The Importance of First Impressions
I still remember the first “serious” bike I ever bought. Not the one that showed up at birthdays, but the first bike that made me feel like I was choosing a direction, maybe even choosing a version of myself. It wasn’t the most expensive bike, it certainly wasn’t perfect. Of course, it was a mountain bike. I spent weeks researching it, test riding it, hanging out it in the shop, trying to make sense of what made this frame different from that one, and why this level of Shimano was so much more important than that one.
You probably remember your moment, too. The shop. The lighting. The smell of rubber. The simple, unmistakable sense that you were stepping into a larger world and (whether you knew it or not) putting in place the first stone of future decisions.
It’s easy to say that first bike doesn’t matter anymore. People upgrade quickly now. The industry appears to change dramatically every year. Riders are exposed to endless videos, endless reviews, and opinions. However, even in all of that noise, something quiet and deeply human still happens: your first serious bike becomes the reference point you don’t realize you’re using.
Whatever it was about that bike, it left an imprint. Not on the kind of rider you became, but on the kind of bikes you continue to choose.
We’re not as rational as we think. We carry preferences forward. We carry loyalties forward. We carry the geometry, the responsiveness, and the personality of that first real bike forward, even when we swear we’re starting from scratch and buying into a new category.
This, right here, is why the industry finds itself in a strange place. So much of the first-bike experience now happens online.
A bike is a physical experience first, and a digital decision second. We’ve inverted something essential.
We don’t feel the bike. We don’t pick it up. We don’t ride it around the shop. We don’t test its personality.
We scroll through specs. We watch someone else ride the bike we’re thinking about buying. We read reviews written by people we’ll never meet. We see pictures. We compare charts.
That’s why local bike shops matter, despite everything happening around them. Not because they’re romantic or nostalgic, but because they’re one of the few remaining places where a rider can walk in and be surprised by something. You can’t be surprised by a bike on a website. I mean, you can, but it's not the same thing.
You can be surprised by a bike sitting quietly on a shop floor, by a frame you never considered, by the way a bike feels the moment you sit in it, or the way shifts feel and sound.
Today, group rides, even more than shops, have become rolling ecosystems of discovery.
When someone new joins a ride and the only bikes they see are the same brand, the same style, the same tires, the same everything, their sense of what’s possible becomes limited before it ever has a chance to expand.
When a group ride is diverse, when someone rolls up on something unexpected - say a handmade steel frame, a gravel bike that looks like it’s carved from a single piece of metal, an old mountain bike with a modern rebuild - it quietly gives permission for curiosity.
...and I've come to believe this:
It’s curiosity that invites someone in, and it's community that convinces them to stay.
Together, they’re what grow cycling.
