College Park Bikes: A profile

The College Park bike shop can’t complain about a lack of customers. 

“Hey how are you guys?”

“Fine.”

“How can I help you?”

The bike shop is located just off the University of Maryland’s campus. People come from across the area for help with their bike.

I asked customers what brought them in.

“Bent rim, bent rim on the tire”

“I ride my bike to work and I got a flat tire. And I don’t know anything about bikes.”

“The shifter stopped working after 10 years. So it was about time.”

“My back tire got really worn down and it got really flat.”

“Brakes and shifter.”

“My daughter is looking for a bike. Whatever works.”

But the shop is struggling with the effects of the pandemic. It’s constantly fighting supply shortages.

“It’s just always you know, backorder like, you cannot get it when you need it,” says owner Marden Timen You lose sales because of that.”

On Sunday, he was trying to put in an order for bike parts at his supplier as usual. But his supplier only had one bike bag, one tire pump, one tire lever, and one allen wrench left — for the whole country. 

“I mean last year was is much worse than this, now it’s kind of like dropping a bit so we have some availability off on bikes and accessoration parts,” he says.

Not only does Timen not have enough parts, he doesn’t have enough staff. 

“Bike is very unique, they have a skilled people, you cannot just hire anybody.”

That makes hiring hard, but not impossible. His newest hire is Steph Guedj. She started four days ago. She’s a psychologist by day and now a bike mechanic as well.

“I’ve always wanted to learn more about bike repair and maintenance,” she says. “And so I just happened to come in last weekend and saw that they were looking for bike mechanics, and I said, I don’t have very much experience. But I would love to learn that I can do attitude.”

Another recent hire: Jesse Leibovitch. He’s a freshman business major at UMD, learning more than just how to fix broken bikes.

“Looking at Marden and just like the whole business structure, I can kind of like, correlate that and like, really see how the businesses run,” he says. “Someday I want to end up like opening a business, whether it’s a franchise, or just like a shop like this. I just think it’d be fun, because you’re helping people and making the world a better place.”

Timen took over the store in October from Larry Black, who owned the shop for decades.

“Larry is kind of like a fly by the seat of your pants kind of guy,” says junior mechanical engineering major Brandon Hill, who worked for Black for about a year out in Mount Airy.

When Hill had a question about how to repair a bike in Mount Airy, he’d ask Black. Now, he asks Phil Eide, the resident Google for bikes. He’s been repairing bikes since 1982. 

“Modern is evil. What works good for the Wright Brothers works good for us,” he tells me.

“It’s true!” he adds when I start laughing.

His hands are black from all the grease.

“What’s the difference between the new stuff and the old stuff?” I ask.

“The new stuff, you know, you get a lot of carbon and everything like that. It’s light, it’s comfortable in everything, but you can’t do much with it,” he tells me. “And they can break you know, you get in a wreck and they crack and you have to throw them away, that kind of thing. The more gears you have, the more picky they are to keep them all running good and everything.”

Timen got his start selling bikes in a Crofton warehouse and shipping them out to customers. He sold his own brand of bikes called Armden — a play on his name. 

“People like to have something or low reliable and good quality but also good price. So this is the bike for that kind of demographic,” Timen says.

Those bikes are filling a niche.

“Cannondale and Trek are not really producing a whole lot of their budgets talk anymore,” Hill says.

“They’ve been focusing exclusively on the upper end,” he adds. “So their budget bikes have been like lagging behind in terms of supply and iteration, whereas our bikes are getting better and better. And I mean, they’re here they’re available, you can actually buy these and put your hands on them, which is not something you can say about Trek or Cannondale right now.”

Timen is a Ughyr Muslim, born and raised in China. Nowadays, human rights groups say China is trying to destroy the Uyghur culture by forcibly sterilizing women, separating children from their parents, and even rounding them up into “counter-extremism centers.” It weighs heavy on Timen.

“It’s hard, man, you live here in freedom, like you don’t worry about like, police coming and knocking on your door and stuff like that,” he says.

But he says he tries to keep a positive outlook and work hard. That way, he says, he might be able to help the people suffering back home.