Will Jurowski, whose tastes ran to high-end triathlon bikes, is now a professional triathlete in Boulder. He sold them in his Fourth Ave. bike shop called Transition Rack. The Local Bike Shop is now in Transition, selling Detroit Bikes.
Jurowski’s partner Shawn Jyawook stayed, and he took on as partners Transition Rack’s head mechanic/manager Brad Stark, as well as Stark’s father, Jim. “My dad was, like, ‘That sounds like fun.’ We like to work on projects together,” says Brad. Jim lives in Kalamazoo and works for Stryker. For a while, the Starks lived in Switzerland, where Brad acquired his love of biking: “We biked everywhere.”
As The Local Bike Shop, Brad says, “We don’t cater to the high end quite so much.” He still works with triathletes–“Race safe!” he says, giving a fist bump to a triathlete who is on his way out to Boulder to visit Jurowski–but is now trying to sell and service more utilitarian bikes to people who live nearby.
“We sell commuter bikes, road bikes, cyclo-cross,” which he explains is like a road bike/mountain bike cross: “great for gravel roads, or Michigan roads in general.” That’s where Detroit Bikes come in. Like the more famous Shinola Bikes sold a few blocks away, Detroit Bikes are retro-styled commuter bikes. Unlike Shinola Bikes, they’re “cut, coped, bent, welded, painted, assembled and packaged in our factory in west Detroit,” as the Detroit Bike website rather pointedly says in cyber response to Shinola’s “assembled” in Detroit. Detroit Bikes are cheaper than Shinolas–$600-$700 vs. $1,000. When we stopped in, Stark had sold out of them, but he says: “It’s so easy to go pick them up–I just drive over to the factory”–something he was planning to do in the next day or two.
The Local Bike Shop doesn’t sell used bikes, though you might think so at first glance. Stark and his mechanics are so busy with repair work, you can barely pick your way around the bikes on the floor. As if to punctuate the point, while we were there a woman wheeled in a bike in with a flat tire. A transaction occurred that was nineteenth century in its simplicity. Stark quickly established her price point for a new tire. No work ticket, no fiddling on a computer, just “Can you come back in a half hour?” and she was out the door.
The Local Bike Shop, 217 S. Fourth Ave., 214-9700. Mon., Wed.-Fri. 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Sun. noon-4 p.m. Closed Tues. thelocalbikeshop.com
