industry. That reality is the economic “now” of the company, and of the seven people who make a living working there. But as Rodeo looks to the future, the economic product of the first ten years of doing business is now fully funneled into developing a better product with a better story in the next ten years.

I follow Stephen on Strava. My unscientific summation is that he commutes by bike to Rodeo’s offices 99% of the time, somewhere between a 25-to-35-mile round-trip day depending on his route (extra Strava stalking was done for this story). Earlier this summer, when wildfire smoke had Denver’s air quality as the worst in the world, Stephen rode his bike to work. In the winter, he puts studded tires on and keeps pedaling. Sometimes he rides in the rain. Of course, being Colorado, there are plenty of nice days, too. But the point is, rain or shine, he keeps going through the motions. In the now ten years of Rodeo, I can’t help but wonder about the span of emotions he’s felt during those rides, rehearsing or replaying the day, to and from this machine that he’s built; how much gaping space there must be between the highest, most inspired moments of Rodeo and the near-death experiences. It’s a story that he’s living and telling in real time; some days he’s the one writing the story and other days the story takes him. But each day starts and ends with riding bikes, what the story was built on all along.