How Did This Woman Change Cycling For Millions?

How did one person revolutionise cycling for millions? Isla Rowntree, an ex-professional cyclist and one of the few female founders and CEOs in the bike industry, started Islabikes in 2005. Her company redefined kids’ bikes with a focus on fit, lightweight design, and safety. Nearly a quarter of a million bikes were sold in almost 20 years.

Now, we’re meeting Isla to find out more about her, understand how she was able to transform the kids’ bike industry and discover what she’s up to now.

00:00 How could one person have revolutionised cycling?
00:57 Who is Isla Rowntree?
01:15 What is Islabikes?
04:35 Riding with Isla
06:03 How did you start Islabikes?
10:20 What has Isla been building?
11:38 Was it hard to run a company and design bikes?
12:20 The quality of Islabikes
15:08 What’s next for Isla and Islabikes?
16:01 Why did Islabikes stop selling bikes?
19:52 Islabikes’ Legacy

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how can this one person have revolutionized cycling for millions of people it’s a bold claim and she would be far too modest to make it herself but I can for she is ISA rry a former professional cyclist who started a bike brand making bikes for kids and in so doing genuinely revolutionized the experience of cycling from learning to ride right through to learning to race not just for the millions of kids lucky enough to ride an is a bike but for all of those who benefit too from other bike brands upping their game as a result Isa was a Pioneer and one of the very few women Founders and CEOs in the bike industry the company that she started in 2005 has defined kids bikes ever since by creating frames and parts that prioritized fit lightweight and safety three things that were previously missing from bikes for young people to find out more I’m on my way to meet Isa who is she how has she revolutionized the kids bike industry and what is she up to [Music] now hello oh hi Isa nice to meet you s great to meet you yeah great thank you very much so this is this is ID bikes now it is yeah so what’s what goes on here now then um well as I’m sure you know Isa bites was a children’s bicycle brand for many many years been going for 18 years um and at the end of last year we stopped selling bikes all together was decision that was taken um but the entity continues the business entity and there are nearly 250,000 dialer bikes out there that we sold over that 18 years now I run a very small version of the operation just selling spare parts to keep all the all the children on the road no way what Isa truly revolutionized was designing kids bikes that actually met the needs of kids whether that’s smaller diameter handlebars that little hands could actually grip or brake levers that could be pulled with little fingers or fast rolling agile tires that could cover ground with ease despite little legs and so this unit is now full of these gamechanging parts ready to be shipped out I always love the fact that you use Kevlar Beed tires yeah well they’re light and easy to get on and off and this is a tread tread design that that I I I did myself they’re multi- surface tire for what most children do on their bikes small diameter grips have another area of design Obsession many many years ago of mine there was several iterations of these right from the start of isites in the early days I worked out that you needed to put a plug in underneath the grip because when a hand a bicycle Falls over the open end of The Handlebar stamps a hole like a pastry cutter through the end of a gri grip and a pediatrician from Bristol F me up in about a year two of iyes and he’ spotted that I had these it’s a pediatric surgeon that that that was fitting these underneath the early version of grips the the the bigger diameter bit used to break off leaving the grips because it it was too thin here but he said you’re the only people that do this and can you encourage the rest of the industry to do it because I operate on children that have fallen off onto the end of an open hand handar and it often goes into their vital organs and that was his job and so I set about improving the the grit design that I’d done um and you can see um they’ve got the bigger the bigger end on them for the older older children’s bikes it’s not quite so big there’s a nice pair of cycle cross tires there is that your design as well yep it is yeah yeah what became clear to me within minutes of meeting Isa was just how much she loves bikes and riding whether that’s racing Recreation or transport like the bike that rides the few miles to the post office several times a week complete with giant paniers and trailer so that’s a big trailer and that’s a single speed right yeah yeah so you ride you ride your single speed a very beautiful single speed with a what how many kilos was I don’t it’s pretty overloaded Mondays is the big day cuz people order over the weekend haven’t quite finished loading it up today there’ll be another paer on there but that’s amazing yeah [Music] with the last few Parcels packed up we followed Isa on her Laden single speed back into the local town of Ludo ready to head out on bikes ourselves I wanted to get out not only because I love the riding around where Isa lives in the borders of England and Wales but because it is such a treat to ride with Pro and expr Cy there is always something to learn from someone as accomplished as [Music] Isa it’s amazing up here isn’t it quite a climb where are we just for the viewers this this is called high venel right here Low’s over there you can see titon CLE over there and then that’s yeah right there and so so we’ve ridden up on gravel today but I mean you’ve ridden and raced all disciplines I’m I right in thinking that you medled in a downhill National Championship once if you go far enough back yes I did yeah I think it was from 91 and then so since then you raced you raced all disciplines what were you professional in um I professionally I raced for rally for team rally um and we were a mountain bike team but we also competed quite a lot on the road as well um yeah really to support our mountain bike racing but there’s some good Ries in the team yeah and how did you get from being a pro cyclist Pro mountain biker to then starting is bike so what was the process they were really the pro cycling ran in parallel to my um other careers if you like so um I started in a bike shop when I was 16 um had already had