My name is Andy Stevenson and I’m the person responsible for the mess that is Stooge Cycles. I do everything – designing and prototyping, working with my manufacturers in Taiwan, right down to taping the boxes for dispatch. Stooge was formed in the summer of 2014 with a single frameset, the MK1. This was my idea of the perfect rigid bike and was a response to nothing being available on the market that got me excited enough to buy. I’d nearly been killed by a Trek Sawyer when it landed on my head, nearly been killed again when a Salsa Fargo I was riding failed to take a corner and sent me flying through the trees. So damn, it was time to design a hot bike that allowed me to rip the trails without fear of death by metal. My early years were spent riding and racing BMXs all around the country, digging trails in the Welsh countryside with friends, building ramps and jumping over cars, and other such idiocy. I never grew out of this shit, just grew up a little, and now build bikes that would’ve blown me away back in those early days
So Stooge has now been running for a few years and i’m still here, dedicated to making perfect rigid bikes for people with the vision to ride such things. I could talk all day about the very special requirements of rigid geometry as opposed to full suspension or hardtails, but that would be boring, on this page at least. Stooge is still a one-man-band in an industry full of corporate nonsense and I view this as a good thing. Sure, it would be nice to have hundreds of thousands of pounds to create a full line-up of bikes all at once, but the Stooge ‘one limited production run at a time’ model means that every frameset is a special thing.
The Stooge mission remains the same – to create beautiful bikes that stand outside of any trends or fashions, that handle wonderfully and challenge the common perception that a rigid bike is a lesser bike. All my bikes are true trail weapons that are more than capable of embarrassing many a full-sus rider. The purity of handling is something you quite simply don’t get when 6 inches of travel is constantly altering your geometry.
Future plans for Stooge include not taking any of this too seriously, working hard to not get bogged down in the latest trends and standards that regularly swamp the industry, promoting the beautiful simplicity of the 1 1/8th headset and the straight steerer, using colours to make bikes nicer, PLUS tyres, did I mention PLUS tyres? Skinny steel tubes. Radical rigid geometry. Always twin or triple top tubes. Simplicity. And the joy of life on a bike that beguiles and seduces.