As women who love remote bicycle adventures, Martina Brimmer and I crossed paths in loose orbits for years: there is unspoken kinship when you hold a shared passion for something in which your gender makes you an extreme minority. But Martina and I didn’t properly get to know each other until this past summer, when we both presented at the inaugural WTF (Women, Trans, Femme) Bikexplorers Summit in Whitefish, Montana. Over a hundred WTF and gender nonbinary cyclists from all over the country—plus a few intrepid international attendees—came together to support, celebrate, and connect over being outliers in a culture that is dominated by men.
Martina is the co-founder and sole owner of Swift Industries, a company that designs and manufactures adventure bicycle bags from a workshop in the heart of Seattle. Her session at the WTF summit—along with Lane Wilson of Oveja Negra—was about bags and gear. I went into it moderately interested, expecting to hear about Swift’s products: instead, the conversation became a no-holds-barred deep dive into hard questions about activism, sexism, community, and whether it is possible to meld the values of compassion with the realities of capitalism.
I left the session with a deep admiration for Martina’s commitment to guiding her business with a sense of accountability. In the past few years, Swift has experienced enormous growth, and Martina is using the increased volume of her company’s voice to help foster and shape a more inclusive cycling community.
When I’m out on a ride, I smile knowing that Martina is probably also on her bike, chasing down the horizon and changing culture with her fierce and open heart.
Words by: Tessa Hulls
Images by: Nia Martin
Where do you feel the strongest?
In wilderness, in spaces that probe my creative-systems-thinking, in environments that inherently enlist emotional intelligence while pushing my critical thinking to the max.
Tell me about the relationship between your company's values and your personal values.
My personal values and my company’s values are wedded to each other. Who I am, and the changes I want to see in the world are expressed in my business. The bitch is that sometimes what I want runs inherently against the grain of mainstream capitalism, and occasionally what I want for my company and the people who work by my side feel uncomfortably at odds with my personal values. I’m evolving every day.
You’re someone who navigates the world with a strong sense of accountability. What do you feel accountable to, and why?
I want to actively participate in the change I demand of society. I’m afraid of accountability, but I’m hungry for it—for myself and in my communities.
The outdoors are regarded as male spaces: how does your gender identity impact your experience of the outdoors?
The outdoors are one of the only places where I can tune in and integrate wholly and without distraction and the white noise of gender oppression. That’s the painful irony, the outdoors are my haven but the forces of mainstream society on the outdoor industry sends me messages every day that I’m unqualified to experience the great outdoors, that masculinity is the qualification for legitimate belonging in wilderness.
Tell me about your community!
There are so many. I’m deeply in-love with the cycling and outdoor communities, and totally psyched to be surrounded by entrepreneurs. Those two are very masculine environments, which I love and hate at the same time. I have a strong sense of my own masculinity, I’m comfortable in it, and I’ve relished keeping up with the guys since I could walk. My queer community is incredibly influential for me for a million reasons, but I learn so much about resistance, capitalism, oppression and accountability from that part of my family of friends and it inspires me in powerful ways.
Describe a time that made you feel more vulnerable than you’ve ever felt.
I had a nervous breakdown a year ago. The pressure of running my business, and the potential of my dreams was all too much for me to carry and my physical and emotional bodies collapsed. I started having severe panic attacks that lasted days on end during which I was convinced I was dying. I woke up every day on the edge of a precipice of sadness and hopelessness and had lost all bearings on what it meant to be Martina. My mom called me every single morning for five months to make sure I got out of bed. I wouldn’t have left my bedroom without that daily call.
How about a time that you felt incompetent?
During the lowest points of my nervous breakdown, I dragged myself into my business every day and pretended to lead my team. It felt insane to have people looking to me for direction when I felt like the thinnest piece of glass ever known to this world. Every time I talked about our future I felt that I was lying to them. I didn’t see a future at all; I had to fight every nerve in my body that was telling me that Swift was over and that no one would have jobs the next week. All of a sudden, the business that had once felt like home, was completely foreign territory and I didn’t know where I was.
How do you navigate those experiences of insecurity?
I started asking for help. I started telling people what I was going through. That part was hell at first, I’m a really independent person and it’s been a point of pride as a young woman how self sufficient I am. But it wasn’t an option to navigate this breakdown on my own, I was too sick. I began telling everyone what was happening to me: that I was emotionally unstable and deeply depressed, and that I needed their love and support. The day I sat down with my co-workers to tell them what I was experiencing and to ask for specific kinds of support still makes me shake. It took tremendous vulnerability because a deeply ingrained assumption of mine was that leaders should know everything, and should carry the emotional burden of risk all alone.
What about you makes you most proud?
That I’ve built a business. What I’ve found in Swift Industries is a real-life experiment that challenges how and where products are made, that offers us a living economics classroom which tests our ideologies, comfort, and understanding of the impacts of money. We’ve built a place together that has allowed us to grow individually parallel to the growth of the collective team, and that has pushed our comfort levels as leaders, influencers and collaborators. Swift Industries unlocks skills, dreams, and opportunities that have been germinating, just waiting for the perfect conditions to unfurl.
Who is your girl crush?
Gillian Rose is one of thousands of womxn that blow me away. An acupuncturist, healer, and incredibly wise person, she’s one of the three incredible female caregivers I’ve worked with on my journey with sadness and fear. Gillian has a way in the world that intuits connectivity down to the most subtle relationships. I can’t believe I’ve had the chance to get to know her.
How do you or other women you know enforce elements of misogyny? Share an example.
I judge women all the time—today in the airport I checked myself for assuming that the stunning young lady sitting next to me only cares about her looks. Who taught me that? And so what if she does?
In my work life, I’m ashamed to admit a reflexive belief that men are more qualified to talk about bicycles than womxn.
I’ve offered men higher incoming wages than womxn in the past because they’ve come to the table with assertive negotiation skills, and I’ve assumed that they know more than I do about the very industry I’ve worked in for a decade. In doing so I’ve undervalued my female employees, and been lamb to cultural cues that men inherently know more than womxn. Yuck. What’s more, I’ve operated under the insane pretense that men understand my business more that me. I get so emotionally tangled in those dynamics because I want to learn so badly, but that's not the only impulse rooted in that assumption—a subtle societal voice is telling me that I know less than men. They exist together. It’s so hard to distinguish the layers of patriarchy.
What do you do to combat it? What should we as a society do?
I work to pay close attention to the reflexive and engrained ways I judge womxn, to work to honestly dialogue with myself when I notice it. I’ve committed to calling it what it is, and am working on talking about it more openly when these dynamics come up. I feel ashamed when I notice these judgements, and that shame results in silence sometimes. I’d rather start talking openly about the guilt and embarrassment these paradoxes bring up than pretend I’ve got a handle on egalitarian treatment of folks.
What do you love about the relationships between women?
The tenderness. I love the tenderness of femininity, regardless of who embodies it.
