INTERVIEW
Before Spurcycle's Original bell, all was bad. Then two brothers popped up with a design so right, we all had to have one. Over a decade later, we spoke to brother and co-founder Nick Slone to hear how they're still ringing the changes.
PUBLISHED
July 11, 2025
WORDS AND PHOTOS
Regroup
WORDS AND PHOTOS
Spurcycle
"We hear the phrase, ‘You guys should just do...' a heck of a lot", says Nick from Spurcycle. He's in Bend, Oregon, we're not, but the visuals are coming through fine, so we see his mildly exasperated, mostly amused shrug of the shoulders as he recounts the words that follow Spurcycle's every move - or lack thereof. People, it seems, get confused when a brand only makes one thing, even when it's the polished jewel that is the Spurcycle bell, a handlebar adornment of such perfect proportions that a ride without the opportunity to give its lovingly machined dome a ring-a-ding is somehow incomplete. We've rung it in the garage, through sun-dappled, silenced woods, on bridges, paths and paved roads at speed, all without anyone to alert in sight. A Spurcycle bell must be rung as a challenge must be answered.
“It’s never for lack of ideas,” Nick continues of the brand’s singular pursuit of sound. “It never is, right? My brother, Clint and I founded the business. He’s our product designer, a graduate of the Stanford Design School. Between us, we often explore new avenues. Still, we’ve found that once you start digging into the details, the user needs and where we might be able to innovate given small company resources, and applying those effectively, things are never so straightforward.”
Nick is the first to admit that early on, their approach might have been a little too aggressively concise. “For quite a little while, with our original bell sales, we had two SKUs: a raw with a gold hammer and a black with a gold hammer. My brother and I would talk about doing more options, but we’d be like, ‘no, no, that would mean more SKUs!'” he laughs. “More stocking locations, and we’d probably still be doing 80% of the volume through the original ones anyway, so, no, that’s a marginal gain and we don’t want to get into that, thank you very much!”
The boys have loosened up over the years, and, as Nick admits, he may even have enjoyed doing some of the limited edition colours. “We managed to figure out some techniques to make the process of expanding the range more efficient,” he says, a move which settled Nick’s nerves as Spurcycle’s man of Operations, and leant into their culture of doing more with less.
Spurcycle started ringing back in 2012. Almost thirteen years later, the brand’s line is still neat, tight and understated. We’re struggling to think of another company in the cycling space that held its head and steered its own course during the industry’s choppy years of turbo-charged external investment, with all of its promises of seemingly unlimited funds and no strings, well, none that you can see right now, not while we’re all friendly. “Neither Clint nor I would consider ourselves salespeople,” Nick says. “We’re not branding people, we’re not good at e-comm. What that means is, there’s always more demand on the product’s performance and its uniqueness.”
Fans of Spurcycle will know that the team has experimented with other products over the years. Notably, a stunning titanium key clip, a small zippered stow pouch made from a soft, semi-opaque but sturdy material that felt fabulous in the hand, some water bottles, a nifty saddle bag, and a titanium multi-tool to end all multi-tools. We could write a love letter to that little darling. “Some of those you mention, we really liked making, but for one reason or another, after the last one sold, we stopped,” he says. “We still get regular emails from customers asking if there’s a spare what-have-you in the back, a demo product getting dusty, and if not, when we might start production again.”
Nick mentions the saddle bag as an example, a regular subject of customer inquiries. “It was a good design. I think we made 2,000 of them, but during the pandemic, our sewing vendor closed up shop, so we didn’t think it was appropriate to resource that. Ultimately, it wasn’t commercially successful enough to warrant keeping in the line.” But the bells are, and while few in SKU, Nick and his brother have stayed in the game, hale and hearty thanks to being lean. “We sell a lot of bells, but we’re talking formed metal goods – when we place an order, we barely move the needle for our vendors.” A case in point, Nick says, is the dome of the bell, which is manufactured in New Mexico. “If we order 5,000 or even 10,000 domes, they can’t order in a sufficiently small quantity of metal to fulfil the order. It’s just not possible.” Instead, Spurcycle has to commit to a year’s supply of domes in advance. “With domestic manufacturing, these are not shops that want to work with you on what are, in reality, low volume numbers. They can press out half a million. But low numbers are more of a problem than profit to them.” The rub, Nick says, is that e-comm amplifies a brand’s presence. “People tend to have the perception we’re a big brand – we’re not!” he laughs. “We are in a lot of shops and a lot of countries, so we understand the perception. Still, we’re small and in fact smaller than your average bike shop.”
As to where Spurcycle makes its Original bells, everything under your thumb is made in the US (the brand’s Compact Bell hails from Taiwan). “Making our Original Bells domestically was a point of personal investigation,” says Nick. “My last job before Spurcycle was in an outdoor products business, and we were doing production in the Philippines and Vietnam. Clint had experience in China working on some medical devices and other projects he had been a contract designer on, and that was a well-established way of doing things. I don’t think we necessarily had an ideology to make in the US, more that we were curious to see if we could do it.”
