By Will Murray
In monsoon-soaked Crested Butte last week, I had the chance to visit with Jason Berv, inventor of the Hero Kit.
The Hero Kit is a small, lightweight, ready-made packet of what you need to get home when your bike components fail. The mountain bike kit and the road bike kit are tailored for those specific needs, with a fix-it tool, some commonly failing components, puncture repair items and clean-up supplies. Jason also sells a trail/road rash kit to clean up from crashes, the Crash Pack.
“A nurse once sent me a little testimonial about how the pressure bandage helped her staunch the flow of a bad cut she got in a crash. It was nice to hear that from a medical person.”
Packed in the kits is a small booklet of emergency repair instructions. “Here’s an email from a cyclist in western Canada who wants to know how much the booklet weighs,” Jason says. He slides over to a small electronic scale with the booklet in hand. “One-point-two ounces,” he declares. “That shouldn’t slow anybody down. I’ll let her know,” he says as he slides across his office floor to his train-trestle-looking wooden desk pointing at the windows framing the peaks west of town.
“I was mountain biking on the Switzerland Trail west of Boulder, and for the 200th time saw a cyclist broken down with no idea of how to get home. After having given support to these folks, I thought about how great it would be to have a little emergency repair kit so that nobody would have to get stuck out in the woods anymore. And I wanted to include a really small, easy to follow booklet of instructions about what to do with these parts. So easy that you can follow the instructions out in the wild. So I did,” Jason says.
Soon thereafter Jason added the road bike version. Trails aren’t the only place cyclists can get stuck.
Jason is also practical about cycling. “The Crash Pack carries in a jersey pocket and has what you need to clean up from a minor spill,” he says. Cyclists don’t always keep the rubber side down, and asphalt bites hard. Trails are ready to provide scrapes and scratches and cuts and eager to pack them with dirt, gravel, invertebrates, bark and twigs, none of which are all that hygienic. The Crash Pack cleans you, or more likely another rider, up enough to get home.
Hero Kits (so named because, well, when you are broken down miles from nowhere and somebody shows up with the right tools, components and knowhow, you need a hero) come in small, lightweight but durable plastic bags (I grabbed an empty to slip my phone into for rides) and also as ready-to-go seat bags.
“My former business partner was really enthusiastic about the seat bags and ordered a ton of them,” Jason reports. But his best seller is the mountain bike Hero Kit. “Sales come from all over. We get a lot of sales in Canada. I’m not sure why that is, but some of the clubs and groups buy up bunches of them.” Some clubs might consider supplying group ride leaders or even giving them to club members as a membership premium.
Jason works from his upside-down home (in CB they put the bedrooms on the ground floor and living spaces upstairs, as the winter snowpack often buries the ground floor windows) and a tidy, cozy office 60 seconds from his home.
“Every quarter I hire some local kids, including my two sons, to build up a bunch of kits, which I send to Amazon and other distributors. We get a little assembly line going and really have fun putting together the kits.”
They make great gifts, too. I mentioned to Jason that we gave away a few Hero Kits as door prizes at a fundraising event for Project Recycle a few weeks ago, and folks seemed pretty enthused to know about the kits. “Here, take a couple more to give away to raise money. Getting kids on bikes is a great idea, so here, let me help.”
Hero Kits started with Jason’s desire to help cyclists. And he’s still helping.
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