FAMILY BALANCE: THE STRIDER PHENOM

[MotoFactory]

You’ve no doubt seen them, watched kids zip around on them, tripped over them, and found them strewn across suburban lawns and driveways. It seems every kid in the world now starts life on wheels aboard a balance bike, a pedal-less mini bicycle that’s offering a new platform for learning that shuns the tradition of training wheels. It’s such a simple idea, learning to coast on two wheels before adding in pedals, and yet it took the ingenuity of one engineer with a toddler to bring the concept to light.

Strider Bikes is still a relatively young company, but it is already approaching 5 million in global unit sales. This staggering milestone is testament to the core concept behind Strider, an idea that came to founder/CEO Ryan McFarland when he wanted to build a better bicycle for his 2-year-old. McFarland recently welcomed us into the Strider Sports International, Inc. headquarters in Rapid City, South Dakota, to show us around, tell us the story of the Strider’s origins, and talk about the singular focus of the company and why it’s so important to the entire powersports industry.

Start ‘em young. This is McFarland’s main goal in a nutshell.

“This is the bike I built for my son when he was 2,” said McFarland. The blue and white prototype is proudly on display in the company’s main showroom. “I was becoming aware of how mismatched the traditional stuff was to his size. I had the four-wheel scoot toy, the little bicycle with training wheels and the Yamaha 50 with training wheels. We had all these things that seemingly should have worked for him, but I realized that they’re too big and heavy, and the complexity is too much for a 2-year-old.”

Once McFarland decided to create his own bike for Bode, the first priority was to get the sizing right. “You can see this sketch. That’s me laying him out on the living room floor,” said McFarland. “I’m thinking, ‘No wonder he can’t do some of this stuff. He weighs 20 pounds.’ I need to make something smaller, lighter, and I really need to focus on the one skill I want him to learn. It’s not pedaling; it’s how to hold the bike upright and move on two wheels. So that was kind of the breakthrough. If that’s the focus, then we can get rid of the pedals, we can get rid of a lot of weight, and we can also get the seat down lower so that solves the size problem. When the pedals came off, it set the design free.

“There was a piece of me that was wondering, ‘Well, is it still going to be a bike?’ I really had to think about that, and that was the breakthrough moment—realizing that pedaling doesn’t necessarily define riding. The throttle doesn’t define riding. Riding is being balanced on two wheels, counter-steering and steering. That’s riding.”

Teaching “EVERY SINGLE KID” to ride requires adaptive solutions, which the Strider Education Foundation also proudly provides.

Once McFarland put his young son on the prototype, the change was immediate, both in Bode’s abilities and their daily lives. “When you have a 2-year-old, you can’t really go anywhere with them walking. They just dawdle along,” said McFarland. “So, you’re either carrying them or you’re pushing a stroller or something. But once he was on this, he was gung-ho to go and going faster than we’re walking. We started becoming way more active. We took it everywhere. Even downtown, in crowds, and lots of people were seeing it. Every time we were out, somebody would stop us and ask, ‘What is that? How old is he?’ They’d never seen a little kid ride like that.”

One of the places McFarland recalled taking the prototype was the Thunder Valley National. Once strangers started offering him money for it, McFarland knew he was onto something. “I really didn’t set out to create a product with a business in mind,” he said, “but the demand was overwhelming. So, I decided I’m going to have to do something with this.”

The origins of Strider are on display in the “Inventor’s Corner” of the company’s headquarters in Rapid City, South Dakota.

The company’s rapid growth only furthered McFarland’s belief that “striding” is a far superior way to learn the basics of riding than training wheels. (And don’t even mention the word “tricycle” to McFarland unless you want to get thrown out of Strider HQ.)

“A lot of people don’t understand the nuanced difference there, but on a bike with training wheels or a tricycle, you don’t counter-steer. Everything is backwards. One of the reasons kids have a hard time coming off training wheels is that they’ve been practicing the wrong skills. They fall, get hurt, get scared. They might get frustrated and think, ‘I’m done with riding.’ Just like that, bicycling and motorcycling lost a prospect. It’s that fragile.”

