graffiti art. We were both skateboarding a fair bit at the time so that’s how we met.
As we got older we both stopped skateboarding and started getting into track bikes. We were buying secondhand track bikes in Japan and selling them Stateside. Maceo was coming over three or four times a year for work, doing a clothing brand over here. Every time he visited he would buy all these track bikes, as many as he could take back with him on the plane.
We’d go out to all these bike stores in the suburbs that were run by old men. At lot of them were the builders’ stores where they had all the old keirin frames that weren’t really for sale. But we’d go in and talk to them for long enough and we’d be like, “Come on, how much are the bikes going for?”
In 2008 Maceo and Ryan were visiting some builders with the idea of setting up a bicycle brand that would be designed by Maceo and Salah and made in Japan by these old men. At the same time I was getting the keys for this place. The whole time I’ve been in Japan I’ve worked at bars, cafes and restaurants and I knew from experience, having run my own bar before, that doing it by myself was really hard work. Maceo and Ryan were coming to Japan a lot so it made sense that they’d help out with the bar whenever they could.
So they still live in the U.S?
Well Ryan has been living here for the past year, year-and-a-half, and Maceo and Salah both live in the States but visit fairly frequently.
Why did you come up with the name Kinfolk?
The guys in the States came up with that. It was either that or Maceo’s old graffiti crew name which was Lit Fuse. But I thought about what it would be like for a Japanese person to say and a lot of Japanese people can’t pronounce “L” or “F.” So I was thinking Lit Fuse would be hard for them to pronounce.
I guess for a bar name Kinfolk sounds a little more welcoming than Lit Fuse. What all does Ways&Means do besides the bar and the bikes?
Salah and Maceo do web design and graphic design work. We also do a lot of tie-ins with other companies. Last year we did a project with Nike where we created a one-off bicycle for a famous Japanese messenger, Shino.