Our History

Bikes At Work began in 1991 as a one-person, bicycle-powered local delivery service called "Fresh Aire Delivery Service" note below). We originally started as a grocery delivery service, but eventually grew to providing curbside recycling pickup, newspaper and periodical delivery, local business delivery, and even a pedicab service. We have moved well over one million pounds of cargo by bicycle over the years.

We discovered early on that existing bicycle trailers were inadequate for the types of cargo we were carrying, so we began making our own bicycle trailers to meet our needs. Soon others began asking us to build trailers for them, too, so we started a second company, Fresh Aire Trailer Works, just to manufacture bicycle trailers.

This became confusing, so in 2000 we combined the companies together to form "Bikes At Work", a company devoted to providing bicycle-powered products and services to help people accomplish useful work.

Today, we primarily manufacture heavy-duty cargo bicycle trailers and related equipment in our small workshop in Ames, Iowa, USA. (We continue to operate our delivery service to a limited extent to allow us to continue to test and refine our products, but we are not taking on new delivery clients.) We hope you find the information on our web site useful. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Note : If you are interested in operating a bicycle delivery service like this, we suggest getting a copy of our book "Cycling for Profit". It has detailed information on starting and operating a bicycle-based business. The book is out-of-print, but you still may be able to obtain copies from the publisher, Amazon.com, or through your local library [via intralibrary loan, if necessary]).