34 ADVENTURE CYCLIST au gu s t/s e p t em b e r 2016

BIKES BUILT FOR WOMEN

Go to the website for Specialized bicycles and you’ll find

19 models of bikes built specifically for women. Every bike, says Specialized, is “designed and engineered from the

ground-up to meet the needs of women who love to ride.

“That means that you’ll find purpose-built geometries,

women’s-specific grips, saddles, and crankarm lengths, and

a level of performance and comfort that stands

without rival,” the website continues.

Go to the Trek website and you’ll

find a story titled, “My Mom Gets

Rad,” about Gisele Pansze, a mother of

three living in Durango, Colorado. Pansze enrolled in a Trek Dirt Series camp in 2014 when her son was 16 years old and now mountain bikes with him throughout Durango, one of the coolest towns in America. Mother and son often ride in Overend Mountain Park, “which is directly behind their neighborhood,” reports the Trek website.

Trek prides itself as “the first major bicycle company to develop a full line of bikes designed specifically for women,” and today has no fewer than 50 women’s models for every conceivable purpose, including triathlons.

Offering bikes designed specifically for women is not universal among bike companies. Fuji, for example, doesn’t have a women’s line. But the biggest players — Specialized, Trek,

Cannondale, and Giant — all offer extensive women’s lines of bikes.

Thank you, Georgena Terry.Terry, in case you don’t know, is the

pioneer in designing and building bikes

specifically for women. “I kind of like to say I should be

getting a commission from Specialized, Trek, and Cannondale, who claim to have started the concept of women’s bikes,” Terry said. “Without me, they might still be in the dark ages.”

Terry started building bikes in the early 1980s after getting into cycling in a big way in 1975 in Pittsburgh, where she got a degree in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Terry was always a pioneer, landing an engineering job at Xerox in Rochester, New York, where she still lives, at a time when women were rare in such jobs. She worked on the team that developed Xerox’s first laser printer, which was based on the company’s 3100 series copier. It was a remarkable achievement for a woman in the 1970s, but Terry soon decided it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She began to resent having to get dressed up every day to sit in a room with 25 men “puffing on cigarettes.”

“If I die of cancer, it’s Xerox’s fault,” she said. “I don’t take orders well from people, even when they’re asking in a nice way. There’s something in me that just bristles at that. I’ve never been able to get that under control.”

Terry took a leave of absence from Xerox and began hanging out in her basement, playing around with building bike frames. She never went back.

“I liked bicycling a lot, and with my mechanical engineering background the ultimate challenge was building a bike frame,” she said.

Terry bought Richard Talbot’s Designing and Building Your Own Frameset: An Illustrated Guide for the Amateur Bicycle Builder, and The Proteus Frame Building Handbook, by Paul Proteus — both out of print today — and got to work experimenting.

“A good friend who was comfortable

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Georgena Terry starts a revolutionBy Dan D’Ambrosio

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with an oxy-acetylene torch taught me not to blow myself up,” Terry said.

The couple who had owned Terry’s house before her had built small airplanes in the basement, a fortuitous situation for the budding framebuilder. There were electrical outlets throughout the basement and excellent lighting. Terry’s first frame was an exact copy of a Schwinn Super Le Tour, touted at the time as a high-performance touring bike.

As she got more into framebuilding, Terry began to believe that Schwinn had botched the design on smaller frames that women would ride. One example: instead of lowering the bottom bracket height on smaller frames, Schwinn simply shortened the seat tube.

“While cornering, you would not feel like you were settled into the corner,” Terry said.

Terry was an avid club rider in Rochester, and word got around that she was building frames. She started getting customers from the bike club.

“A lot of them were small women who couldn’t find a bike they could straddle,” Terry said. “They were getting sore necks and shoulders trying to reach the handlebars.”

Terry began going to bike rallies around New England, where she ran across a small bike built by Bill Boston that used a 24-inch front wheel with a standard 700c rear wheel. The small front wheel meant Boston “didn’t have to compromise the geometry or play a bunch of games” with his small bikes, Terry said.

“It lets the top tube be shorter because you don’t have the problem of the front wheel hitting the pedals and

allows you to lower the top tube,” Terry said. “You don’t have the problem of the head tube getting so short everything gets crammed up.”

Terry wanted to use the small front wheel design for her bikes but felt like it belonged to Bill Boston. She asked how he would feel if she adopted the design for her bikes.

“His comment was, ‘Please use it, this is the way it should be done,’” Terry remembered.

And as it turned out, the idea of using a small front wheel dated back to the late 1800s, when it was used on track bikes. Boston had just adopted the idea to traditional road bikes. Nothing new under the sun.

For women 5’3” and shorter, the small front wheel design made for a bike that handled “totally normally,” Terry said.

At first, after leaving her well-paying job at Xerox, Terry wasn’t making much money building bike frames. But by 1985, just three years into her new life as a framebuilder, she started picking up steam.

That year, Terry went to Interbike — the industry’s biggest trade show — and started getting orders from independent bike shops. She hired people, including a painter and two framebuilders from Ben Serotta who had moved to Rochester from Saratoga Springs, bringing valuable production skills with them.

“Serotta was in production mode, I was in one-at-a-time mode,” Terry said. “These guys brought that knowledge with them.”

