Picking up the slack

Kathryn Racine-Jones uses pedal power to make deliveries.

Kathryn Racine-Jones, with her shiny delivery trike, often loaded with crates of coffee beans, is used to getting a lot of attention. Co-founder of B-Line, an urban bike delivery company, she spends more time than your average delivery vehicle driver talking to strangers—which today includes Portland mayor Sam Adams and the owner of a local bakery.

The self-financed company started by Racine-Jones and her husband Franklin less than a year ago required few capital expenses other than two electric-assisted bicycles, a couple of coolers and a rented warehouse space amounting to a total investment of about $46,000. The couple uses the trikes, which can hold up to 600 pounds each, to deliver produce, coffee or baked goods to the dense urban core where parking and traffic make deliveries more costly and energy-intensive. B-Line now has three clients, including Portland Roasting Co., Organically Grown Company and NatureBake, which is just about all the two trikes can handle. 

B-line hasn’t quite figured out if its services actually cut delivery costs for companies. But it promises to help its clients meet their triple-bottom-line goals, such as lowering their carbon footprints and creating a more livable downtown by relieving congestion on the streets. With sales picking up, the couple says it plans to hire three to five additional delivery people by the end of 2009. To that end, B-Line in late April received a boost from the Multnomah-Washington Regional Investment Board when it received a $25,000 forgivable loan to create “green” jobs. They’re forgiven $5,000 for each employee they hire, up to five, over the next two years.

“When we decided a year ago to leave our day jobs and scrape together our savings for this we didn’t know the economic downturn was around the corner,” Racine-Jones says. “That said, there’s collective energy across the nation. We want to be leaders of the new economy and find a new way to do things and we feel like we’re catching that wave right now.”

It might take some time before that wave crests. With just three clients, B-Line is slowly ramping up. It plans to add a new client every other month until the end of 2009, according to Racine-Jones.

The National Bureau of Economic Research declared in December that the United States economy has officially been in a recession since December of 2007. Unemployment rates reached 8.5 percent in March, the highest in 25 years, and Oregon ranked third in the nation for joblessness at 12.1 percent. Small businesses, which have less cushion, tighter margins and less ability to predict cash flows than larger companies, are among the hardest hit. The index of small business optimism, which tracks the outlook for small business expansion, was the second lowest in the ratings’ 35-year history in March, according to the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB).