Thread and Chain

Maren Winter and Levi Goebel represent an emerging generation of entrepreneurs building long-term creative careers in Northeast Michigan through reshaping a design-first apparel brand and a community-focused bike shop.

Written by Karl Williams with Photography by Oliver Van Assche

Coming Home

Alpena, a small lakeside city in northeastern Michigan, has all the makings of an outdoor sports Mecca -- sparsely populated with large tracts of open land and four distinct seasons, it offers a playground for a multitude of seasonal sports like cross-country skiing, kiteboarding, and mountain biking. In recent years, bikes have become a much more conspicuous presence in the city landscape, vying for space with pedestrians and cars on infrastructure designed for the latter.

Many of these bikes have been bought and repaired at Harborside Cycle & Sport, a bike shop located in the commercial district of downtown Alpena, a part of town that has seen an economic renaissance over the last decade. Once an exemplar of the economic misfortune affecting many rural areas, downtown has become vibrant, largely thanks to the efforts of local development authorities and small business owners.

The owners of Harborside Cycle & Sport are Levi Goebel and Maren Winter, a young couple in their mid-twenties who purchased the business in March 2024. Growing up in northeastern Michigan -- Maren is from Alpena and Levi grew up in Hillman, a small town about twenty minutes west -- the couple returned to the area in order to run the bike shop. Alpena, surprisingly, offered more professional opportunity than cities in the southern part of the state.

As is the case with many rural areas, the young tend to imagine their futures in places other than their hometown. Levi and Maren thought about moving out West, possibly to Colorado or Utah, before deciding on coming home. The couple joins a number of young business owners who have returned to the area either to take over or start their own businesses.

By the time Harborside was put up for sale, Levi had become well-practiced in the art of cycle maintenance. As a child growing up on a lettuce farm, he spent much of his free time mountain biking and repairing the bikes of friends and family.

Harborside didn’t only offer Levi an opportunity to pursue his dream job: it combines the personal and professional passions of its two owners. With a background in the arts and in graphic design as well as a love of the outdoors, Maren founded Skyre Sports while working as a graphic designer for a wedding invite shop in Kalamazoo.

The lone artist in a family of business people and teachers, Maren has melded her artistic sensibility with her entrepreneurial ambitions through her Skyre Sport brand. The brand features three previously established sport apparel brands that she has purchased in the last few years: Choucas hats, Dunebird, and Wizbang. She first purchased Choucas in 2022 from a retiring orthodontist in New Hampshire who had created the brand twelve years prior.

A passionate mountaineer, the original founder named the brand after the Choucas bird found in the Italian Dolomites, which she had hiked with her husband, and developed functional activewear hats for women. With a longstanding desire to apply her design skills to sports apparel, Maren saw the opportunity as a way to thread the needle between creative expression and entrepreneurialism -- and to do so in the place she calls home.

The Trials of Youth

Both Levi and Maren have bought businesses created by others. While there’s a market edge to taking over a business with an established customer base and brand, the takeover itself can pose risks -- not only the disruptions of too much change but the tail risks of not changing enough. These are risks that the couple is acutely aware of as they try to maintain an inherited customer base and remake the businesses according to their own characters and values.

Taking over a business is not dissimilar to buying a house: it can take a while to make it your own and to shake the feeling that it still belongs to someone else. To Levi, Harborside still feels a bit like the previous owner’s. Given the limited space in the building, much of the layout remains the same, and customers sometimes still ask to speak to him.

“I shadowed under him for six months to make sure everything was going to go smooth,” Levi said. “And for probably eight months of that, every customer would come in, and I’d greet them, and they'd be like, hey, where is he?”

Levi’s youth no doubt plays a role in all of this -- his customers tend to be older than him, and they typically ask him if they can speak to the owner, drawing a sheepish response from him that they are, in fact, already speaking to him.

The youthful character of the business does shine out in certain aspects. The shop uses a system of smiley face stickers associated with the work orders they receive. The color gradations designate increasing levels of problem-solving: Green indicates an easy fix, yellow a consultation with Levi, and red Levi’s problem.

All green work orders may be alike, but every red order is a problem in its own way. Levi has a technical mind; he began studying mechanical engineering at Saginaw Valley State University before deciding to suspend his studies during the pandemic, and his engineering background is apparent in his approach to solving problems. Levi speaks a lot about trial and error, tinkering with the bikes to determine the technical issues that will mercifully render a solution to the problem.

While Levi betrays the mindset of an engineer, Maren has always been the artist of the pair. She spent much of her childhood drawing and painting, “consumed” by a desire to create. An inveterate doodler, her approach to design is oriented around a comprehensive iterative process. She likes to take the seed of an idea and exhaust its possibilities, creating dozens of versions before synthesizing a final version. This approach emerged out of her love of drawing and painting, though the design process for her products is a bit more streamlined and intentional. The abiding source of her designs, however, remain the environment that she grew up in, and she takes time to explore northeastern Michigan’s distinctive natural landscape.