already got a well well embedded passion for bikes and and the mechanical side as well as the actual cycling I’ve always loved both and through my yeah early 20s um I um made trailer bikes for children yeah so that that was throughout my 20s and then I stopped doing that in order to race for rally and it was like can I get better if I do this full time was really the thing in my head um and I learned actually I didn’t really get any better but it was a great experience with rally and two years of going I was World Cups and yeah was Great Rally shrunk their team they actually removed all the women from their team so that was kind of get a proper job now it was actually my sister that said you haven’t got a you’ve done this youve got this slightly itinerant career you need to go and work for a big corporate and treat it as your degree okay and she my younger sister said that to me and it was really inspired and I thought well who can I work for in the area I live where I live and hord’s head office was in redage 25 miles away and I worked there for nearly four years yeah and eventually I I went from running the spare parts range there and um that’s what I was recruited for to um to being responsible for pretty much the whole bik range wow and I could kind of almost always see potentially the inspiration then because hords for a lot of people in in the UK is where they get their kids bikes right and so you were there looking at people buying these kids bikes and thinking that’s not a good bike yeah exactly I think you’re you’re absolutely right it was in front of me at that point and then the other key thing that happened at that point was um sister and my best friends my best friend started having families they they they they’ had their first children um and so they were then getting to the point where who are they going to ask what what first bike to get for the kids and of course it was me and at that point I’m like I don’t want my my nephew and my nieces and my um best friends um children to ride on bikes like this you they get they’re going to they’re going to take up video games and football if this they because they were so bad at that time and I thought I felt from the design point of view I could so easily make them so much better I mean it was some rocket science of that point it was a low bar and it was that and my experience at Halford’s um I knew where to go to get them made by them because that feels that’s the key I was going to say that feels like the leap of faith to presumably get on an airplane yeah to Southeast Asia and go and find someone or people that could make everything for you but I was already then in the industry and I knew I knew which yeah I’d made a lot of contacts at hords I knew how how the system worked if you like so I knew where to go um to ask and um actually had a lot of support from a few key few key manufacturers um of of components and and bikes um in the early stages and um was able to get it off the ground from the top of the mountain it was time to follow this former mountain bike Champion down some decidedly ungravity descents into town Isa had told me that she’d been back building frames again and I was really Keen to see what she’d been creating [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so oh wow well that’s a treasure try isn’t it [Music] so what has she been building a lot mountain bikes mainly beautifully made and spec single speeds for her home Trails or events like the Highland 550 but also a bike for gravel racing built with isa’s customary creativity and Innovation just 7 kilos despite the steel frame built to flex and using brakes from a time trial bike in order to do without drop bar shifters which is something of a pet peeve of hers given their one size doesn’t really fit all approach it is quite flexy I think but that is Arrow isn’t it that is super Arrow it’s cool seeing all the bikes racked up and the the creativity that goes into clearly like designing and experimenting must be something that you’re super into as well as clearly very good at well can’t can’t help doing yeah yeah I mean it just it just happens when you want to to not really that side of things but it must have been hard like running a company and still presumably designing a lot of yeah yeah that yeah I mean that that shows Insight from you really um that that I think anybody that starts something um from scratch the small founder entrepreneur and and is the designer as well um if if that project is successful that business is successful and grows there becomes a point where there’s a tension between those things and what happens is the thing that you’re good at that you start out doing that makes the business what it is the time available for that get squeezed by everything else and and that’s something that definitely happened for me it it strikes me like seeing the I don’t know the passion that you pour into it and it always appeared that way with Isa bikes particularly in like the quality of them the fact they last for such a long time and one thing I was wanting to ask was the secondhand value of an isik is is really it’s really strong is it there’s an incredible secondhand Market was that ever something that you were concerned about as a business the fact that so many traded hands that you know they weren’t buying them new new um not not concerned and I think that the secondhand thing emerged very early on in the business so as soon as the first child had grown out the first bikes that we sold they they were they were ex exchanging hands for for 2/3 3/4s of the original price and and that I always felt that was something to be celebrated I think in the in the latter years of the business um or or once the business had grown to a certain size and was established I don’t know 10 years ago that um the secondhand Market became a competition for us and I think that was recognized and um perhaps seen as something as a threat at the time but not I say seen as I’m not saying I saw as cuz actually I never really felt it like that I just saw it’s the more use message that these bikes get the more year years that they’re in use it’s great for the environment um they’ been designed to be maintainable so things like I didn’t use plastic bushings I refused to use plastic bushings in pedals and things like that always proper bearings do you ever look at other brands that are constantly sort of superseding their product lines and you know they they’re