R.E. Load makes custom homemade messenger bags, and regardless of the fact that they work in what could be described as a sewing factory we’ve always been sort of jealous of the people that work for R.E. Load. They get massive street cred just for working at the coolest company in town, they get to help organize one of the most fun annual activities in Philadelphia (R.E. Load’s April Fool’s Race, an “alleycat”), they don’t go into work until 10 (used to be 11), if they need a day off they can have it, and they have a really awesome boss who seems more like a friend. In short, R.E. Load sounds like the business that dreams are made of, a way for capitalism to be friendly.

We interviewed the man half behind the dream, Roland Burns (his partner Ellie, the “E” in R.E. Load runs R.E. Load West) and sought to discover if R.E. Load could continue to live up to our fantastical description of it in the face of more employees, more sales and just plain more. Time will be the true indicator of this young company’s success, but Roland has his head in the right place, with an eye to business remaining fun, creative, and even community-based. In the course of our discussion we kind of found out what an alleycat was, conversed about “accidently” starting a word-of-mouth business, while mulling over the problems of a growing enterprise and the recent popularity of bike culture.

All the bikes at the April Fool’s Alleycat after party:

THE BIGGEST ALLEYCAT EVER

The Vulture: I heard this year’s April Fool’s Alleycat was a lot bigger than the ones held on previous years. . . and that you weren’t even prepared for the amount of people who showed up?

Roland Burns: No. We had no idea. This is our seventh year and it’s been something that has been built to get bigger every year. The first year we didn’t even invite out-of-towners or anything because we wanted to make sure we could pull it off. Every year it’s gotten bigger, last year there were about 186 people.

To give some perspective, I would call an alleycat a basic level of messenger race, and then there’s championship events like Messenger World Championships and the North American Cycle Courier Championships [NACCCs] which we just had here in September. Those are the biggest races of the year, the World’s was in Australia this year and they got roughly three hundred or so people. The NACCCs got something like four hundred. Considering those are the big races, I thought ours would cap off at 186, but I went ahead and made enough [manifests, spoke cards, and t-shirts] for about 250 people, just to be safe. . . but it was just completely out of hand. Which is awesome, but I felt really bad and a little embarrassed that we weren’t ready.

V: But you guys didn’t even advertise, right?

R: We put stuff on our blog and on our site. Other than that it’s completely word-of-mouth. There’s also a big messenger events website, which was started by a guy named Joel in San Francisco a long time ago. It’s messengers.org, and it has listings of all the events all over the world.

In terms of our resources; you never want to order a lot of it and have a lot of t-shirts left over, or print too much stuff out. I thought what we had would be alright but obviously that day. . . I kept looking around the corner and the line never went down. . .

V: What did you do when you ran out?

R: This is a R.E. Load event and something that really represents us. We have a lot of people who come in from out of town just to race, I didn’t want to leave anybody hanging who would be like “Hey! I came from Baltimore to race in this.”

I decided to let everybody who was past the point where they could get a t-shirt and spoke card to race for free. We’ve always charged five dollars, which is based on. . .

V: That might as well be free anyways.

R: Pretty much. We give racers four color shirts and a spoke card and beer at the after-party. We want it to be something fun and that people will come out for. It’s a lot of promotion for us, so we just try to cover our costs. . .

But when we ran out, I thought the only thing to do was to let people race for free, and I told a lot of people that they could ride with me to Kinkos once the race started so we could print off some more manifests. We were lucky because people group up into teams anyways and decided to share manifests. A lot of people don’t care the least bit about winning or trying to win.

THE WINNER OF DEAD LAST

V: Yeah. Can you explain the reasoning behind a prize for DFL [Dead Freaking Last]?

R: I can’t say this with any exact authority but I think it’s that people want to celebrate the person that’s amazingly fast. . . most messenger races until recently would literally be: go to point a, go to point b, however many points there are, go to the finish. There was no choice of route, and you could literally judge who completed the course the fastest. People want to celebrate that, but then they also want to celebrate the person who took their time and comes in with a sandwich in their hand, or just had the most fun.

There are also prizes for “most fun person”. I think that’s something that goes hand in hand with the culture, it is about fun, and it’s about sharing your city with other people who have the same general common experience.

In a lot of cases you don’t want it to be so serious. It’s really based off my personal experience as a messenger, I wasn’t the fastest, and races where you had to do zany stuff, that was more of a rolling party then just “ride with these people and I hope I can keep up with them and I can’t so now I’m lost in the middle of Boston.” I try to keep the race simple and accessible, I don’t want to alienate the commuter-biker who rides their three-speed to and from work. I don’t want anyone to be intimidated. I want people to have fun and race.

JUST WHAT, EXACTLY, IS AN ALLEYCAT???!!

V: What, in your own words, is an Alleycat?

R:That’s a big debate on messenger lists, believe it or not. . . we’re trying to decide a definition for Wikipedia. In my own words I would say it’s a loosely organized race that is not really sanctioned and that it’s on an open-course with traffic. That’s as far as I can go.

V: Can you date the start of Alleycats to within your life-time?

R: It’s within our life-time. I don’t know specifically well enough to really say, but they were definitely going on. . .I started messengering in 1997 and they were going on in a much smaller scale at that point. I could probably find out. . . online.

I think they’ve been going on for awhile and that they probably started in New York or SF, which are the two biggest places with messengers. But it’s definitely a fairly new phenomenon in terms of the level and number of alleycats that go on. I mean, there’s something somewhere every week these days. It’s grown a lot.

V: Do you see what’s happened with RELoad as a metaphor for what’s happened to bike culture in the last couple of years?

R: Yeah, I guess so. We happened to start at a time, when I guess, number one, bike messenger bags were becoming more popular in terms of fashion and general use aside from bikes. Messengers themselves have become, I guess, quote unquote, more popular as a cultural icon. There are books on messenger style now.

