FORAGER CYCLES was hatched from a list of ideas scribbled into notebooks by Dan Stranahan. Product ideas that surfaced while working as a bike mechanic in rural Alaska, and on tours in the off season. Things that would make cycling a little easier, more accessible, more enjoyable.
When travel ground to a halt in 2020, Dan pulled out the notebook. Simple and Small, it started with a Cable Cherry. He made the first one with a workbench and zero machine tools in a dirt floored barn stall - hardly precise- but it worked, and excitement grew. The Challenges of machining spheres, tiny threads, and tiny holes became apparent, and equally fascinating with a good reason to overcome them. After a lot of dead end calls, Dan found a manufacturer that was similarly young & eager and the first 1,000 pairs of Cable Cherries were made in Chicago, and shipped out of the 12x12’ barn stall.
That first run quickly sold out, Forager moved into a (slightly) larger commercial space, and everyone seemed to want our fruit! It was an exciting time until the shop in Chicago fell off the map - website closed, not returning emails or calls. Working with them had gone great until then, and it was a shock to our tiny operation. Spring had arrived and we had to find a more reliable shop, fast.
Despite how deflating that was for everyone, we carried on and brought manufacturing much closer to home. This time to a couple renowned CNC machine shops - Lichen Precision & Andersen Machine here on the Olympic Peninsula that made Cable Cherries from the later half of 2020 through the end of 2023. Today, we work with a shop in Oakland, CA with a focus on high volumes of precision parts, and we sure did work to get there. In 2020-23, over 10,000 pairs of Cable Cherries were made in Washington, assembled by hand and shipped around the world thanks to a colorful crew of dealers and customers.