DailyBicycle.com
by Oliver Carbonell
Quick Q&A with Mike Ferentino of Santa Cruz Bicycles / Swobo
Have you ever heard of Swobo? The urban bike/clothing brand has actually been around since the early 1990’s and has been brought back to life in recent years with a strong line of clothing and city bikes. It’s an interesting company and I wanted to learn more about it. Mike Ferentino of Swobo was gracious enough to do a Quick Q&A with the DailyBicycle, getting at the heart of what Swobo means, from his insider’s perspective.
DailyBicycle: First of all, for readers who aren’t familiar with the rather hip and growing Swobo brand, give us your elevator pitch on Swobo. What defines the brand?
Mike Ferentino: Probably the easiest way to define Swobo would be “bikes, wool, ethically sound and environmentally conscious thinking, and a sense of humor.” Basically, we make clothes out of merino wool or wool blends from New Zealand, as well as clothes out of organic cotton, have much of it stitched up right here in the SF bay area, and we have a line of bikes aimed squarely at the “sensible urban transportation” target.
DailyBicycle: Living in New York City, I see more and more people commuting to work by bike. The city’s cycling infrastructure continually improves and that’s part of the reason for the boom. On a national scale, are you seeing growth in the city/commuter bike segment?
Mike Ferentino: Yes, but it’s probably premature to say that the velorution is just around the corner. There are hot spot communities, for sure, where bikes have taken hold, and the idea of bike transportation has been embraced and incorporated into a broader cultural context. But much of the country is still auto-dominated and auto-dependent, and it’s gonna be a while before we start seeing big change across the whole country. If we ever do. Of course, spike gas prices up a few bucks a gallon while wages stay where they are and job markets don’t grow, and who knows? We might even see bikes taking over the rust belt cities and the entire population of Atlanta in that case…
DailyBicycle: What did Swobo announce at the recently held Interbike show?
Mike Ferentino: Announce? We plied people with liquor, gave away belt buckles, and had a few really good derbies in the booth. Oh, and we showed off some new clothes, and quietly introduced a couple new bikes which should be starting to show up for sale right about now on our website. But we didn’t really announce anything in a formal sense. That seems kind of a “power tie” thing to do. We don’t have power ties.
DailyBicycle: Wool has made a come back over the past few years… it seems what was old school has come back to become the new cool thing. Talk to us about Swobo’s effort to promote wool.
Mike Ferentino: Wool kicks ass. It always has, with regard to how it performs as a fabric - how it insulates, how it breathes, how it wicks, how it regulates temperature. Even back in the bad old days when wool was itchy and coarse and prone to shrinking the moment you even threatened to wash it, wool could stand toe to toe with the very best synthetic “technical” fabrics and in most criteria outperform them.
Meanwhile, over the past decade or so, there has been a lot of energy quietly
invested in making it better at the textile end of things. So we have access now to
wool fabric that is incredibly fine in its weave, very lightweight, almost silky in
terms of comfort, and it can handle far more abuse in terms of care than wool was
generally acknowledged to be able to handle in the old days. It is a far more
sophisticated fabric now than it was twenty, even ten years ago. AND, it’s a
renewable resource. Sheep keep on growing new crops right on their very backs. There was a company down in New Zealand that made wool bike clothes a few years ago, and their motto was - “Made from sunshine and grass.”
That’s an ethic that comes across almost as a tossaway one liner, but it bears some really deep consideration. Wool is a renewable resource. It isn’t a plastic, it
won’t last forever in a landfill, it didn’t start out as crude oil. More and more,
as we face some pretty heavy changes that will come our way on this planet and with regard to our civilization, these are going to be choices that take on more and more weight. Being stylish is all well and good, and if wool tugs at some retro
heartstrings, fine. But on a deeper level, if and when you pause to consider the
choices you make as a consumer, wool is a sane choice.
We run Swobo with a pretty nonchalant sense of humor, because getting heavy about this - beating people with the environmental doom stick - probably turns people off more than it inspires them, but not far beneath our glib jokester skins, we really care about this shit. How we choose to act during our time on this planet, even if each of us are just one in six and a half billion or so, each of our choices, each of our actions, carries some weight. Pay attention, folks.
DailyBicycle: Thanks Mike!
Check out the goods at www.swobo.com
Copyright 2010 DailyBicycle