Nick Slone
Simple on the surface, the Spurcycle bell is a product of about a dozen distinct parts. “They all require different types of manufacturing,” says Nick. “The dome is formed on a big deep-draw press machine. There are some stamped parts – the mount and the nut on the inside of the bell. We’ve got some rubber injection molded parts. The hammer is a turned CNC part.” If they were manufacturing in Asia, Nick and Clint would have an agent, a single point of contact who could liaise with each component maker in turn. Not so, in the US. “There’s a lot less of that sort of relationship here,” he says. “We had to go out and find each part maker. For example, our wireform is coming out of Ohio, for coatings, we go to the East Coast and California, our dome, as we talked about, is made in New Mexico.” Nick paints a picture of parts pinging their way across the States, before returning piece by piece to the brand’s HQ in Bend, Oregon, where each bell is hand-assembled and tested.
“To be frank, we didn’t expect to be still making our bells in this manner,” admits Nick. “The reality is, though, that there’s no other way we’ve found to make them the way we want them, with the level of quality we demand.” In related US news, fans of the brand’s key clip will be pleased to hear that soon, Spurcycle’s production partner, Paragon Machine Works, will spin up its tools to produce version two of what we can attest is the finest key clip we’ve ever used. “It’s another example of a product where it makes sense to manufacture it here in the US,” Nick says. However, the brand’s multi-tool, which Nick also informs us is now back to production, fabricated in Taiwan, a practical decision, he says, predicated on the nature of the product and the low minimums a partner can reliably expect to commit to while guaranteeing the extremely tight tolerances Spurcycle demands.
Nick then tells us a story that takes us back to the beginning, to the Kickstarter that launched their business, a story that aptly illustrates the brand’s unwavering focus on quality and why production is not an email-and-forget process. “We initially found a company that made bells and could form our dome,” he says. “You can’t machine a dome and have it sound the same as if it’s formed. We’d machined some, and they didn’t sound great, but luckily, this company found a tool in their facility that could form our dome. That one step saved us tens of thousands of dollars, allowing us to meet our Kickstarter obligations and fulfil our production runs for the first two years of the business. However, they were a very old-school company – they’d been around for over 100 years. So when we started to drive for improvements in certain areas to enhance quality, such as refining the brushing technique to be a little more radial and developing a specification around the coarseness and consistency of the brush, they pushed back and told us, ‘Hey, we’re not making jewellery.’ To which we replied that, actually, we are; this is bicycle jewellery, a bell that costs five times more than most bells on the market. We have to hit that spec.” A move to a new partner followed, one more accustomed to finer tolerances and more willing to work with Spurcycle to realize its dream of making the world’s most beautiful – and everything else – bicycle bells.
We can all picture a bike bell in our minds in the same way we can picture a bike; it’s an imprinted form that cyclists the world over could sketch out in a second, a circle with a little lever on the side. Did Nick ever worry that Spurcyle’s design was too much bell for the bike business? Too different? Nick muses for a moment. “That’s a great question,” he says. “To be truthful, sometimes you’re not quite sure how your success came to be. We started this business because we couldn’t find a bicycle bell that we wanted to put on our bikes. We were both living in San Francisco at that time, and the Golden Gate Bridge was a regular on our rides when we’d head out of the city towards Marin and the Headlands. There’s a multi-use path over the bridge, and man, that’s a stretch that cries out for a bell. So my brother and I started experimenting with ideas. We knew it would have to be smaller than other models to align with the aesthetic of our bikes. It also had to mount on a 31.8 handlebar and be able to be tipped forward so it didn’t meet the wind and sit behind the bar. Anyway, we’d been working with a friend who was a pretty talented industrial designer, and he came up with the novel concept that the wire lever would be an offset spring and the thing your finger interacts with for actuation.
“We worked on the look, shape, and size constraints, but ultimately, people liked it. When we did the Kickstarter, we didn’t have a fully fledged design ready to go. We were maybe at 80%. Anyway, we went live and thought we’d see a few units move, but it went crazy. We set a $50,000 goal, which was quickly met. Within a week, we exceeded $100,000. Ultimately, we had 6,000 backers and raised over $300k.” Within thirty days, Nick and Clint had gone from an idea to having 10,000 bells to make.
“At that scale, we couldn’t ship a beta product. We had to finish development and do it right,” he says. “The success of Kickstarter forced us to move fast. So we both quit our jobs and never looked back.” Years later, though, Spurcycle’s bell still stands alone. There have been imitators, flagrant copies, but never anything to match it. “The industry evolves and there are trends,” says Nick. “But with our bell, some things came our way and we stayed the course.” This is no false modesty. Nick gives every impression of being as careful with his words as he is with Spurcycle’s SKU count. So we’ll say what he should have: the Spurcycle bell is an icon. Nick and Clint nailed it, and they had the good sense to follow up their design and early success with clarity and the wisdom to eschew the funding that could so easily have robbed them of the potency of their singular approach.
Will we see Spurcycle ringing the changes in the future? “We’re not resistant to change and expect to evolve,” he says. “The distinction is that we will remain intentionally focused. Right now, we’re most excited and determined to ‘undork’ mirrors. Much like we did with bells, we hope to put an industry spotlight on an overlooked but important cycling accessory that could be much more.”
For now, though, while Spurcycle looks back to the future, if you haven’t had the pleasure of flicking the wire loop of a Spurcycle bell and hearing its strident ding, we recommend you do so at your first opportunity.
Regroup is a proud Spurcycle stockist.
