Master of Life

Every now and then, an unusually large male customer walks through the doors of Alchemy Bicycle Company’s production facility in Denver brimming with doubt. He doesn’t believe Alchemy’s carbon frames will stand up over time, usually because others have failed him before. When this happens, says Alchemy chief design officer Matt Maczuzak, “The simplest thing our sales guys do is just walk into my office and ask if I can come out and answer a few questions. I don't even have to say anything, they get it pretty fast.”

That’s because the prodigiously bearded Maczuzak, 39, stands 6-foot-4 and weighs 240 pounds—“250 during the winter,” he grins—and punishes every bike the company makes before it goes into production. As a customer once said in the showroom, “You guys must sleep well at night knowing that Paul Bunyan is testing all your frames.”

“I’m horrible on a mountain bike,” allows Maczuzak, who is also known as 'Bear,' “but that’s almost better for testing because I just point that shit and hope that it holds up. It certainly does put customers at ease.”

It’s a sunny day in Denver, and Maczuzak is walking the floor of Alchemy’s factory. He strolls past a sign that reads GOOD IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH and enters the production room, where welder Jeff Wager is working on a frame. Posters honoring Metallica, Slayer and Iron Maiden adorn the walls, making Wager, the lead singer in two death metal bands, feel at home. In an adjacent room, Phil Harwood, a skinny, heavily tattooed do-it-all with a backward mesh ballcap and mustache, puts the final touches of bright yellow paint on a different frame. “You can’t deny that we’re in the fashion business,” Maczuzak says. “Gotta make ’em look good.”

In a warehouse full of multitaskers—some of them bike nerds, some of them aerospace experts, four of them MBAs—Maczuzak remains a unicorn. As Alchemy has grown from a custom-only boutique manufacturer to a full production company, offering a complete line of high-end road and mountain bikes, no one has driven their innovative ways more than the hulking, whiskered engineer. This is particularly true when it comes to carbon frames, which Alchemy is known for. The brand was the first to produce a carbon full-suspension frame entirely in the U.S.—the Arktos, which won People’s Choice and Best Mountain Bike at the North American Handmade Bike Show. Maczuzak designs everything in CAD, then makes custom molds, then he and others cut the carbon and bring it to life.

“What Matt’s done as a one-man band with composites is pretty much unmatched in the bike industry,” says Joe Stanish, former VP of operations at Mavic and Enve, who joined Alchemy in 2017 as chief operating officer (but has since moved on). Getting the opportunity to work with Maczuzak was a big part of the draw for Stanish, who’d worked with composites for 20 years and also spent time at SRAM, Santa Cruz and RockShox. When Stanish started in Denver, Alchemy president Ryan Canizzaro promised to build him an office as soon as possible. “I said, ‘I don’t need that, I just want to be sitting next to Matt so we can collaborate,’” Stanish recalls. “His tube-to-tube construction is probably the best I’ve seen.”

Yet Maczuzak intentionally keeps a low profile. He didn’t tell anyone at Alchemy that he was being profiled by Bike until I arrived. That included the company’s marketing director. “I don’t do the spotlight very well,” Maczuzak says.

Long before he fell into the bike industry, Maczuzak was a self-described “closet dork” who grew up in blue-collar Pittsburgh and later moved to Cleveland. His father worked in the steel industry; his mother taught high-school biology. He spent six years in college, switching majors from microbiology to mechanical engineering to computer science. After graduating from Miami of Ohio, he took a job with an industrial engineering firm in Cleveland designing products such as sippy cups for toddlers and butt-wipe packaging.

From there he moved to Austin and got into Cat 3 crit racing. At the time, he was a svelte 195 pounds, but his bikes didn’t care. “I bought a high-end custom carbon frame, then I broke it,” he says. “They repaired it, but a few weeks later I broke it again. So they replaced the frame, and within two weeks that cracked. I decided, with my background, I bet I can make a carbon fiber frame that won't break.”

Enve composite guru Carl Turner sent Maczuzak a few tubes, and soon enough he was pedaling his homemade frame in crit races. It held up. Friends started asking if he could make one for them, too. So he did. In 2010, he took a job with Alchemy, which at the time was based in Austin. Canizzaro moved the company to Denver eight years ago and started ramping up production. Now more than half of the 500-plus bikes that Alchemy sells per year are stock models, Maczuzak says, noting that they prioritize enjoyment over weight in their construction.

“Instead of chasing a 675-gram frame, I'd rather have a little more material in there and know that it's going to ride beautifully,” he says. “Our customers don't mind the extra 30 or 40 grams. That's like having a few extra sips of water in your bottle.”

Before the tubes get molded and cut and sanded and taped, they come to life on Maczuzak’s computer. His office is telling. Two bottles of whiskey sit on a table across from his desk. A white, plastic frame for an upcoming model rests next to a 3D printer. (Maczuzak is currently working on a new 120-millimeter-travel 29er, a Mullet and a gravel bike.)

The book “1001 Bicycles to Dream of Riding" sits on Maczuzak’s desk next to his toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, which he says he uses “often enough” to keep them at work. (He has slept in his office more than once during busy periods.) “My tools,” he says, “are a computer mouse, a Dremel and sandpaper.” He also moonlights as a demo bike mechanic if no one else is around, and, oh yeah, he designed the company website.

I’m surprised to learn that Maczuzak is the runt of his family—his father and two younger brothers are all 6-foot-6 or taller—and that he never played football, even though he loves talking about it. He spends his free time reading science fiction, brewing beer in his garage and building a 6.7-liter V8 engine for his 1977 Ford pickup. “I didn't know anything about motors a few months ago,” he says. “So I went out and bought a block, pistons, camshaft and bearings, and now I’m putting it all together.”

He also built a small-scale production home brewery and specializes in sours and IPAs, which he serves at the keg parties that he hosts. “If it wasn’t for my wife saying, 'OK, focus, we need to go socialize with people, I’d spend all my free time in the garage,'” he says.

This is something people bring up when they are asked to describe Maczuzak: If he is interested enough to devote time to a trade, he gets to know every aspect of it. Hence a coworker’s comment when she learns Maczuzak does not have a master’s degree: “But you’re a master of life.” With a specialty, lest one forget, in constructing unbreakable composite bikes.

“When I first told people I was going to make carbon frames,” Maczuzak says, “the running joke among friends and friends of friends was: How long will he ride it before it breaks? I think one guy’s guess was 20 feet.”

Did he collect a penance when he proved them wrong?

“Just in smug joy,” Maczuzak says. “A lot of those people ended up buying bikes.”