Shifting Gears

Bellingham bike mechanic pairs his passion for biking with his career

STORY BY NICK YERGER | PHOTOS BY BEATRICE HARPER

(Above) Josh Poulsen is Transition Bike’s mechanic and repairman, the man behind the scenes keeping bikes running smoothly.

As a kid in Bozeman, Montana, Josh Poulsen could be found wrenching away on his BMX bike, trying, and not always succeeding, to fix parts he had broken that day. Now the 30-year-old father with a well-groomed moustache is one of Bellingham’s best bike mechanics.

Poulsen discovered his passion for bikes in his formative years and with the help of a supportive mother was able to keep ripping around on two wheels, hitting every bump on the ground and breaking parts along the way.

After high school, Poulsen attended Montana State University to study cell biology and neuroscience. He bought his first mountain bike not long before, a 24-inch-wheeled Rocky Mountain Flow. He soon realized that a future as a lab technician in a white coat wasn’t for him.

“I changed my mind. I was paying cash for college,” Poulsen says. “It was like, I’m getting nowhere with this, I’m gonna do what I wanna do. So I started working at a bike shop and that made all the difference.”

Owenhouse Bicycling Co. in Bozeman was his first shop job. There, Poulsen dove deep into bike repair.

At 22, he made a trip to Bellingham to visit a friend going to Western. Poulsen was unaware of the bike trail access in the area but saw the potential while hiking Oyster Dome.

“I went back to Bozeman and realized I wanted to move to Bellingham. I wanted to ride my bike all the time. It’s close to Whistler, it’s close to Squamish, closer to Black Rock and other places I wanted to ride,” Poulsen says.

The customers won’t argue that.

Zoë Taylor, a customer of Brown Dog, opted to go to Pouslen’s shop over any other in town. Taylor met Poulsen when Brown Dog was just in its infant stages.

Taylor could tell immediately that Poulsen wasn’t just in the bike industry for himself and personal gain, and really cares about his customers.

“He’s just intuitive and his attentive to what people have going on, their energy, their presence,” Taylor says. “He reads and adapts, and I feel like he applies the same thing to bicycles. His heart’s in it for sure.”

At Brown Dog, Poulsen built a strong customer base of people like Taylor that would keep coming back because of his attention to detail, reasonable prices, fast turnaround and knack for helping people understand their bikes.

“I want to help explain what’s going on in what they think is a complicated suspension, and all of the pixie dust and unicorns they think live inside,” he says. “When these in fact don’t live there. It’s just a horse, there’s no unicorn, or pixie dust, just suspension oil.”

Running a small business is hard, and something that Poulsen knows intimately. He was constantly on the phone, answering texts, responding to emails. Brown Dog was closed three days a week but there wasn’t ever a time when he wasn’t working.

Also a part-time firefighter, Poulsen was left with little time for his wife, Shala, and their now one-year-old daughter, Lyra, let alone time to ride his bike or build trails.

While running Brown Dog, he worked at least 60 hours per week.

“I just wanna spend time with the family,” he says. “But there’s a balance, I need my personal time to keep myself sane, and that involves building trail and riding bikes. Being part of the family, being there as much as I can, especially at these critical growing stages of a one year old, that’s very important to me, and to her as a growing little human.”

When Transition Bikes offered him the position of service manager at the company’s new Bellingham headquarters, it was a dream come true for Poulsen and he was more than happy to say yes.

The job is salaried, comes with benefits for his family, and Poulsen keeps getting to do what he loves without the stress of running his own business. The hours are nine to five, often shorter, giving Poulsen plenty of family and fun time.

When Transition moved to Bellingham with plans to have its own full-fledged demo center and showroom, Brown Dog would not be able to continue its demo and sales role, so Transition’s founders, Kevin Menard and Kyle Young reached out to Poulsen and offered him the job.

“He’s got a great, approachable personality, and that’s kind of a core part of our brand, being approachable and easy to talk to,” Menard says. “We love that about Josh, cause he’s super good with customers, face-to-face, that one-on-one kind of connection.”

Menard explained that at Transition, Poulsen is responsible for keeping the demo fleet in order, setting customers up with demo bikes and working on personal bikes that Transition customers bring in.

“He’s always bled the brand a bit, he really believes in the brand, beyond just as our employee,” Menard says. “That’s kind of what we look for in an employee. That makes him want to go the extra mile, the extra step to take care of people. You’re always going to get a better experience from someone who takes their job more personally.”

Menard’s right, Poulsen goes the extra mile and has no intention of changing his top notch customer service habits that are engrained in him and were his number one priority at Brown Dog.

“If you want to go take it for a test ride and confirm that it is in fact shifting better, that’d make me feel better,” Poulsen says to a customer picking up a bike from the Transition headquarters.

He then goes outside, carrying extra parts for the customer, and helps him load the bike into his truck once it’s confirmed that the bike is shifting better than before.

At Transition, Poulsen will keep doing what he knows best, helping people to the best of his ability and loving it.

Though Brown Dog no longer has a storefront and regular hours, it will live on as Poulsen continues to maintain bikes of loyal customers on the side, taking on new ones as time allows.

“I’m an old man, I just turned 30,” Poulsen says. “I have a wife and a kid and a real job. Well, I work for Transition, so it looks like a real job, but it’s more of getting to do what you love and getting paid for it. It’s definitely an ideal job for my lifestyle.”

The pixie dust and unicorns might just be real after all.