Way back in 1981, when mountain bikes were modified single-speed cruisers, owner Chaz Romalis and a few of his hard-core cronies opened up a little bike shop in Deep Cove. Located on the Pacific Ocean’s pristine Indian Arm, at the far eastern edge of North Vancouver, British Columbia, the shop was just a front at first - an excuse so Chaz and his buddies could tell their parents they actually had jobs. Today the Cove is a larger extension of that original reality and an integral part of the North Shore scene. Hundreds of high-grade bikes hangin’ from the ceiling. Local rippers bustin’ airs in the parking lot. Chaz’s dogs Gramps and Bronx chillin’ in the corner, blown after a morning epic of R & D. Riding culture in its thickest state.

From rats to riches
Chaz Romalis turned his passion for rippin' into a successful mountain-bike business

Doug Ward
Vancouver Sun


Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Mountain bike pioneer Chaz Romalis once lived in his Cove Bike Shop, sharing space with rats who grew huge from chowing down on the shop's tasty selection of Power bars.

"Whenever I had a girl over and she went to use the washroom, she'd scream when she saw a rat, eh?

"I lived in the store for six years. People thought I was crazy because there were these rats running around.

"I put in a little shower and a little stove. It was pretty cosy. Then when things got better, I got a big trailer. I put it next door and I carved a big hole in the store wall so I could just walk into the trailer.

"It was pretty wild, eh?"

Romalis, 42, has had a wild ride -- "living the life," as he is wont to say -- since 1980, when he and two of his high school buddies, Doug (Dewey) Lafavor and Ashley (Nummers) Walker, scrounged $7,000 to start Canada's first all-mountain-bike store.

The Deep Cove Bike Store, renamed Cove Bike Shop in the 1990s, is legendary because of its big-time influence on the North Shore's big-air mountain-bike culture. Cove Bike Shop is to the hard core on the Shore what the Bowery bar CBGB's was to the New York punk scene: seminal.

Riders gravitate toward the Cove and not just because of its line of high-end bikes, tailor-made for the North Shore's wild-and-crazy terrain, or because of the Cove's famous skull-head logo.

They also come because the Cove has credibility. It was there at the beginning. The store sold some of the first mountain bikes in Canada, cruisers that Romalis and his mates personally trucked back from California in 1980.

Twenty-two years later, the Cove shop has a free-radical vibe that captures the outlaw spirit of the sport, a spirit personified by Romalis, with his long hair, his dogs Bronx and Gramps, his stoner/slacker charm, his habit of going water skiing at lunch or spending the morning ripping his bike down Mount Seymour.

Romalis has an inimitable style of speaking, a cross between the hoser-speak of Bob and Doug McKenzie and the far-out argot of California surfer dudes.

"The guy is so damned cool," said Johnny Smoke, a long-time employee at the store. "He has a lot of charisma. Chaz is kind of hippie-looking, a little bit out there and very easy to talk to. This has really helped market the store over the years."

Romalis himself no longer sleeps in the shop with the rats. In 1996, he bought a groovy three-storey beach house just up the road from the store, with a fabulous view of Deep Cove and Indian Arm. He also owns a house behind the store, where three of his employees live, "so they won't be late for work."

He's the sole owner of the store, which is jammed with state-of-the art bikes, with price tags as high as $5,000.

Romalis said the Cove Bike Shop, along with its bike-manufacturing arm, should record gross sales this year of more than $5 million.

He is flush enough he can afford to live six months of the year in Mexico. "I'm in the Cove until November, when the weather gets lousy. Then I head down to Puerto Vallarta. Geez, it's fun down there. A little mucho-mucho R and D, eh? It's the best."

Romalis "oversees" the store as opposed to running it, which is the job of the store's full-time manager. This allows him to set his work schedule, which always includes time for epic rippin' down the trails or chillin' in the Cove. "I'm doing what I always wanted to do when I was a kid. Now I'm getting paid for it."

