Pain of long-distance ride leads to better bicycle seat

EUGENE, Ore. – Seven years ago, on the fourth day of a 400-plus-mile bicycle trip, Jeri Rutherford’s backside “was so sore I could hardly stand it,” she said. “I swore then I would invent a better bicycle seat.”

So she did. First she had to figure out what was wrong with conventional bike saddles. “It wasn’t hard to figure out what I needed to create: a seat that would flex and move under the rider,” said Rutherford, 53, a Eugene native who now lives in Marsing, Idaho, near Nampa.

After coming up with her T-shaped design, she had to get a patent, figure out materials, find someone to manufacture the saddle and bring it to market.

All that took until last December, and so far this year her company, RideOut Technologies, has moved 1,800 of her Carbon Comfort Saddles. She started her seat project by contacting a person who builds boots for Olympic skaters. “Those shoes flex, and that’s what I realized needs to happen with a bike saddle, too,” she said. That led to injecting carbon fibers into a mold, to give just a bit of movement to the baseplate of the seat.

Then came the underpinnings.

“On a regular bike seat, the post goes right into the seat, and that can be really miserable in terms of comfort on a long ride,” Rutherford said. “On my bike saddles, the post goes into a rail, and underneath the seat there’s a crossbow-type suspension – that’s what I got a patent on – that absorbs shock and also flexes a bit from left to right. It keeps the blood flow in the seat from getting constricted. That’s what causes pain, when the muscles are screaming for more oxygen, and instead, it’s getting cut off.”

She went through about 40 prototypes in her garage, which took about five years. Success didn’t come cheap. Getting the patent cost $20,000, “and then I spent two years and lost $40,000 trying to get the saddle made in the United States,” she said.

Her lucky break came at a trade show in Las Vegas, where she met a woman from Taiwan “who makes 80 percent of all the bicycle seats sold in the United States,” Rutherford said. “She met with me, looked at my seat, looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Smart. I make.’ ”

Rutherford traveled to Taiwan, where she worked directly with Stella Yu, a dynamo in her early 60s. From then, it was only five months “to get it perfect and to market.”

Rutherford sells her original unisex bike saddle for $85. She’s added a slightly different version for people, mostly male, who are on their bikes eight hours a day. She calls that model StormQuest, and it sells for $94.