Bike maker that employs formerly incarcerated workers gets a restart

Brandale Randolph has always been dedicated to lifting people up.

A former stockbroker, Randolph co-founded a nonprofit called Project Poverty in 2010, to bring people out of difficult financial circumstances.

When he was living in Texas, he had developed an algorithm that could pinpoint people struggling financially based on 30 different factors. In 2016, when he moved to Framingham and was looking for new work, he ran his algorithm to learn about the local community. 

Randolph found that women who were formerly incarcerated represent more than 50% of all the heads of households  earning just half of what’s considered poverty-level. Their annual median income was only $11,500, and 80% of them were mothers, he said. 

“That was the one demographic that stood out to me,” Randolph told the Business Journal. “I wanted to figure out if there’s anything I could do to create some jobs for them that could help them put food on the table for their kids.”

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So he started teaching people how to repair bikes, and then developed his own brand of bicycles. From there, he founded The 1854 Cycling Co., with a specific mission to create living-wage jobs for formerly incarcerated people. He employed about 14 people at one time. 

“Some of them came from people who I had known throughout the neighborhood,” he said. “Some of them came from some of the parole officers nearby, and some of them were just friends of friends.”

But in 2018, the business took a hit when new steel tariffs were instituted. This made importing parts “very expensive,” Randolph said. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, he ran out of money and had to shut down production.

“We’ve been trying to get back up and going since the pandemic, to find a location, to find enough capital to hire people,” Randolph said. “So we’ve been trying to get our sales back up.”

Hand-built electric bikes

To get 1854’s wheels moving again, Randolph has developed an electric-bike designed to improve community policing. He said he has reached two statewide contracts to purchase the bikes, and said the funds from those sales will be used to get production going again. He declined to name the customers.

Randolph said he’s hoping to employ 30 to 40 people once the company is back up. He plans to train everyone in building these state-of-the-art e-bikes. About 80% of those employees, he said, will be people who were formerly incarcerated. 

“When we put this into production, I want to make sure I have the cash and the capital to maintain this for the next couple of years, because the unfortunate thing is that when we shut down last time, a lot of people still don’t make the same amount of money they made working for me.”

 Randolph’s dedication to hire formerly incarcerated people is deeply integrated into his work, and beneficial to his company, he said, noting that his employees are among the hardest workers. 

“I’ve employed both ... I can tell you for a fact, the people who are formerly incarcerated are very dedicated to their job and there’s a huge difference in terms of the worker loyalty,” Randolph said. 

“A lot of these people will be some of the most dedicated employees they’ll ever have. Make sure you bring them in and treat them as if you’re giving them a fresh start, clean slate, and they will return that loyalty twentyfold,” he added.