Romalis was raised in Deep Cove, with his future business partners Lafavor and Walker. As kids, they were avid skateboarders and road bike riders. Romalis won the national skateboarding championships in 1979 when he was 18. Once he had the jones (the bug) for mountain bikes, the skateboard was history.

The fatal shift happened this way. Romalis had a broken ankle, so couldn't ride his road bike. He borrowed his mom's three-speed beach cruiser.

"I stole my mom's bike out of the garage and rode down a trail to get to Myrtle Park, and I thought, 'This is so much fun, riding off road.'

"I thrashed her bike, and I thrashed my dad's bike, and I thrashed my sister's bike. I'd ride them up Mount Seymour and come down the roughest trails, and it was just ridiculous. You'd ruin a bike every ride.

"So we began to [break] trails on old pieces of junk. Just having a blast, eh?"

The carnage prompted Romalis to look for stronger frames and tougher rims.

He and his buddies began buying parts from Bellingham and California and building their bikes. People would laugh at his new-fangled bikes with the big rims and weird frames, but he didn't care.

At about the same time, other roadies in northern California were making a similar shift into off-road cycling, riding gear-less clunkers that were up to 40 years old and weighing up to 23 kg.

The riders began modifying these bikes in their back yards -- a front brake here, a seat-post quick release there -- and eventually the modern mountain bike was invented, along with a new sport and lifestyle.

In Deep Cove, Romalis and his pals were similarly building cruiser-style bikes. Then something revelatory happened during a trip to Osoyoos. A guy from Marin County, outside San Francisco, rode into town with a genuine hand-made mountain bike.

Romalis and his cronies were blown away. They'd seen the future. Lafavor flew to San Francisco for some reconnaissance. He spent a week there, riding down Mount Tamalpais, and returned to Deep Cove with a $750 chrome-plated cruiser.

"Doug was the talk of the walk with that machine," said Romalis. The Deep Cove boys tried to interest some local bike shops in mountain bikes, which in those prehistoric times were modified single-speed cruisers.

There was little interest in what the bike industry believed would be a fad. The road bike was still king, so Romalis and his friends decided to open their shop in Deep Cove.

"We started it partly because our parents were always saying: 'Come on, you bunch of bums. Do something with your life.'

"Having the store was also a good excuse to drive to California six times a year to pick up bike frames. It was a great lifestyle and easy living, although it's easier now."

Other stores in B.C. -- including West Point Cycles -- began to sell some of the new style of bikes. (West Point owner Jacob Heilbron would later establish Rocky Mountain Bikes, and begin supplying mountain bikes across Canada.)

Lafavor and Walker quit their food-services jobs at Vancouver General Hospital to work full-time at the bike shop. Romalis dropped out of college.

"I'm in second-year science, eh, trying to be an engineer or a doctor. I'm looking at all these dorks in the class with glasses on, and I'm thinking, 'This is a different breed of people. I'm bailin.' "

Through the '80s, the shop just broke even. Lafavor and Walker eventually quit and joined other mountain-bike manufacturing companies. Then in the '90s, the mountain bike industry took off, especially on the North Shore, where riders were more than happy to buy bikes more expensive than their cars so they could ride the gnarly terrain on Mount Seymour, Cypress Mountain and Grouse Mountain.

In 1995, Romalis decided the company had to begin producing its brand of bikes. The first design was called the Hummer. Romalis developed the advertising line: "Don't let summers be a bummer, get a Hummer."

The bikes are produced in a factory in Surrey and sent to dealers and shops in Europe and North America, bringing in sales figures in the multi-millions.

That's not bad coin for a guy who looks more like a tree-planter than a successful entrepreneur.

"He doesn't come across as a businessman," said Smoke. "Sometimes he doesn't even seem like he's all there.

"But Chaz has natural knack for the market. He's smart with numbers and that's caught a lot of people off guard."

Smoke has worked at the Cove bike shop off and on for 13 years, and "I've never seen anything less than double-digit growth every year."

Over the years, it's been Romalis who's kept the shop's drive-chain spinning.

"Chaz has toughed it out. This place is his heart and soul," Smoke said.

© Copyright 2002 Vancouver Sun


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