This is where McFarland sees Strider’s central focus: laying the foundation for future riders. “For about the last 20 years, bicycling participation rates for kids have been on a massive decline. I’m talking 250,000 per year. We’re turning that around by getting riding to a younger age, so now we’re reaching kids with a safer, more fun alternative and a more intuitive learning process.”

Part of the challenge, as McFarland has observed, is that other sports are being offered at much younger ages today. “When sports like tee-ball and karate moved down from 9 or 10 years old to 4 years old, they preempted riding. Kids are learning all sorts of other skills, and this one’s put on the back-burner. What Strider is doing is jumping down to a 1 1/2 to 2 years old and pre-empting other activities. It’s like an extension of mobility from walking and running to now striding and riding. We’re back in first place and making a difference.”

Strider’s success fueled McFarland’s ambitions, and he admits he thought about advancing his product line with e-power. The popularity of Stacyc and a booming micro-mobility sector among young teens clearly indicate a strong market for it.

The first prototype began with McFarland laying his two-year-old son Bode on the living room floor and taking his dimensions.

“There’s that fundamental decision that you have to make: Are you going to chase the few at the higher price or are you going to chase the many across the base? Part of the reason that bike and moto are declining, bottom line, is both those industries have fewer people participating, and they’re all participating at higher price points. The pyramid [grows tall and skinny], and at some point your pyramid falls over. I have to laugh when I see them bring out statistics like, ‘Bicycling is booming. Total revenue for the year is here instead of here.’ Yeah, but you just sold more expensive stuff to a smaller group of people.

“The products get so good and all the enthusiasts love them—and I do too. The enthusiast part of me was, like, yes, let’s go down that path, and we developed some really cool stuff. But that’s not recruiting new participants. I had to consciously make the decision to stay focused on just Strider. This is the need, right here.”

Through the Strider Education Foundation, the All Kids Bike program seeks to shift the entire paradigm of early childhood education—a lofty goal that is already underway in over 1700 schools across the U.S.

With nearly 5 million units sold around the world, McFarland feels he’s just getting started. In 2017 the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Strider Education Foundation was founded, and the following year All Kids Bike was born. Its lofty ambition is to shift the entire paradigm of early childhood education and build a program to teach kids to ride a bicycle in kindergarten PE class. Creating the curriculum was a challenge in itself, along with creating a fleet of bicycles that store easily and require zero maintenance. But All Kids Bike has solved every problem in its path one at a time, including finding PE teachers who didn’t even know how to ride a bike, and is now underway getting the program into schools across the country.

“The cost is at $9000 to the school, one time. And then this program, once it’s in the school, it will last 10 years with them not needing to do anything. There’s no maintenance, no additional money, anything. It’s like we’ve put the desks and the books in the school, and now they get to use them for a decade,” said McFarland.

The program is starting to gain momentum through state funding but is mostly backed by donors. “Most of our donors are corporate or large grantors, like racers,” explained All Kids Bike Executive Director Lisa Weyer. “The Ryan Dungey Foundation is one of our highest donors. They’ve given us nearly $250,000.” Andrew Short, Cody Webb, Mark Blackwell, Josh Hayes, JD Beach and Jared Mees are also national ambassadors with the program.

The Strider Sport International, Inc. headquarters is full of reminders of the company’s focus and motivation.

“The average school will teach over 1000 kids during a 10-year time frame. So, for $9000, we’re teaching 1000 kids over the next 10 years in each school that we’re in,” McFarland explained. “We’re in almost 1700 schools, and that means that in 10 years we have 1.7 million kids. I hope to double that number in two and a half years.”

Calling back to the 20-year decline in bicycling participation that initially sparked his cause, McFarland is proud to talk about how he sees the tide starting to turn.

“We single-handedly will have stopped the bleeding, and we’ll be starting to climb through what we’re doing with the foundation and putting learn-to-ride programs in elementary schools. I don’t know what everybody else is doing, but that’s what I’m doing,” McFarland said with a smile.

The post FAMILY BALANCE: THE STRIDER PHENOM appeared first on Dirt Bike Magazine.

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