Teague was enlisted to design a new kind of bike by Oregon Manifest, a non-profit dedicated to making the world think differently about bikes. Its Bike Design Project gave firms in five cities the opportunity to build a bike made with their city in mind; the public then voted on the winner, which will enter a limited production run from Fuji Bikes. The New York City bike had a USB phone charger built in; The Evo, from San Francisco, was all about modular storage. Chicago's Blackline bike was a rugged pothole-conquerer of a bike, and Portland's PDX came with an app to personalize the ride just for you. For every different city, a different bike.

Every bike was made specifically for its city

But the voters picked Seattle. They picked Denny, the bike Jackson and the team at Teague designed with Sizemore Bicycles, a custom-bike maker in the city. (The bike is named for one of the founding families of Seattle, and for one of those dastardly hills.) The collaboration produced a bike that's designed to be both simple and powerful, to work in any situation at any time without its rider ever needing to worry about having the right tools at hand. "I think as we moved through it," Jackson tells me, "one of the things that we didn't want was having [to add] accessories to the bike." Everything about Denny was made with the same idea in mind: you just go.

That ethos led the Teague and Sizemore immediately to their most ingenious innovation: the lock. The lock is the handlebar and the handlebar is the lock. "You kind of see people get the tiny U-lock and they're shoving it in their back pocket," Jackson says. "Or they're hanging it on the handlebars, and it's swinging around and clamoring and it doesn't make for a comfortable riding experience." The team thought about putting a chain lock inside the frame, but decided that was less secure and more complicated. Plus, they found an added benefit to their solution: "when you come up to the bike, there's no handlebar. If I steal this bike, how do I ride it?"