“I take a lot of pictures. I'll see stuff. I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting,” she said. “And I'll like, take a zoomed-in picture, like the water is doing something funky, and I'll take that picture, and I'll put it into Photoshop, and I'll mess around with different textures and stuff. And so I have, like, a folder in my phone of just like, a bajillion different things that I like, oh, that's gonna be a print. Like, I just know it, so, yeah, I definitely take inspiration for a lot of our prints from nature.”

Though the production process utilizes various technologies of the twenty-first century, her products’ origins rely on the timeless tool of visual art: the human hand. Maren has always drawn her designs by hand first, turning to digital tools only after she is satisfied with the iterations that she has put onto paper.

While the brands she has taken over have their origins in different parts of the country, their aesthetics align with the locally-oriented design philosophy that Maren seeks to implement. Dunebird, for example, originated on the Jersey shore, and its look and utility align with northeastern Michigan summers, which tend to be not altogether that different from the North Atlantic. Maren has been strategic about the brands she’s acquired, seeking out those which will match the environment that has shaped her artistic sensibility.

Maren’s business challenges are not altogether different from Levi’s: while customers do ask for the previous owner as frequently as a few years ago, her biggest task is not only to grow the business but to make it her own. Though she has already begun to do so: while Choucas originally licensed most of its designs, future designs will all have the same source: Maren’s hand.

New Horizons

701 North 2nd Avenue was founded by Martin Neumann in 1949, The building has housed many different businesses. It originally started as an auto shop before becoming a gun shop, then a convenience store, after which followed a long period of dereliction. It retains the stylistic marks of a post-war mom-and-pop shop, though oversized. Its 5000 square feet dwarf the 1500 square feet of Harborside’s current home.

This will, sooner or later, become the new home of Harborside. It’s no doubt a fixer-upper: at the moment, its interior looks more like a haunted house than a sporting goods shop. But the couple embraces the challenges that come with growth. They’ve received a grant from the Alpena Downtown Development Authority as part of a program to renovate building facades in the area, and they’ve already begun to prepare the building for its new role.

While downtown has flourished in recent years, the north side -- historically, the poorest residential and commercial zones of the town -- has yet to experience such an economic revitalization. This may soon change: new businesses have begun to pop up, and Maren and Levi hope to be part of this process of growth. Though the centrality of the current location offers a number of advantages, they see the potential not only of a bigger space but of the area itself.

Levi imagines Harborside as not only a place where people come to buy new bikes or have their bikes repaired but as a place where people can linger and hang out. His efforts to get the bike shop involved in the community include a weekly group ride for families around town. A goal is to expand these group rides to include mountain biking and longer distance runs, as well as running educational clinics on bike maintenance and repair. He sees Harborside as not only a small business but a potential community builder, engendering and expanding a passion for biking and other outdoor sports in Northeastern Michigan.

“Our goal is to get people on bikes,” he said. “Whether, yeah, you buy a bike for me, or I can help you buy a bike from a different bike shop, or off a Facebook marketplace. I'll look over your bike before you buy it, make sure it's good, and you're not going to get scammed or have issues….We're trying to get people outdoors, which can be a therapeutic outlet for people.”

The move into the new building will feature an expansion of the business into running and hiking gear and apparel. They also plan, of course, to sell Maren’s merchandise in the new shop, further merging their respective businesses.

Maren, too, emphasizes the role of the local community in her business and her future goals for it. While much of her merchandise is still produced by a manufacturer in New Hampshire, the plan is to root all of her businesses in Alpena.

“I want to manufacture an Alpena. I want to have full manufacturing control,” she said. “It's a slow process, even if we're cutting somewhere else and then sewing here, and then we slowly move to fully manufacture, but it's just something that I think could happen.”

They hope not only to succeed as young business owners in an aging community but hopefully to pave the way for other young people who would like to start their own businesses.

“I came back, and I just feel like it is a very underdeveloped place that needs more of this. Needs more young people. Vibrancy. Needs support from others,” Maren said. “I just want to help it grow. At one point, when we were living downstate, we thought about headquartering down there, because that's where I was. And I was like, I'm going to end up here. I know I am. I just feel like my heart is here.”

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Choucas Hats can be found at choucashats.com or through Instagram @choucashats. Maren can be found @marenwinter.design on Instagram. Harborside Cycle can be found online at harborsidecycle.com or through Instagram @harbosidecycle. Levi can be found making routine appearances in Choucas content, and on Instagram @goebellevi.

This iteration of the Local Creative Highlight Series was proudly produced with financial support from the