My love affair with bicycles began in the mid-1960s, while riding the scenic roads of Northern California with the then-new Santa Rosa Cycling Club, where my father served as Vice-President. Over the years, I've cycle toured all over the USA, Canada, Mexico and Europe. My wife and partner Camille Armstrong now call Santa Rosa, California our home. We created BikePartners.net Folding Bike shop to serve the bicycle touring, traveling, commuting, recreation, education, and family community.
November 2024, we converted to a mobile showroom business. We provide sales services to our customers conveniently and efficiently.
We are a dealer for the following bicycle brands:
BikePartners.net promotes the use of bicycles for daily transportation through the sale of compact folding bicycles and recumbent trikes. We employ a mobile business model to bring bicycles to the customer at the place of their choosing.
We live in a world where transportation is simple, safe, affordable, and healthful. We have public facilities and transportation systems that are robust, bicycle friendly and accommodating. Bicycles are our primary solution for travel, and they are optimized for efficiency, comfort, transportability, and security.
We believe that bicycles should be functional and fun. That's why we sell exclusively bicycles that fold or pack for transport. No more schlepping cardboard shipping boxes across the airport on your cycling adventures! No more bumper racks or roof racks. No more bikes stolen from the bike rack. Just you and your bike. Anytime, anywhere. Every day.
To be of service
Geoffrey Smith and Camille Armstrong, a happily married couple, co-own BikePartners.net Folding Bike Shop.
Geoffrey co-managed the campus bike shop at UCSD, La Jolla, CA in the 1970s, where he majored in Biology but really learned mostly about bicycles and customer service. His love affair with bicycle retail has haunted him for the ensuing decades, which led to the founding of BikePartners.net Folding Bike Shop in 2011 in his hometown of Santa Rosa, California. (Geoffrey had a brief 25-year career in software development, and another 18-year career in environmental non-profit management and public lands advocacy, in-between.)
Geoffrey is the "I" in all sentences that use the "I" pronoun.
Geoffrey's LinkedIn profile
Camille is a life-long bicyclist, but honestly prefers a nice hike in the chaparral or forest to a bicycle ride in traffic. She has degrees in piano performance and dance from the University of Redlands, and worked as a teacher to nearly 1,000 children in Kindergarten through 4th grade public school. Camille spreads the gospel of folding bicycles everywhere she goes, and is the nicest of the two co-owners. People love her, including most of all her co-owner.
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BikePartners.net started as a mobile rental service in Santa Rosa featuring Bike Friday folding bikes. We operated out of a Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia which served as our office and showroom. Our starting fleet consisted of 4 Bike Friday folding bikes and a Bike Friday Tandem Two'sDay. We pulled a trailer when business picked up, but the VW wasn't very happy about that.
Reponding to customer interest in purchasing our bicycles and accessories, we sublet commercial space at 111 5th Street, in the Historic Railroad Square commercial district of Santa Rosa, right on the 'SMART' train railway and SMART Multi-use bicycle and pedestrian Pathway. We were privileged to share this space with Sycip Designs, maker of custom bicycle frames. We added Montague folding bikes to our sales offerings, to provide a full-size option for our customers.
Bursting at the seems, we moved around the corner to a commercial storefront at 512 Wilson Street. Here we expanded our accessory lines, and were able to provide a full retail experience for our customers. We added Tern and Brompton folding bicycles, and TerraTrike recumbent trikes to our lineup.
Having (barely) survived the boom and bust of the COVID epidemic, and owing to challenging retail conditions in our locale, we made a leap of faith. We sunsetted our popular rental program, and changed back to a mobile sales business model, leveraging the portable and compact nature of our folding bikes. Now with a larger van (Sprinter of course), we come to where our customers are for their purchase needs, with a number of bikes on board to try out. It works well! Customers appreciate the convenience of meeting at a place of their choosing, and test riding on familiar routes. We like the variety of experiences that we encounter with our mobile showroom!
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Since our first rental customer in 2011, we've put hundreds of butts on bikes. We like to think that we have made the world a little more sustainable, and a lot more fun! Thank you!
Visit our web site, BikePartners.net, for more information.
Thanks for visiting!
Geoffrey + Camille