Made in SF, Except When It’s Not

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Anyone can get a tour of Rickshaw Bags, says Mark Dwight. He started the company, in 2007, to promote the business of making things in a town that doesn’t make much anymore.

On a recent Thursday morning, the six-person tour was full of people drawn by the dream of making things themselves. This may have had something to do with its being part of a week of festivities organized by the local nonprofit SFMADE, which Dwight also founded.

“Is it expensive to keep this business local?” Justin Westrum asks Dwight. The environmental consultant is here because he wants to make what he calls “high-visibility bike apparel.” “Something that is fashionable, safe and functional,” he adds. “Something that doesn’t let you look like a fool.”

“For sure there are too many taxes,” says Dwight. “But San Francisco’s unique sense of style and the fact that the item is made or assembled here furnishes a soul of the final product. I could have moved the production in the Bay Area, paying less. But I wanted to live in San Francisco. Not in Fremont. No offense.”

“I thought places like this disappeared from the city,” says Terence Shek, a blogger and cultural reporter. “I’m very surprised. I know many Californian brands, but almost all moved their production somewhere else.”

“We’re able to do this,” says Dwight, “because so far we’re not interested in pushing the brand too much.” The company that Dwight sold to a group of investors in 2005, Timbuk2, is sold in chain stores around the country. Dwight prefers to do business with what he describes as “single-door shops.” In the Mission District, that’s shops like Mission Bicycle, Valencia Cyclery, Freewheel Bike Shop, Pedal Revolution and Arkay Workshop.

The factory gets about a hundred customers a week at its doorstep, looking for customized items. As Dwight tells the tour group, “You guys can bring your grandmother’s couch, we’ll make a bag out of it.”

This time around, selling as many bags as possible is not the end goal, says Dwight. “If I can satisfy my customer’s requests, craft a quality product and give a salary to everybody of my staff, the mission is accomplished.”

“Are any of the bags made in China?” asks Steven Liu, another tour participant. Liu works for Cisco’s mobile web department. He’s here on behalf of his sister, another aspiring bag manufacturer.

“We’re not able to produce the commuter laptop bag here,” says Dwight. “So we are in touch with a Chinese factory. However, in order to minimize the transportation’s impact on the environment, we assemble them here. In this way, we can order more bags and minimize the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere.”

Again, the experience of Timbuk2 is recalled. The company once made all of its products in San Francisco but began outsourcing sewing to China after Dwight took the helm in 2002. It continues to manufacture its custom bags at its headquarters at 20th and Shotwell.

In the middle of the factory, right next to the reserved bike parking for the company’s employees, 10 women, all Chinese, sew Rickshaw products: bags, sleeves for iPads and MacBooks. These women are the company’s manufacturing base. It takes about 20 minutes to sew a single messenger bag, says Dwight.

Recently, a Google order of more than 15,000 computer sleeves pushed the whole staff to work days, nights and weekends. “We’re not used to such big orders,” Dwight says. “We consider ourselves a small business. But I think this is the reason why [companies like] Google and Firefox chose us as partners. We’re not big. We offer a high degree of customizability. And we have a story to tell: How to run a business today in San Francisco.”