That ties in with us because we [Roland and Ellie] were messengers, and I think we’ve set a standard. I hope this isn’t reaching too far, but I think we’ve helped to open up an ability to express yourself more. Also more people are interested in more performance style track-bikes and that fits in with what we do.

FUNCTIONAL ART (AND MUSIC)

V: Why were you so interested in making a highly functional but expressive bag?

R: It’s honestly, it was just something I needed. . .I met my business partner, Ellie, and I had a bag that I hated. It was all black and falling apart. Her mom was a seamstress, and I asked her if she could help me fix that bag up. We started shopping and then we decided to make a bag from scratch.

V: So, wait, you didn’t know how to sew or anything?

R: No. The first bag I made for myself was the first thing I ever sewed. My dad, actually, still has it. . . it’s pretty awful. To this day everything is just sort of based on the way we would want to ride if we were our customers. Why shouldn’t you be able to tell a messenger from eight blocks away by the way their bike or bag looks?

The companies that existed then [before R.E. Load], there were good things about each of them, a strap here or a pocket there, but there wasn’t something that was exactly what we wanted. The main benefit that we had was that we’re the creators and users. We tested out all our first mistakes on ourselves.

When we started we didn’t plan to make stuff and sell it. We made stuff for ourselves and people thought it was cool. People started asking us to make them a bag.

V: What about your own bags, now? The one’s you sew, they look like they’re starting to turn into an art project. . .

R: Yeah. I have the ability now, which is one of the things I’m happiest about, I can make what I want. I don’t have to worry about making a bag for someone. I don’t get to make nearly as much stuff as I want too, but I do have the ability, if I think of something, to take the time out to make it.

I just started to become way more of a computer nerd because of starting so many things for the store, and I was reading a computer magazine. . . I’ve always known just enough about Photoshop to get by, resize this or magic wand this. I can do what we need to do to translate images to a bag but I started reading more into it, and I read this article about how to break down a photo. That’s what I’ve been into lately and also I’ve always been really into music.

I think about it all the time, if I didn’t run this store I’d DJ constantly.

V: Yeah. What’s your DJ name?

R: I go by Mr. Ill, but it comes in waves. . . at times I’ll DJ a lot, but lately I haven’t been doing much, which I’ve been kind of bummed about.

But I’m always seeking out new music, even if it’s only for myself. Music has been one of the biggest influences in my life so I wanted to translate that into a series of bags, which I kind of just started thinking about. James Brown passed away and that was the first bag that I did. I’m making tribute bags to all these people that I love and I’m excited about it.

V: They look good so far.

THE BUSINESS THAT NEVER STARTED BUT EXISTS

V: So, when did RELoad become a business?

R: We officially started the business in ‘98, but before that if people wanted one [a bag], we’d ask them to pay us for the materials first and then we’d get them, make a bag, and then they’d pay us for the work. We eventually got one of the biggest, I guess, “names” in messengers, the first person to ride a track bike and work in Philly, wanted a bag from us, and it went from there. Messengers go in and out of places everyday, they go all over the city, and if they are wearing a noticeable bag people see it.

We never put any money into it, we never really made a decision. We never said “okay, now let’s take out $5,000 and start a company” we just kept making stuff and it just kept growing.

We blew up our old machine almost immediately, which was actually my roommates. . .

V: It wasn’t an industrial machine?

R: It was just a sucky home machine. Then we found a sucky industrial machine at this place that was basically a home machine that was made of metal instead of plastic. We each put in $250 towards that, just like, “whatever, we’ll see”. It broke every two months and it would cost us $100 to fix, but we rolled with it for eight months and then finally got a real machine, which is still in the store now. It’s the first machine, which I love.

TEXT BOOK WORD-OF-MOUTH

V: You guys have always done all your own advertising, do you have an art background?

R: No, I’m actually an engineer. I went to Drexel. I’m a materials engineer.

We started in my kitchen, then Ellie moved to a warehouse and we rented one of the rooms there for REload. That took us through 2000, then I meet a bunch of the people from 1026 and we moved into 1026. We were there for three years. That, I mean, anyone around us could do anything as far as screen-printing. Jeff Weisner did our catalog. . . we were just incredibly lucky.

Even to this day I still kind of miss that. It was an awesome place to be. Our stuff would always get messed up by someone screen-printing on our table, but whatever. We’ve just been lucky. My sister designed our website, basically for nothing, because she wanted to build her portfolio. Pretty lucky.

GROWING PAINS, OR, WHEN YOU START ACTING LIKE YOUR DAD. . .

R: As a company we’re trying to branch into another direction, which is product lines, because in the past we’ve almost been completely custom. We’re working on developing a middle ground between completely custom and already made. I actually think a lot of people have been overwhelmed by how many choices there are to make.

V: So you need, like, tattoo flash?

R: Yeah! One of the most common questions we get is “Do you have a book of what you offer for custom?” For some people they love it, they know exactly what they want if they can have anything in the world but other people can’t visualize that way.

V: Bottom line. . . How big will you let the company get? What lines won’t you cross?

R: Yeah. It’s more about what I would never do, we learned early on that we never want to have anything that’s made out-of-house. We never want to go the “made in China” route or anything like that. One of the down sides of being able to grow to a level, even right now we have so many orders and so many things to do and make that there are different levels of employees with different skills. . .

Our main concentration is always going to be a completely custom bag but we’re starting to lose the ability to do certain things. For instance, Mac makes laptops in specific sizes but PCs don’t and that used to be okay, we’d just have people send us the dimensions of their PC. Now we have so many orders and so many different skill-levels in employees that that’s no longer a reasonable

Ro’s blog

R.E.Load