In the spring of 2010 a classmate of mine passed me a flyer about some electric bikes his friends were building in his hometown of Philadelphia. "Do you think students would buy these?" he asked. I didn't think so; in fact, I thought the idea of an electric bike was weird.
However, once I rode my first ebike up the hills of San Francisco, I had an answer for what I would do after graduating. By that September, The New Wheel's first website was launched along with an advertisement for "elegant pedelecs" 😅. Our unofficial tagline was "the optimistic bike shop".
2025 will mark our 15th anniversary. It feels like a momentous time. There is so much change, so much innovation, and so much confusion. Technological progress is stunning, while social and political harnessing of new wealth and opportunity feels stalled. Ideas that felt self-evident for us when we started - environmental protection matters, human centric cities are the future, fossil fuels are the past - are still litigated, and, even worse, ignored. It feels more and more, as W.B. Yeats put it at a time of similar confusion, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst [a]re full of passionate intensity."
In spite of the challenges broadly in the world and inside our business, we remain fundamentally optimistic. Our optimism isn't the optimism of the sand-covered ostrich or a will to power. In fact, we have retired our "optimistic bike shop" tagline; that was for a time when it was about us and what we were doing as individuals. Now, each morning we arise, inspired to do the good work of supporting a now mainstream movement of thousands of people choosing to ride electric bikes alongside our dedicated team of professional New Wheelers.Â
Each of you rides for different reasons - convenience, savings, exercise, sustainability, joy, all of the above. And each ride is a choice: for ease, for clean air, for health, for financial well-being, for freedom, for a human-scaled experience. Each ride is a statement of optimism; optimism spreads through action- a smile, a wave, taking in this moment with a loved one in the passengers seat.
After 15 years, Karen and my optimism is refilled afresh because of you, our riders, and our team, and what we are doing together. With tens of thousands of you riding your ebikes each day, we have a new tagline:Â We support the optimists.
Let's make 2025 a year to be proud of.
In Optimism,
Brett Thurber
