It’s largest cargo bike manufacturing facility in North America that you just’ve probably by no means heard of.
After years of avoiding media consideration, the key is lastly out as Icicle Tricycles celebrates its twenty fifth anniversary and settles into their Outdated City headquarters. I received a tour of their 30,000 square-foot manufacturing facility on the finish of Northwest 4th Avenue on Wednesday and realized extra about this burgeoning enterprise that sells a whole bunch of cargo trikes a 12 months to prospects everywhere in the globe.
Icicle Tricycles is owned by Ryan Hashagen, a comparatively non-public man who’s well-known by insiders for his behind-the-scenes activism on a lot of native points and who’s now, considerably reluctantly, popping out of his shell. I first met Hashagen when he moved his pedicab enterprise from Seattle to Portland in 2008. Nearly instantly, Hashagen he himself into numerous advocacy campaigns; first he fought for higher pedicab laws, then he joined Portland’s bicycle enterprise and catastrophe reduction actions. Nevertheless it was his work with Higher Block PDX, the nonprofit that re-imagines public house with short-term tactical urbanism interventions and the driving pressure behind the Naito Parkway protected bike lane, that thrust Hashagen into the highlight.
Hashagen’s quite a few advocacy roles (he’s additionally a significant participant within the Outdated City Neighborhood Affiliation and not too long ago received a seat on the board as its enterprise consultant) is why Icicle Tricycles has saved such a low profile. His work on typically delicate points triggered him to fret that his enterprise may get caught up in native political debates. However with the expansion of his enterprise and its quarter-century milestone, his new function in Outdated City, and a place as adjunct college teacher at Portland State College, he’s taken cues from new staff who’ve urged him to open up.
2025 marks a brand new chapter for Hashagen and his enterprise. I’ve bugged him for years to let me do a narrative about his store, however he by no means agreed to let me in. After I received an e mail from his Gross sales and Advertising Supervisor Graham Adams about their twenty fifth anniversary, I (jokingly) stated I wouldn’t do the story until I received a manufacturing facility tour. I used to be shocked when he obliged. My time there Wednesday felt a bit like opening the gates of Willy Wonka’s chocolate manufacturing facility.
“That is our tricycle manufacturing facility,” Hashagen beamed as he swept his hand throughout the air of a cavernous, 100-year previous warehouse on NW Hoyt that used to accommodate, fittingly, an ice manufacturing facility.
Hashagen’s enterprise origin story started along with his nice uncle who ran a motorcycle messenger service in Salem, Oregon in 1935. “He would do procuring journeys, deliveries and run errands for folks by bike for 10-cents a visit,” Hashagen shared, as he confirmed me a classic billboard commercial for “Crimson High Consumers Service”.
From one previous trike he discovered within the yard of somebody’s home whereas hitchhiking by the Yukon in 2000, to a complete fleet of trikes that sit in orderly rows in his warehouse at this time, Hashagen has constructed Icicle Tricycles into enterprise that employs almost a dozen folks and boasts shoppers as various as a small nonprofit bookstore to the Nationwide Soccer League and nearly all the pieces in between.
Solely 3% of the corporate’s orders come from Oregon and one in 5 trikes are shipped internationally. A whiteboard within the gross sales workplace listed about 60 present and pending orders from cities throughout the U.S. and Canada (the place he maintains a second workplace).
Strolling with Hashagen across the manufacturing facility comes with a operating dialogue of the numerous trike prospects they’ve labored with:
“This one’s a romantic guide bike, so it’s promoting romance novels. These are for San Diego Premier Lacrosse League who will use them for promotional actions. This one goes to a neighborhood banana stand that may hand out free bananas in Bellevue, Washington. We construct trikes for Coachella [Music Festival], the Nation Music Awards, and we additionally simply did 9 trikes for the Tremendous Bowl not too long ago for Cheetos and Fritos.”
Then there’s the enterprise that makes use of certainly one of trikes to promote caviar, there’s been one used as a menstruation info station, and even one which was shipped to Fort Saskatchewan, Canada to function a job growth software for an indigenous neighborhood in a rural village that has no street accessibility.
