Bridge manufactures carbon bike framesets in its modestly sized factory in Toronto.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Tucked away near the end of the Beltline Trail in Toronto’s west end, a small team is hard at work manufacturing the only carbon bicycle frameset made entirely in Canada.
The headquarters of Bridge Bike Works is a relatively modest 8,400-square-foot factory, where 14 employees control every step of the bike-building process.
There’s a Computer Numerical Control vertical mill machine where aluminum moulds are fabricated to shape the company’s signature carbon parts. There are walk-in and chest freezers where carbon is stored between the various stages of production. There’s a cold room where lamination experts use hair dryers to make carbon pieces more pliable and easier to work with.
There’s a hot press that applies pressure to moulds containing carbon parts while they are compacted from the inside. And there are finishing workshops – separated by hanging plastic walls – where bikes are sanded, wrapped, assembled and painted in one of Bridge’s five signature colours: ocean sky, aged rosé, deep sand, grey flannel and dried sage.
The whole team is process obsessed.
“We have a saying in the shop that the art is in the process,” co-founder Frank Gairdner says.
Bridge's 14 employees control every step of the manufacturing process, including building and painting the body of the bike.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Founded in 2020, Bridge weathered the rise and fall of the COVID-19 pandemic bike market nicely. While many of their competitors rushed to increase production to meet heightened consumer demand for outdoor gear, co-founders Mike Yakubowicz and Mr. Gairdner watched patiently from the sidelines. Instead of rushing their product to market to capture the hype, they focused on building a business and brand they could be confident would last beyond the boom.
Now, while many of its competitors are recovering their bottom lines, Bridge is on a trajectory for growth.
Most bicycle parts are manufactured in Asia, Mr. Yakubowicz said, meaning there’s a large chunk of the bike-making process that remains opaque. While bigger brands, such as Cervélo or Cannondale, have in-house engineers to design their bikes, they often offload production to factories overseas.
Co-founders Mike Yakubowicz, left, and Frank Gairdner held off on bringing their product to market during COVID-19, when demand rose sharply for outdoor gear.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Lead engineer Thanos Drivas was a senior R&D engineer at Cervélo before joining the team at Bridge. “We did all the design, but then we just sent the design to Asia and would get a finished product back,” he said.
He added: “What Frank and Mike offered was the opportunity for me to fill in the rest of the picture.”
That picture begins in the CNC machine. As one of the company’s first investments, a lot of what makes Bridge bikes unique originates there. Carbon parts require moulds to make. But while most companies send their designs elsewhere to be built, Bridge does it all in-house.
“If you don’t control your mould, you do not control your part,” Mr. Gairdner said.
This also allows them to be agile with their manufacturing, he said. If a part or tool breaks, they can fix it themselves on the spot, instead of having to send it elsewhere and await its return.
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Close to the CNC machine, a large walk-in freezer houses the huge rolls of carbon that will later form Bridge’s signature frames. Owing to the epoxy in the carbon, it has to be kept frozen to prevent it from hardening.
Each Bridge bike has more than 750 individual pieces of carbon in it. Each is cut out using a 2-D plotter resembling a giant robotic drawing machine, sorted based upon which part they belong to, such as a handlebar stem, and refrozen in kits until they’re needed.
Gairdner takes out a kit of pre-cut bike parts stored in Bridge's production freezer.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Each Bridge bike has more than 750 individual pieces of carbon in it that are cut out using a 2-D plotter.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The chest freezer where these carbon cut-out kits live looks as if it’s filled with dozens of very complex IKEA projects. It’s also where one of the company’s five lamination specialists goes to find what they need to make their next part.
One of those parts is a carbon threaded bottom bracket. It’s the only piece of a Bridge bike that is patent-pending and its invention is an example of why local production matters: Bridge was the first company to mould threads into the carbon part, instead of inserting a threaded aluminum part within the carbon.
“For a short period of time, we blew up the cycling portion of the internet. Which was fun because we didn’t do it for marketing purposes, we did it for ease of production,” Mr. Gairdner said.
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The decision to invent this new technology on a whim is something they wouldn’t have been able to do if they outsourced production, Mr. Yakubowicz said.
“It’s emblematic of having your engineer, your laminators, everyone on the floor together. If we were using an Asian factory and we had proposed that technology, it would have been months of R&D, they might have just said, ‘No, we don’t even want to do it,’ ” he said.
Instead, within two days, the team had a working prototype.
“We came in one day and we just gave it a shot. We tried to break it and we couldn’t break it and then we were like, ‘This seems like a good idea,’ ” Mr. Drivas said.
A compression moulding machine, used in the bike-making process. The company's long-term plan is to scale, increase production and move into a bigger space.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Currently, Bridge has one bike available in five different sizes. They’re high-end bikes with prices to match, ranging from around $12,500 to $15,500. Framesets are also available starting at $6,000. In addition to direct orders from Bridge’s website, the bikes are sold by 20 dealers in Canada, five in the U.S., five in Asia and one in Europe.
While U.S. tariffs on China have forced some in the industry to increase their prices, Bridge has managed to keep theirs in check. And so far, despite exporting to U.S. dealers, Mr. Gairdner said they’ve been relatively unscathed by the Canada-U.S. trade war.
Next, the plan is to scale, increase production and move into a bigger space. Yet, in true Bridge fashion, they’re in no rush.
“Fundamentally, we have to grow slow. There’s no other option. Which works for us because it’s been our starting ethos,” Mr. Gairdner said.
“It’s basically people processing product. That’s what we focus on.”