Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Joy Liu would come home late at night from her job at a wine shop to find people standing outside her house. The culprit: her husband Tijon Randall’s bike repair services.
Randall had a day job at a repair shop at the time. And he was also running a side business, a bike wheel company called Honey Wheel Co., operated out of his living room and basement. When overwhelmed with repair work, Randall relied on his co-worker, Vincent Cabrera, to help. While customers waited, Randall and Liu offered them beer, wine, and snacks.
“A lot of the core values that we have now came from this practice of hospitality,” Liu said. “When you go into a bike shop, it’s rare to have a couch, and that type of service before or during when your bike is getting looked at.”
This hospitality became a core of the next phase of their business. In May 2021, Randall, Liu, and Cabrera opened a boutique bike repair shop, Tuned, in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
A bike repair room of their own
At Tuned, Randall largely builds wheels, Cabrera works on suspension, and they tag-team on bike builds, tune-ups, or troubleshooting. Apart from general support, Liu handles business operations — everything from bookkeeping and communications to keeping alive the plants that welcome their clientele.
They left behind the industry’s typical ‘just get it done’ mentality and opted to give customers’ bikes extra TLC. They also didn’t want the typical messy shops that smelled of oil and grease. When you walk into the space, you are greeted with the aromas of incense and (free) coffee and staffers’ smiles.
“Most people are not really expecting that — you’re expecting bikes to be everywhere,” Randall said. “You’re expecting a dude with an attitude and with grease on his face.”
Biking down memory lane
Randall didn’t learn to ride until age 12. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. At age 16, he bought his first bike through a friend, a BMX GT Dyno he had saved up for with odd jobs.
Randall recalls racing through the streets of Spanish Harlem in the ‘90s to explore the city. He and friends rode down to Union Square and the Brooklyn Banks skate park, sometimes picking up a posse of up to 20 to 30 other riders. Randall went as far out as Secaucus, New Jersey, and Upstate New York: “It was like an escape, to get out of my neighborhood,” he said.
Riding as much as Randall did, his bike inevitably had service needs. When fix-ups from friends or bike shops weren’t up to par, Randall started tinkering. After high school, it was tough to get a job at a bike shop — nobody wanted someone self-taught. He was finally able to get some experience through AmeriCorps.
In some ways, Cabrera’s route to bike repairs was similar. Scared of riding, the training wheels didn’t come off until he was 11 or 12. A native New Yorker, he moved to Puebla, Mexico — there, close to the mountains and in a town you could cross in 20 minutes, Cabrera learned to ride and then taught himself to fix his bike. When he moved back to New York as an adult, he figured he should get a job at a bike shop.
Cabrera and Randall’s parallel paths also reflect a penchant for problem solving. When they’re not fixing cracked pistons, they’re working backwards to solve the mystery of some creaking sound — where in the bike it’s coming from and how to stop it. It helps that they no longer have a boss rushing them through a service.
Being BIPOC bike repair shop owners
In an industry where white men tend to own the bike shops, Randall and Cabrera are used to first-time customers automatically second-guessing their expertise. They often brush it off, or quickly explain their process as best they can. But it still sucks.
Liu has witnessed some version of this scene play out countless times: a customer will stop by looking for the owner. A white customer has just come out of the restroom. The new customer assumes the white customer is the owner and that Randall and Cabrera are the mechanics.
“A lot of bike shops that are white-owned have Spanish-speaking staff [and people of color] … working in the back and don’t have interfacing opportunities with other customers,” Liu says. “So there’s a lot of microaggression.”
After some initial weird interactions, though, those customers wise up: “They will check their bike over and they take a second to look around to see what else is in the shop,” Cabrera said. “I feel like that’s when it clicks in their head and they’re like, ‘oh, they’re more than capable to actually work on my bike. My bike will be fine.’”
Being ride-or-dies
It also helps that Tuned is part of a larger circle of BIPOC small business owners and creatives. “So we do cope by … expressing frustrations that we have with others, so it doesn’t just sit with us,” Liu said. “We are in community.”
The Tuned owners are a tight-knit community themselves, partly for the same reason. Liu and Randall, after all, met when Liu was expressing frustration toward one of Randall’s old co-workers. She was getting a tune-up on her bike, a red 1980s vintage Univega. The mechanic working on it had chosen a bright pink bar tape without asking her.
It wasn’t just about the poor aesthetic choice, Liu says — it was that, out of the few ways she could personalize her bike, she wasn’t given a choice in it. Randall came over and helped deescalate the situation. His calm energy has since come in handy while with Liu in the emergency room after one of her bike accidents.
Liu’s history of vehicle accidents reflects another core value of Tuned: respect for the work at its highest level. “You could literally die riding a bike that wasn’t built properly or didn’t have proper maintenance,” Liu said. “I think it is very important not to treat it as if it’s just this frivolous thing.”
High standards notwithstanding, they keep the shop fun, a place where people feel comfortable being creative, Randall says. Their space is studded with stuff from the community: mash-up figurines from a fellow BIPOC creative (picture Elmo’s face on King Kong’s body, or Cookie Monster’s face on Godzilla’s body); an old Pepsi-Cola fridge from a restaurant around the corner that closed down.
“[Our hope] is to elevate the idea of what a bike shop is,” Randall said. “[To] increase the level of service and expertise, and just keep pushing as far as we can take it.”
This post has been updated.
291 Nevins St., Brooklyn, New York 11217
Tuesday – Friday 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Saturday 12 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
(718) 643-1858
Follow on Instagram at @tuned.by
