Culture and Context

What Japanese gambling and American bike messengers can tell us about the future of brands.

I left San Francisco for two years between 2003 and 2005 and came back to find it a very different place. When I returned to the city, I was amazed by the sheer number of hipsters on bicycles and, in particular, by the number of fixed gear bikes on the road. Obviously, in the short time I’d been gone, a trend had emerged and was in full flourish.

Fixed gear bicycles – those with pedals that are locked to the rotation of the wheels – predate the geared members of their family. Early on, it was fixed gear bikes that cyclists raced over mountains in the Tour de France, but after the advent of gear-shifting mechanisms, the “fixie” was quickly marginalized to specialist pursuits like track racing. In cities like San Francisco, fixies gained an early foothold in the bike messenger community. Messenger friends of mine used to say that there was an intangible flow that resulted from pedaling a bike with limited braking capacity and the inability to coast; that the minimal mechanisms meant less chance of something breaking or getting jogged out of alignment; and, perhaps most importantly, that the reduced number of parts allowed a courier to lock his machine anywhere while minimizing the risk of it being stripped down or stolen.

More recently, young professionals and hipsters in cities like New York and San Francisco have adopted the fixie as fashion statement. In these urban environments the bike is often faster than an automobile, is conveniently lockable outside of favored drinking establishments, and also provides a spiritual linkage for the young and wanna-be-gritty dotcom workers to their unencumbered-by-the-9-to-5 bike messenger brethren.

Within this current fixie craze, there are many recurrent themes. Riders decorate their bikes with spoke cards, which pay homage to messengers' alley cat races, and with color matching top-tube pads, which recall the BMX bikes many of us rode as kids in the early 80s. There’s even a full-fledged subculture within this subculture, revolving around the highly sought-after NJS fixie.

In Japan, track bike racing is a gambling sport. The racing takes place in a velodrome, called Keirin, and has evolved from other forms of traditional track racing. In 1957, in order to regulate the gambling that surrounds Keirin, a set of standards around bicycles, materials, and tools was created. These regulated parts are called NJS, named after the Japanese Bicycling Association that acts as the regulating body. They are limited in number and can sell for many times their equivalent in the open market, both inside and outside of Japan. As a result of their scarcity and ties to an exotic sporting event, these bikes and parts are highly prized by those trying to differentiate themselves within the wider fixie subculture.

When subcultures adopt aspirational iconography from other groups, they also take on the original symbolism, however informally. Baggy jeans, trucker caps, basketball jerseys, and fixed gear bikes are all examples of cultural signifiers that have been adopted by groups outside of those who originated the style. Knowledge of the context, tensions, and juxtaposition between markets and individuals has become vitally important in the understanding of subcultures and, by extension, the consumer markets that serve them. Understanding the space where one subculture overlaps with another has become more important than defining one large culture or market. As Chris Anderson reiterates in his “long tail” theory of modern business models, niche products, markets and brands are the future of many largely segmented megabrands. The NJS fixie is a niche product par excellence.