not back compatible so yeah people constantly need to keep buying do you ever look at them and sort of wish they did things differently yeah I think that there is a view among some people that that that there’s a cynical intent in changing products um for the sake of it or to make us spend more money and I I don’t think that’s actually true I think I think the the the majority of people working in the bike industry are well intentioned they’re they’re genuinely trying to innovate and and make something that they believe is better I think it’s the collective effect of that and some of those changes I mean I get driven mad by the number of bottom bracket and headset stands like everybody else the number of tools that you have to have just to be able to service them I mean it’s a barrier to entry to somebody becoming a mobile mechanic isites decided right from the outset not to have any model years and that was that was a part of my don’t change it until there’s something you’re actually going to improve don’t change it it as soon as you have an idea to make something better put it on the next production run you know do it straight away but if there wasn’t anything to improve then a model might run for several years without any significant changes can I ask what comes next for well for you for Isa bikes um I don’t know I don’t have an answer I I’ve never had a planned career I don’t know what I really want to do when I grow up but um it’s been pretty good fun so far um yeah mostly um I don’t know it opportunity will come along and um I’m not I’m not close to things I’m actually enjoying the place I’m in at the moment I’ve had a an emotionally quite challenging few years for various reasons and um I’m enjoying what we do I’m enjoying my little spare parts business yeah doing something that I think is a good thing and um let that settle in and then we’ll see I hope to remain healthy enough to carry on cycling yeah and exploring wonderful country that we live in as long as possible [Music] what we’ve yet to touch on in this video is why Isa bikes stopped selling complete bikes but it is a question that I’d asked earlier in the day can I can I ask why why you ceased selling bikes then um it it it’s a complicated and quite personal story and journey um and it’s it’s an area that going into running a business business I I didn’t think about at all is what happens at the other end you don’t really know where it’s going to take you but at some point unless you want to do it forever you’ve got to got to have an exit and the typical way of exiting is to sell I actually did a management buyout three and a half years ago now and that was at that point sort of the the the plan solution and really so I could retire and go on to do other things and in particular I I want to avoid a situation where as my parents aged that I would be torn between the needs of running a business and their care needs but after a very difficult period in the cycle industry which I’m sure you’ve spoken to many many many other players about the MBO you know wasn’t really working out um and again I could I could have sold it but by that point in time you know um it perhaps it didn’t have the value in it and when you when you sell a business the founder they want a piece of you with it it usually goes with the deal you know you’re going to work for us for another 3 years or another 5 years that was an option but not very palatable and the other part of that that I’ve always found really difficult to deal with is you know if you sell your brand and for better or worse I put my name on it so it’s really personal um if you sell your brand at some point you’re not going to be able to be involved in the design decisions anymore or you got to work for the new people you can’t have both and and my name’s going to be on something that I’d be uncomfortable with it’s just an inevitability and my bikes as up here sort of the the all the iterations of of the no 164 year olds bike um they’re deeply personal yeah you know I I’ve I over the years I’ve willingly but I’ve pulled my emotional Soul into those bikes you know I really really care um in right down in here about the per the tiny details of them and to see to see a bike in 5 or 10 years time with my name on it didn’t sit with me you know I thought was not right you know somebody else would obviously think it was right but I might not I found that really difficult do you regard it as a courageous decision I’m not sure how many other people would would not sell do you know what I mean I don’t want the decision to appear like it was all very well planned in advance cuz I spent 18 months up until the end of this year absolutely agonizing over which route to take and exploring different options with different advisers and it was really tough and actually I think ultimately now with the benefit of six months being able to just sort of step back and look at it um is a really good outcome what I hope is that through iab’s 18 years that loads of kids have had great experiences for air bikes and will continue to do so and I’m actually really comfortable now I absolutely love packing my hles um I enjoy the process of doing it I enjoy thinking that every time I sck a set of grips in a bag that a bike’s going to yeah be safe and usable again or somebody’s bought some new tires and there’s all sorts of extraordinary things get ordered I think bikes get bits you you will know in a garage or cyclists bits disappear off bikes that aren’t used for a while don’t they yes how does that [Music] happen on the one and it feels like a real shame that Isa bikes are no longer making and selling complete bikes because they were they are great bikes and and great bikes deserve to be made but on the other hand my time with isos got me thinking about what it is to start and to own a company and she said how do you finish it why not burn bright make great product change in industry and then step away with pride in your achievements and make no mistake the Legacy lives on there are as she said a quarter of a million bikes out there that’s still on the road teaching kids how to ride and helping them to fall in love with cycling and yes there are still crap kids bikes being made but the bar has definitely been raised I for one will be hitting that thumbs up button to salute Isa for her achievements and also got to say a massive thank you for showing us her Trails her workshop and also making us some cake