Meet Charles James and Daisy Chiu of CrimsonBikes

Today we’d like to introduce you to Charles James and Daisy Chiu.

Charles, Daisy, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started CrimsonBikes in 2009 when I was in college. It began with my roommate and I fixing up abandoned bikes for our friends. We loved it. I come from a family of mechanics so there is something very zen about fixing bikes, it was also a great way to destress from schoolwork.

After a while, the dorm room became too small to house all of the stuff we had collected, so we decided to do something a little more official. We got a real space and funding from Harvard to create a bike share, and it grew pretty rapidly – almost faster than we could keep up with. At one point, CrimsonBikes was one of the largest campus bike shares in the US! After graduating, my partner went off to med school. I stayed local and went into tech, but I couldn’t shake my love for bikes. In 2015, I came back to oversee CrimsonBikes’ transition to something other than bike sharing. Besides, Hubway was doing a much better job connecting the city, so a campus bike share seemed redundant.

So I decided to go back to our roots. We had started CB with the goal of making biking more accessible. We figured we could accomplish that goal as a bike shop. I recruited my business partner Daisy Chiu to help me with that task. She saw the vision and bought in 110%. Now, two shops later, things seem to be going in the right direction. We’re providing our customers with an innovative approach to the traditional bike shop, and bringing biking to folks who may have never considered it before. We’re pretty proud of that.

Has it been a smooth road?
One of the challenges of our our rapid growth is that we have to learn on the fly. As soon as we learn a new skill, we have to learn another one. It’s exciting, but sometimes we make mistakes. We just to use those mistakes as teaching moments, pick ourselves up and keep going.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the CrimsonBikes story. Tell us more about the business.
CrimsonBikes is a bike shop with brick-and-mortar stores, a heavy online presence and home delivery/repair. Ours is a pretty fresh take on running a bike shop, but we don’t stop there. We also offer things like bike leases and monthly service plans to make owning a bike more affordable.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Honestly, we hope other shops take our lead. It’s no secret that the retail world is in big trouble. For bike shops, a little outside-the-box thinking is just what the industry needs.

Pricing:

• With our Lease Plans, customers can get a new bike, repairs, and theft protection for just $19/month
• If a customer already has a bike, they can get the same benefits for the same price. $19/month

Contact Info:

• Address: 1001 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA 02138
  11 Kilmarnock St Boston, MA 02215
• Website: crimsonbikes.com
• Phone: 617-958-1727
• Email: hello@crimsonbikes.com
• Instagram: @crimsonbikes
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CrimsonBikes
• Twitter: @crimsonbikes
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/crimsonbikes-cambridge-3

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