From Trash to Treasure: Meet the Canadian Woman Turning Bike Parts Into Art
It began with a clock.
Marianne Koops can’t recall why she first decided to fashion a working timepiece from bicycle scraps that day, but she does remember the positive reactions.
“I kind of always wanted to, I had a little collection of parts,” the 44-year-old Canadian told Bicycling from her home in Prince George, British Columbia. “I made a couple clocks, I don’t even remember why, and everybody said, ‘Oh, those are really cool.’”
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What began on a whim three years ago, in the back of the local bike shop she’s worked at for decades, has become its own thriving business. Today, Koops is crafting hundreds of pieces a year of all kinds: not just clocks, but earrings, candle holders, Christmas trees, and more.
Koops has never been a hardcore cyclist herself, but after years at the heart of the Prince George area’s cycling community-selling a child’s first bike to their parents, making repairs for the local BMX crew, or providing a spare part for a neighbor in need-she knows her way around a bicycle.
That experience has also taught Koops how much useful material goes to waste-good metal that isn’t in perfect enough condition for a bike, but is far from being trash.
“We throw a tremendous amount of stuff in the garbage and the landfill, which just drives me crazy,” Koops said. “I can only imagine what a major city is like-we’re just a small shop in the middle of nowhere.”
A growing desire to solve this problem got Koops brainstorming. The only problem was, she’s not a natural artist, and she’s the first to admit it.
“Absolutely nothing, zero, I am not artistic whatsoever,” Koops said. “A lot of times, I literally just paint a bunch of stuff. I’ll spend a day just taking different parts of different pieces and seeing what goes together.”
But with the clocks, framed around a painted chainring, Koops had hit on something innovative. She took a few to a local market, and was met with an overwhelmingly positive reaction. She’s now made over 200 of them to date.
At this point, Koops runs an established operation. She formed Rebicycled Treasures, and now markets her art on Instagram, Facebook, at the front of her shop, local fairs, and by word of mouth. At home, she’s built a workshop where she can tinker with new shapes and designs.
As her business grows, Koops has big plans for the future. She wants to expand to other shapes and materials like rubber. She recently bought a soldering iron and drill press to give her more options for how she makes her pieces. And she’s hoping to launch an online store in the coming months, making the process easier for customers who can’t physically come to the shop.
Koops is excited about her success as a small business. But she won’t easily forget why she began making bike art to begin with: “Just making unique stuff with it to show people,” she said. “You can make a lot of cool stuff out of trash, essentially.”
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