Yesterday was an interesting day. It started very early for me. An hour and a half drive to an 8am tour of the huge Tesla factory in Fremont, CA. We spent the morning looking at state of the art automation and the first steps toward humanoid robots in the workplace. In the shell of an old Pontiac facility, the future now was.
On my long drive home, I was thinking about this in the context of the recent and sudden news that Paragon Machine Works has closed its doors and will begin selling off stock and assets.
This is tragic but maybe obvious. Paragon represented a day gone by that we fondly remember. They made things. Things that we will come to covet. They shaped what we put in our hands, now and during every ride. They did this using the most rudimentary of robot, the 3-axis CNC machine or CNC lathe.
Paragon has been around since the birth of modern bicycle manufacturing and mountain biking. Mark made many of the parts seen on the primordial mountain bike and almost anything made of titanium. The support that he provided to generations of frame builders is incalculable. Most frame builders could not have done what they did without him. These are not hundreds of builders but thousands. Maybe tens of thousands of them in the last 43 years. Few can make a claim to have had more of an impact on what we do.
I pulled off the 580 at Marina Boulevard in Richmond California. Something that I’ve done countless times in the past. I decided to stop by Paragon one last time before the lights went off for good.
I park outside the gate and walk into the compound. This is what I want to remember. The roll-up door open. Machines whirring. Plants growing in the garden. I’m trying to soak it all in. Then….
“Hey there, sir!”
It was Mark. Even as his son Calvin has been running the operation for the past few years and Mark and Donna had moved to Petaluma, here was Mark. He’s one of the more hard working dudes that I’ve known and I’ve known a few. This is where we think of Mark, at Paragon, working.
I hadn’t expected this. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to walk inside the building. Now, I’m talking with Mark on my last visit to his shop. It choked me up.
We sit down on some lawn chairs outside the shop and talk about ourselves, our history, the state of things. We talk about the difficult decision to close the shop. We also talk about the incredible response that has come from the bicycle world regarding this news. Few are left unaffected.
I was a Fat City Cycles kid. I got my start in 1990 or so in Somerville, MA. This was in a tin shack in an obscure ally called Olive Square. It was right next to the train tracks and rugged AF. The parking lot was dirt and on the other side in the basement of another building was Merlin Metalworks. This was the hub of the bicycle universe at the time and we were building some of the finest bicycles that had ever been devised.
Mark Norstad, from some place in California, was already the go-to guy for anything CNC machined but especially for titanium. We were using his parts. Merlin was using his parts. Everybody else was using his parts. Decades pass. I’m at a NAHBS event about fifteen years ago. I joke that it should be called the Paragon and Spectrum show because every bike in the arena is covered with parts produced at Paragon and painted (powder) at Spectrum. This was probably the peak.
Over time, young blood started making changes. More niche and specific batches of parts were showing up on bikes that weren’t designed or produced by Paragon. This was infesting the ecosystem. It got more difficult to survive as a custom frame builder. Tariffs, COVID, generational changes, and bicycle advancements pushed against the company hard. At the highest end, additive manufacturing has taken over. At the bottom, cheap import parts.
We’ve seen many companies go extinct over the years in this industry. It took a long time to get to Paragon. It finally came for the foundation species.
This is very sad. Many people and companies are devastated about this loss for many reasons. I’m a bit more insulated than others by it, but not emotionally.
I’ll share some older posts:
Mark Norstad, NAHBS 2017
http://www.peterverdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Mark-Norstad.mp3
Back in 2017, I worked with Paul Fitzgerald to get Mark inducted into the Mountain Biking Hall of Fame. I produced this post to help sell his candidacy. It’s a detailed look at what he meant to us. This was a success and Mark is now a member of that special guild.
In 2024, Mark officially retired from leadership at Paragon. His son, Calvin, took over. I did an interview with him about this.