Upstart bicycle brand Primos Cycles has found a home in Portland. Since launching just over three months ago, the Primos “Dame” has already sold out in two of its three colors and YouTubers are gushing about its rare mix of affordability and quality.
And while a number of bike companies have set up shop here over the years, one thing that sets Primos apart is that its founders traveled over 6,200 miles to set up shop in Portland.
I first met Primos co-founders Carlos Cortes and Pascual Duco at Bike Happy Hour last fall. The 36-year-olds met in their hometown of Santiago, Chile in 2015. Like many of us, bicycling brought them together. Cortes and Duco had just graduated from college and met through a shared interest in doing triathlons. After riding and doing a few races they became close friends and traveled to Rio de Janeiro to watch the Olympics.
Duco was already in the bike industry, having launched P3 Cycles in 2013. Cortes worked as an engineer in the aviation industry, but loved cycling and longed to turn his passion into a career. “I saw Pascual with a bike shop, working in the bike industry and would tell myself, ‘What a lucky guy to do something like that!’,” Cortes shared with me in an interview this week.
Duco built P3 Cycles into a large company by being the first bike brand in Chile to seize the market for inexpensive, urban singlespeeds and offer an option to industry heavyweights Specialized and Trek. At its peak in 2021, P3 Cycles earned $5 million in sales. Duco expanded into a new warehouse, had two retail stores, and carried a large inventory. That same year, Duco and his wife moved to Los Angeles with hopes of further growing P3’s sales.
When the market shifted in 2022, Duco got caught with a massive overstock. “Suddenly, no one wanted singlespeeds or fixies and I had like 8,000 of them in inventory. Everyone wanted gravel bikes,” Duco recalled. He spent the next two years in “crisis mode” and narrowly avoided bankruptcy. That business reckoning led Duco down a path where he ultimately discovered Primos; but not before he and his wife discovered L.A. wasn’t a good fit. “We didn’t like L.A. The vibe was just not for us,” he shared.
Duco wanted to move and had heard great things about Portland from friends in Chile who’d visited in the past. “My wife and I came to Portland for a weekend and we just fell in love with the city because you can walk everywhere, there are coffee shops, restaurants, and streets like Alberta where you can just be chill. It’s the only city I would live in in the U.S.”
“It’s also the city that bikes the most per capita in the U.S,” he added. “And everyone I meet knows something about bicycles.”
I talked to Cortes after he did the weekly “Lawyer Ride” downtown and had ridden into Forest Park from his house in northeast. “This is paradise!” he said of how great the riding is in Portland compared to Santiago.
Duco moved to Portland in 2022; and with his wife settled into a masters degree program at Portland State University and his P3 Cycles company stabilized, Duco began to research a new kind of bike company. He spent many days and weeks combing through Instagram and YouTube to learn what people wanted in a new bike (he gave a shout-out of inspiration from former Portlander Russ Roca at Path Less Pedaled) — and what they wanted from a bike company. “That’s when I started to gather all these ideas and putting them together under this brand called Primos,” he recalled.
Cortes visited Duco in 2023, and after spending a weekend in Portland, went home and gushed about it to his wife. “I love bicycles, and I bike a lot,” Cortes shared with me, recounting a conversation he had with his wife. “I thought, maybe this is an opportunity to follow our dreams to finally have this bicycle brand,” he told her. She was up for the adventure and, with their two young daughters, decided to make the move.
Cortes moved to Portland in March 2024 and by then, he and Duco were working on Primos in earnest.
In Primos (which means “cousins” in Spanish) Duco saw an opportunity to build a bike brand a different way. With P3 he doesn’t do any design or development. He just selects parts and colors from a catalog and then the bikes are shipped from a factory in China. That process nagged at him, and left him wanting more personal investment in his bikes and business. So Duco enrolled in a bike design and frame building school in Spain. “That’s where I really learned what a bike is all about,” he recalled. With his new understanding of materials, geometry, welding, and the craft of bicycle making, Duco made several trips to suppliers in Taiwan and China where he applied his knowledge into what would eventually become Primos’ initial offering, the “Dame” — a $799 all-road bike. (“Dame” can be interpreted a number of ways. It means “give me” in Spanish, refers to a lady in French and English, and is also the name of a restaurant near Duco’s house.)
“We really wanted to make something affordable. We know people just want to ride a good bicycle with good components, and that is fun!” Cortes said. And judging by a host of recent reviews of the Dame on YouTube, he and Duco have accomplished that goal.
How? Duco says he went through the bike, part-by-part, to find where he could spend a little more for a big return. Things like double-butted spokes for nicer wheels, compressionless housing on mechanical disc brakes (for a much better braking feel than standard housing, an idea he got from a YouTuber named The Bike Sauce), a solid Microshift Sword drivetrain (considered a budget version of Shimano GRX), thru-axles (instead of quick releases), and so on.
The result is a bike that’s turning heads online and off.
Something Cycles on East Burnside was the first shop to carry the brand (Duco says the pricing doesn’t leave much room for a shop margin, but they’re working on that). Owner Nicholas Sorenson sells mostly reconditioned, vintage mountain bikes. “And as far as the Dame goes,” Sorenson shared with me yesterday. “I don’t think there is a better value bike on the market. With all the modern features like a 1x drivetrain, thru axles, and flat mount disc brakes, it allows the rider to easily upgrade the bike down the road if they choose to do so.”
And just like Cortes and Duco, the branding behind Primos doesn’t take itself too seriously. The word means “cousin” in Spanish, “So that’s the spirit,” Duco says, “Let’s ride together in a non-competitive way. Let’s ride with families and have fun and remember those times when you were just riding bikes with your cousin like I did when I was a kid.”
For Cortes and Duco, Primos is a brand that breaks the mold in another important way: “One of the big criticisms I hear about in the bike industry is that it’s a lot of bikes made by white guys for white guys. So the idea with Primos was to build a brand that would be appealing to more communities and more colors.”
Cortes said he was nervous when the business first launched. “I was like, ‘Oh, maybe because we’re Latino people won’t respect us as business owners’,” he shared. “But now I feel really proud of that and many people support us for that reason.”
From what I’ve learned about Primos, people support it for many reasons. Right now, Duco and Cortes are riding a wave of interest that shows no signs of slowing down.
“We are really proud to be in this community and my family is so happy here,” Cortes shared. “We just want to contribute and do something great. That’s what we are chasing right now.”
— PrimosCycles.com
