Frontier Bikes is a woman-owned cycling emporium that offers handmade steel bikes, a full-service bike shop featuring expert repairs, and a spin studio all under one roof in Eudora, Kansas, 30 minutes west of Kansas City. Located in the heart of Kansas gravel country, Frontier supports group gravel and MTB rides, as well as local Eudora High School’s Cardinals Cycling Club.
All of this craft, service and advocacy comes with a good bit of irreverence and humor, sassy customer service, and Frontier’s trademark “100K Mansplain Fee”.
Before following her passion for all things two-wheeled, Frontier owner Beth Morford ran a successful sports massage practice. “I traveled with Division 1 universities and Team USA. My biggest career achievement with that was being selected to be on the 2016 Summer Olympics medical staff in Rio de Janeiro,” she says.
Morford honed her bicycle skills by working as a shop mechanic for three years, and then by enrolling at Japanese-American framebuilder Koichi Yamaguchi’s School of Framebuilding in Colorado, which she graduated from in 2017.
You can have a bespoke steel frameset (specializing in smaller riders) built for you by Morford, but Frontier also offers custom wheel builds, expert repairs and a variety of bicycles and accessories from brands like Marin, All-City, Surly and many others.
Frontier is the kind of place you can hang out before or after your ride over some of Kansas’ best gravel roads. Morford says,“We have loads of gravel roads and loads of gravel races in Kansas! We’re sort of the mecca, actually!” And just 3 hours’ drive away is the trail network of Bentonville, Arkansas, which Morford rates as her favorite cycling destination.
If you’re wondering about the name, well yes, “Frontier” evokes the spirit of the American west, but it also reflects Morford’s love of all things Star Trek (space…the final frontier). “I’m sort of a Trekkie at heart,” she admits. The shop jersey also embodies this star-dappled theme.
More than anything else, Frontier Bikes wants to sell you on the love of cycling, and there’s nothing sweeter for Morford than spending hours working on a new build, taking it from concept to finished product and then having it really come to life under the legs of its new owner.
“I love seeing the finished product, getting to ride it, or seeing someone else take it home and love it!,” she says.