There are common classes of trikes that make up a big chunk of the enterprise. The massive three are: guide trikes for libraries; vacationer info kiosk trikes that supply free maps and journey data; and a brand new phase Hashagen is chasing — clean-up trikes utilized by city downtown associations (and nonprofits like Floor Rating in Portland that I profiled final 12 months) that include pressure-washers and trash clean-up instruments.
Hashagen lights up when he tells me a couple of common library guide push cart mannequin. “That is for service inside libraries, faculties, retirement properties — bringing literacy outreach packages to people and having the ability to do pop-up storytime within the park, or moving into and lending out books after bingo at a retirement dwelling.” Certainly one of Icicle Tricycles favourite prospects is Portland-based Avenue Books, a nonprofit that serves people who find themselves homeless.
The corporate presents a very soup-to-nuts service. The trikes themselves are a design Hashagen and his staff have refined over 20 years. They’re constructed for Icicle Tricycles after which outfitted with customized cargo containers, paint schemes, and graphics which might be all accomplished of their store. The manufacturing facility has a woodworking space for carts that get automotive containers with cedar wooden panels, there’s a full print studio for the graphics, a delivery station, a laser etching sales space for the “Icicle Tricycles” plaques fitted to every trike, an meeting and manufacturing space, and an insulation station that builds the partitions of the containers.
Lots of the trikes characterize an entrepreneurs first crack at proudly owning their very own enterprise, for the reason that low barrier to entry is a significant promoting level. An entire trike outfitted with a faucet to dispense beer (or another beverage), might be enterprise and sales-ready for about $8,000.
“We’ve seen a dozens of our carts transfer from a cart to brick-and-mortar,” Adams, the gross sales man, shared. “Certainly one of our favorites, the Nonbinarian Bookstore in New York Metropolis, began out as a library trike simply final fall, then moved right into a brick-and-mortar house. Now the cart lives in entrance of their house, and it nonetheless attracts consideration they usually use it to do cellular outreach.”
That attractiveness is essential, Hashagen says. “Our trikes are actually nice at being the focal point. They’re simply so cute that they only draw folks’s curiosity.”
It’s that very same curiosity that constructed Hashagen’s enterprise from its early days. He recalled a narrative when he was out promoting treats and received a name from Cirque du Soleil. “They stated, ‘Hey, can we purchase a trike from you?’ and I used to be like, ‘No, I’m too busy promoting ice cream proper now!’”
Quick ahead to at this time and Hashagen is just too busy promoting trikes to promote ice cream. (Really, realizing him, he most likely does nonetheless work an ice cream trike at times.)
The subsequent 25 years for Icicle Tricycles will probably see the corporate increase into new territory, and develop into a extra well-known a part of the neighborhood. The current addition of electric-assist fashions will open up new industrial prospects, and Hashagen says they’re launching an indication store to design and fabricate indicators for different companies. That’s an ironic twist for a man that deliberately left an indication off all his former buildings. It’s a part of a shift for Hashagen and Icicle Tricycles, the place his enterprise and advocacy lastly, totally join.
As a result of for Hashagen, the trike enterprise isn’t simply concerning the enterprise. It’s about how the act of utilizing them impacts streets and different public areas.
Throughout my go to on the manufacturing facility, he advised me a narrative about being a younger activist and attending Important Mass rides. “It felt type of confrontational,” he recalled. “After which afterward within the day I’d be driving my tricycle and having these similar those who we had been irritating on the street with our bikes, be the oldsters that had been my potential prospects and those who I wished to interact with. And I began realizing the probabilities of how tricycles can rework public right-of-way — and the way tricycles promote interactivity and commerce within the public right-of-way. We are able to’t simply abandon our streets to be motorized vehicle thoroughfares. Tricycles permit for folks to do enterprise, to work together, to ask this type of engagement amongst folks in a means that motor automobiles might be fairly threatening to — and in order that, to me, was what was probably the most engaging half about tricycles.”
— IceTrikes.com
