Urban utility bicycles

Blue Bucket bikes are almost gone!

Hi Friends, just a quick note – we’re running low on the Blue Bucket bikes, we have less than 10 left and won’t get more until next March. If you’re thinking about a MADSEN and want a blue, now might be the time to act.

Classic Dutch Cargo Bike Upgrade Package

Have you seen our Classic Dutch upgrade package yet? This upgrade includes a Brooks B67 Leather Honey-colored Saddle, Nitto Albatross swept back handle bars, and cork grips. This is truly a comfortable, classic Dutch ride. Buy a cream MADSEN and get the upgrade for free ($216 value). Leave the assembly up to us! Your bike will be shipped with the upgrade installed, ready to ride right out of the box. Perfect for a fall ride on those leaf-covered streets. Quantities limited.

Not just quality of life, an entirely different kind of life

We found this story pretty inspiring and thought you might too. Jesse is a school teacher, and dad who uses his MADSEN like few others. He rides it to work (school) every day, carries his children home from school with it every day and shops at Costco and Home Depot with it.

Jesse never liked driving a car. It made him feel stressed out, impatient and bored — just trying to get there and being obstructed by all the other motorists just trying to get there. He’s discovered that biking to work not only increases his enjoyment of the journey, it actually saves him time!

“No matter what, I never got out of the house in less than an hour,” he says of when he used to drive to work. Then he had to sit in traffic in his car. Now he gets up, makes coffee, loads the bike, fills the travel mug and is out the door in 15 minutes. It takes him 25 minutes to get to work and 15 minutes to shower, shave and change. So, “in less time than it used to take me to get out the door, I’ve had my coffee, a good workout, a shower and I’m at work and feeling great!”

He’s getting quality time with his daughters from the moment he gets off work and he has the freedom and satisfaction of not being dependent on a car with all its associated stresses. That is a different kind of life.

Read the whole inspiring story here.

Thanks Jess and Angie! You remind us why we created the MADSEN.

Congratulations Bernadette - you're our final winnner!

Friends - that was a blast. Six weeks, six bikes and a whole lot of amazing support and enthusiasm from you, for which we're very grateful. We'll be launching some fun initiatives heading into the holiday season and we hope you'll stay tuned and continue to lend your support.

Our final winner could not have been more excited. With her permission I'm going to share the email exchange we had yesterday as I worked to track her down. This was fun and I thought you might might appreciate it too.

First, her site was a blogger blog. Blogger blogs don't give readers a way to contact the author. I find this annoying, but I wasn't going to give up until I tracked her down! About an hour into following links, doing some searching and digging I found an email address that might be connected to her, and I sent this message:

"Hi I’m from MADSEN Cycles and I’m trying to reach Bernadette Noll. Might this be the right email address?"

Several hours passed. I finally stepped out for dinner. When I returned my email box had a series of messages.

First one was this:

Oh please tell me you're looking for me because I won this week's bike!!! Oh please oh please! I mean I love my late 1960s Schwinn with the makeshift basket on the back that I haul groceries in for my four kiddos but COME ON!!! Everyone who knows me says I belong on one of your bikes!!!

Can you tell I'm excited?

Then another:

I know I have 24 hours to contact you back but I am paranoid I'll somehow miss it! So, just to make sure, here's my home email as well.

And finally

Okay. It's now 10:15 pm here. You can find me on Facebook already freaking out about the possibility of winning one of your bikes. And soon I will go to bed not knowing for sure whether I won one of your bikes or not. It's hard to sleep when you're so excited!! but I'm going to try because the alarm will ring at 6:20 whether I won a bike or not and I'll be checking my email quite frequently in the wee hours of the morn. Why can't you be east of us so I know you'd be up before me?? Oh well. If you need to call me you can at xxxxxxxxx.

Until tomorrow. I bid you goodnight while I dream of riding the kids to school in my brand new Madsen bike with the Slow Family Living sticker on the back.

I'm pleased to report that at 10:51pm I was finally able to connect with Bernadette and deliver the good news. After which she promptly choked up. She'll soon be the proud new owner of a MADSEN cycle and is already plotting ways to transport her kids around in it. To those who are disappointed about not winning, hopefully you can take some comfort in knowing that it went to a good home.

Another successful year at Interbike!

  

The booth was a hit. The crowds came to see the MADSENs and Jared's hand-made cobble-stone floor. It was great to make new friends and sign up new dealers. We'll be shipping out a bunch of bikes this week. Thanks to all the die-hard cargo bike enthusiasts that took the time to come by and see us.

Our congratulations to Matthew, this week's winner of a MADSEN!

Matthew, lives in Portland OR and fancies showing up for a stodgy business meeting with one suit leg pulled up and a helmet under his arm. He currently hauls his two kids to school with a bike trailer and is pretty excited about upgrading to a MADSEN. He has a passion for biking, and even met part of the MADSEN team at Interbike (see our Twitter feed for some photos from that show).

Matthew is our next-to-the-last winner of a MADSEN. It's been a ridiculously fun ride, but next week will be our final drawing. This drawing will be made from the top 100 sources of traffic to our site over the last couple months.

We're extremely grateful to all of you for "joining the movement" with us. We wish we could have awarded a bike to all you crazy passionate followers. Your support and interest is what keeps us going. We look forward to bringing you exciting developments here on the blog, our Twitter feed, and our email list. Thanks again everyone for playing along. Stay tuned for next week's drawing.

Congratulations to Phillip, this week's bike winner!

Phillip is no stranger to biking, he races mountain bikes in the summer and has recently taken up cyclo-cross racing. He's an avid biker, but he entered the MADSEN contest because he needed a commuter bike to replace his old one which he crashed. To his surprise, and our pleasure, he's this week's winner! Our sincere congratulations to him.

To those disappointed about not winning - stay tuned, in 7 days, we'll be back at it again!

Just a quick note to those of you who may not be aware: there's a lot going on with our Twitter account. I usually give a blow-by-blow report of the drawings each week, plus we're at  the Interbike show in Las Vegas this week and yesterday we posted several photos and some videos of us in action setting up our booth at the show. If that's of interest to you, we hope you'll check it out.

Congratulations to Rob, this week's winner!

Rob's already hatching plans to take it camping. He opted for the rack model and is already imagining how he'll extend and adapt it to suit his cargo haulin' needs. He's our first male winner, and for those of you in the Eastern US feeling slighted after the last two drawings, he's from Michigan!

Like most of our winners, he was a little shocked and speechless for a while, but soon regained composure and before too long he'll have a shiny new bike, delivered fully assembled right to his front door. Our sincere congratulations to Rob, we hope he enjoys his new ride.

Stay tuned -- we've gotten more efficient about these drawings, and in 7 more days, You could be the winner. If you're new - make sure you review our contest page for all the details.

Congratulations to Beth, this week's bike winner!

So even before MADSEN came along, Beth believed in the value of biking, and other eco-friendly (and healthy) lifestyle decisions. Her blog reveals her passion and she's reaching even more with her Twitter account.

We're excited for Beth, in a short time she'll get a big ol' box from MADSEN Cycles with her bike fully tuned and assembled inside. She'll just slide the bike out of the back of the box, cut a few straps and ride off.

Thanks to all of you who are participating in our contest and "joining the movement" with us. Stay tuned for next week's drawing where one more lucky duck will win their very own MADSEN Cycle.

A weekly need for patience sure seems like a lot

Doesn't it? Well we hope this week's drawing will go smoother than last week's, but beg your patience in advance as we process all the eligible participants, draw, verify and award the winner. We'll keep you posted here!