In 1986, Terry moved her operation from her basement into an old warehouse in a nearby industrial park.

“We were getting a lot of publicity in the consumer publications,” she remembered. “At that point we started getting competition.”

Fuji was the first to copy Terry’s small front wheel design, producing the 450SE. A West Coast company, Centurion, came out with another version.

“At that point, we weren’t just building bikes in Rochester,” Terry said. “We had a manufacturer in Japan building a less expensive bike for us. We could only build so many in Rochester and we didn’t want to miss the market.”

The Rochester-built bike was $1,000, while the Japanese version started at $500 to $600. Both bikes featured the same geometry, but the Japanese-built bike was slightly heavier, with lesser components.

Terry’s company grew steadily through the early 1990s, but then she started to attract attention from major players like Cannondale and others who tout their women’s lines of bikes today.

“They could do marketing we couldn’t afford to do,” Terry said. “It’s really hard to compete with that. People who had never heard of Terry before had heard of these companies.”

At the same time that major companies were beginning to cut into her niche of building bikes for smaller women, Terry expanded into women’s cycling apparel and saddles. Clothes and saddles brought higher margins than bikes. Terry realized she could make a lot more money going in this new direction, and the bicycles “started to gather dust,” she said.

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Georgena Terry starts a revolution

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Terry scored a marketing coup when she introduced the Terry saddle, with a cutout in the center and gel padding. She later came out with a cutout saddle for men that also sold well.

“The first company to copy the saddle was our own manufacturer in Taiwan, who flooded the Asian and European markets with our saddle,” Terry said. “That wasn’t too cool. We went to Italy to have Selle Italia build the saddle.”

Selle Italia still builds Terry saddles, although company representatives once told her they would never buy a saddle with a hole in it. Now, Terry-style saddles are common on Italian bikes.

“Don’t tell anybody, but I still ride Brooks,” Terry said. “They’re incredible.”

In 2009, Georgena Terry sold her company to another groundbreaking woman entrepreneur, Elisabeth Robert, former CEO of Vermont Teddy Bear Company in Shelburne, Vermont.

Robert moved the headquarters of Terry Precision Cycling from Rochester to Burlington, Vermont, evolving Terry into a clothing and saddle company rather than a bike company. Georgena Terry stayed with the company for three years until 2012, but she left when Robert made the decision to no longer sell bikes.

“Liz asked if I wanted to continue doing handbuilt bicycles. I said, ‘Absolutely,’” Terry said. “She does have rights to the name. We have an arrangement that allows me to use my name on my bike.”

Today the Terry website directs

customers who click on “Bikes” to Georgena Terry, and her “Heart of Steel” bicycle website. Terry has always exclusively used steel for her bikes. She still offers custom bikes and also sells three “semi-custom” bikes made by Waterford Cycles in Wisconsin, the Gale Force, Coto Doñana Tour (reviewed in the April 2014 issue of Adventure Cyclist), and Coto Doñana Vagabond, the latter two models named after a nature reserve in Spain.

Terry describes the Coto Doñana Tour as a “true touring bicycle for women, designed to take you and your equipment anywhere.” The Cota Doñana Vagabond is designed for lighter touring. Working with Richard Schwinn at Waterford Cycles to build the bikes has been a perfect match.

“It is a legendary name,” Terry said. “Our bikes are built in the factory that used to make the Schwinn Paramount. There’s a real heritage there, an appreciation of steel.”

Terry’s new company is “just me, social media, and word of mouth.” She sells about 35 bikes a year, just for women, staying true to her roots. That’s not many bikes, but Terry said the business is a “labor of love,” and she does make a tidy profit on each bike.

Considering the long road she has traveled and the pride she can take in having launched a movement for bikes designed for women, Terry is frustrated by what she sees as the regression of the bike business where women are concerned.

“First they mimicked us with the 24-inch, 700c design, then they decided that didn’t look right,” Terry said.

“Translation: inventory problem. Now you have to stock 24-inch tires.”

For a while, Terry said, manufacturers made 650c bikes for smaller women, which worked very well, “but then they dropped that.”

“I had the privilege of meeting with a person who was an insider with one of the really big companies into women’s bikes,” Terry said. “When I asked why they stopped making the 650c bike, the answer was, ‘700c can fit any rider.’ That’s total baloney. When I pushed further the response was, ‘We were getting pushback from dealers. They didn’t want to stock yet another tire.’”

Terry calls what bike companies have done with women’s bikes “an absolute travesty.” She’s also disappointed Robert dropped bikes from the company she built.

“I definitely wish Liz had stuck with bikes,” Terry said. “I feel like it’s the heritage of the company.”

While she is disappointed in what has happened with women’s bikes, Terry is enjoying life, riding about 6,700 miles last year.

“I think I have been incredibly lucky to have discovered the bicycle in terms of what it has brought me for health and fitness, good times, and lots of friends,” Terry said. “I didn’t even start riding until I was 13 or 14 years old. I was really late getting into it, but the minute I was able to make that bike go in a straight line and ride around the neighborhood, I felt like I had found total freedom.”

Dan D’Ambrosio has been a contributing writer for Adventure Cyclist for the past 10 years.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 35GEORGENA TERRY