Paper Roads Aotearoa

Who’s the person behind Paper Roads Aotearoa?

Paper Roads is based in Auckland, New Zealand. It is a one-woman operation, run by myself, Amy, and with some help from my partner, Andrew, who is the technician and takes care of the machine side of things. 

I am a designer by trade—my previous career was in graphic design and prior to that I was a set designer in Sydney, specialising in magical wonderland Christmas photo sets in Westfields and other shopping centres. The sewing experience comes from majoring in Fashion and Textiles in school, an unfinished Fashion Design degree and designing costumes in TAFE and a few short film jobs. 

I was into Audax road brevets in Australia before bikepacking took off, and I knew about the gravel brevets before ‘gravel bikes’ were invented, but there wasn’t much gravel to be found living in the Sydney suburbs. The move to New Zealand purged the roadie out of me despite a frightful time un-doing the roadie habits. In 2018, I was on the second running of the Tour Aotearoa brevet and even rode with the Kennett Brothers, our bikepacking royalty!

How did it all start?

Similar to many new post-Covid businesses, Paper Roads was born out of lockdown when I bought a domestic sewing machine—not for sewing bags, but for hemming the edges of the bandanas that I was lino printing. I really enjoyed cutting lino and even sold a bunch of bandanas which were more in demand than I expected, however the ink and the labour was disproportionate to the price of the product and there wasn’t much incentive to continue. Most people I knew were using their lockdown time to ride laps and get super fit, but my motivation to cycle got taken over by my creative urges. 

Around the same time, I found out a mate of mine, Mark—who used to sew parachutes for the Air Force, was making bike bags for himself. Secretly, I was just interested in making bags that looked better than his, and he gave me some bits to start with, as bag material and parts are hard to come by. Coincidentally, my bike mechanic Benny, who can pass off as Mark’s doppleganger (both bald, same height and wears curly moustaches) also sewed bike bags on the side and gave me some tips on framebags—valuable knowledge, which I thank him for till this day. 

Before long, I was making bags for my mates, who were signed up for the Tour Aotearoa, and I made myself some feedbags for Kopiko Aotearoa. People were finding out about my bags by word of mouth and Instagram, to the point that I was sewing after work every night and getting worried about stitching my finger in my sleepy state, so I applied to work 4 days a week and 1 day on bags for a year. When the company that I was working for announced some new employee benefits, I took a 1 year sabbatical while they retained my position and I went full time with Paper Roads, just after we moved into our new house that has a workshop room connected to a spacious garage. When the sabbatical was over, I knew there was no going back to where I came from!

Which product are you most proud of?

There’s a few, but I have to say it’s the Framebags. They’re not ‘fine art’ if you compare it with some insanely labour intensive framebags found elsewhere. In NZ, you have to find a practical balance with having a point of difference while producing lightweight yet tough bags for wild conditions and being able to pump out quantities of it for every kind of bike under the sun. Bikepacking and the Tour Aotearoa has become synonymous with pre/retirement, and with  numerous bikepacking routes, events and races and tourists coming in droves, a range of Framebag options are on offer for the variety of customers and their needs.

Being short and riding a dropper post geometry mountain bike is a good starting point for designing bike bags. When I was fitting my first bikepacking rig with off-the-shelf bags, there was hardly a thing that worked. Early bikepacking gear was limited and I concluded that it’s designed for tall riders who were most likely men back around 2016 that’ll be bikepacking, who don’t have to live with a packing problem in every part of their bike. It’s easy working with gravel bike frames and tall people, but when my bag is less than a third of some guy’s bag, I am the difficult customer that I can’t get rid of until the job’s done properly.

What excites you about the AUS/NZ bikepacking scene AND/OR how would you like to see the scene grow/change?

From what I know in NZ, you can enter a brevet and get left in the dust by a heap of 50, 60 something year olds. I’m not 40 yet, so I guess it’ll be exciting to know the best time of my life is yet to come! It’s really mind blowing dot watching NZ races like the Tour Te Waipounamu, the Great Southern Brevet and the Renegades Muster. The community is small, so if you’ve done enough bikepacking events, you know a bunch of names to watch. Joe Nation and Rufus Wenlock do us Kiwis proud (I have to be Kiwi now that I own a NZ business, sorry Aussies)—they were incredible in the Silk Road Mountain Race!!

It would be good to see more young people and women in bikepacking races. They are hard, no doubt but when you’re pushing yourself to the limit, you’re just trying to survive and not racing the next woman. For anyone who’s tried to race an event and keep riding after dinner into the night and fall asleep wherever, it’s a cool adventure and something to be proud of. It gives bikepacking another dimension and there’s always stories from those kind of nights.

Where’s your favourite place your gear has taken you? Or that someone has taken your gear?

Currently Robbie (@dirtdroprobbie) is riding a Paper Roads Framebag and Treatbags around the world for a Guinness Record attempt as the first transgender rider to do an unsupported circumnavigation. Not only is this so awesome, but it’s great to put products through torture. It’s interesting to see the Ecopak fabrics still intensely bright without fading from UV. The Framebag hasn’t had any issues after travelling more than halfway around the world, and in hindsight I should’ve supplied Robbie with the expedition style Treatbags. 

What’s next?

Trying to recover my fitness for the Sounds 2 Sounds after a double covid-shingles whammy that wiped out my racing goals. Surviving the bag orders through Jan and Feb and gaining top fitness is going to be near impossible.

I’m trying to stay on top of stock on my website as summer is extremely busy. I’m getting the new 12L Continental Panniers online while already taking orders for them. The existing 8L Trail Panniers have gone through some tweaks, so there’s constantly new stuff to update on the website.

Are there any other Aussie/NZ makers, creators and scene builders you want to shout out:

Shout out to Luke at Southern Lite Packs for sure! He was selling me fabrics and connecting me to suppliers when he was making bike bags as well as hiking packs, and I was just going full time. Now he seems to focus on hiking packs.

Thanks to Cam Baker (@camfjbaker) who worked at Advanced Traders, got me onto a Team Marin 2 as an ambassador in 2023. It really kick started Paper Roads and ticked off that ambassador thing on my bucket list. One year was enough, (I’m too busy for that much content creation) and I came across an irresistible pre-owned but brand new Lynskey frame which is now my bikepacking rig. 

The Kennett Brothers and the event creators who put on bikepacking events using their own time for no money at all—if it wasn’t for them, I’d still be a corporate slave! They’ve made the NZ scene amazing and made so many bikepackers out of us!

Anything else you want to mention:

Thanks to Bike Gear Database (@bikegeardatabase) for selecting Paper Roads as one on their list of 25 Bikepacking Bag Brands of 2024! It was a great leverage for a brand just starting out, so humbled and stoked and by no means are my products perfect, but they took into account the spirit of bikepacking that Paper Roads carried and yes, the maker is very much invested in the sport.  

Links:

@paperroadsaotearoa Instagram

Website www.paperroads.co.nz

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