Steve Rex, owner of Rex Cycles on Capitol Avenue in midtown Sacramento, works on the frame of a custom-made bicycle. Building such bikes takes eight to 12 weeks, and they cost anywhere from $1,600 to nearly $4,000. Sacramento Bee/Owen Brewer

A bicycle built for you

At Rex Cycles, bikes are custom-made to suit your body size and riding style

By Cathleen Ferraro -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Tuesday, June 11, 2002

When Steve Rex bends, shaves and welds raw steel into what will become a one-of-a-kind bicycle, his labor is more than an expression of making a living. It is a melding of metal and muscle, motivated by a deeper philosophical choice.

"Everything about the bike is good," said Rex, 40, owner of Rex Cycles in Sacramento's midtown. "That was my criteria for a career path: that it be right for me and right for society."

Since 1991, Rex has been toiling six days a week inside a century-old former livery stable on Capitol Avenue that has no heating or cooling system. There he tailors bikes meant to fit a particular person's body and riding style.

Rex Cycles is the only custom-bike builder in Sacramento and one of just a handful throughout Northern California. Custom-bike making is a craft that typically doesn't offer its artisans enough to sustain a decent income, and Rex has seen about eight competitors arrive and die during his 11 years in business.

Rex Cycles, which first started in the thick of a statewide recession, has managed to be more profitable with each passing year.

"I'm really amazed, actually," Rex said, recognizing that the high price tag for custom bikes makes for a limited customer base. "I don't know what to attribute it to other than the grace of God."

Rex has two employees, but he alone tailors and welds every bike

- a process he describes as "not romantic, but dirty."

The bike-enthusiast-turned-entrepreneur spends about one hour fitting each customer on a stationary bike that he built and keeps in his local shop.

Rex observes whether people sit back or forward on the saddle, whether they must strain to reach the handlebars and how stretched out their legs are.

The process is technical but not exactly high-tech. Among the myriad calculations Rex uses is just one body measurement.

He keeps a long clipboard in the shop and has customers place it between their upper thighs, up against the crotch area. Rex then measures from the edge of the clipboard to the floor, giving him the proper height of the bike's top bar so that a customer will clear it when stepping off the seat.

At any one time, Rex is hand-crafting about 12 bikes. He completes roughly 85 custom two-wheelers each year, with the colorful finishing touches coming from Air Art, a specialty bike painter in Chico.

All told, it takes eight to 12 weeks to hand-build each bike, which sell for between $1,606 and $3,924.

Rex said more than two-thirds of his customers are men, and rejects the idea that men have more difficulty finding bikes that fit "off the shelf" or that they typically earn more money and can afford such an extravagance.

"Men are just programmed to spend a lot of money on sports. It's part of their socialization. And most cycling enthusiasts seem to be men," said Rex, who rides 45 minutes into work along the bike path from his Arden Park home.

Sixty-year-old Jim Kirstein is one of those enthusiasts, riding about 200 miles a week, including an almost daily bike commute from Folsom to his job at the Department of General Services in Sacramento.

At 5 feet 10 inches and 145 pounds, Kirstein's body size and proportions are common enough that he likely could find a suitable factory-made bike.

"I'm normal physically but I have a unique riding position as everyone does. I guess I've just always wanted a custom bike," said Kirstein, who has purchased two from Rex since 1992.

Rex's female customers almost always end up in his shop not in search of that special "performance" or "look" that inspires many male clients, but because they're small, typically under 5 feet 2 inches, and can't find a bike to match their body proportions.

So far, Rex Cycles has fared well in an industry that is in tremendous flux and consolidation, affecting some of the biggest names in the business, including Schwinn and Mongoose.

"We lost 1,000 independent bike shops over the past three to four years, but the bike industry also had its best retail sales -- selling 20.9 million bikes -- in 2000 in a decade," said Fred Clements, executive director of the National Bicycle Dealers Association. In its first year, Rex Cycles posted $80,000 in sales, most of which came from tune-ups and repairs rather than from hand-building bikes.

Last year, the small local manufacturer's revenue hit $270,000, mostly from the sale of custom-crafted bikes.

Rex didn't set out to earn a living through the bicycle world, even after entering dozens of races and once working at the now-defunct Sacramento shop, Bicisport.

It wasn't until he stumbled upon a two-man custom-bike shop in Bristol, England -- where Rex was spending his senior year of college through a California State University, Sacramento, exchange program -- that bells started to go off.

"That's when I recognized making frames was a way to make a living. ... I talked to the frame builder (in England) but didn't ask about the shop's production techniques or financials," Rex recalled. "I did ask a lot, though, about how they fit people."

A year later, Rex broke his hip, giving him lots of time to sit around and read books on how to make bikes. As he healed, Rex enrolled in welding and machine classes at Sacramento City College, riding a special fixed-gear bike to class and pedaling with just one foot.

"One of my gifts is determination, and that carried me through that period," he said. "It certainly was a good training ground for what was to come later -- running my own service and manufacturing business in a highly specialized niche."

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