When female riders reach out to me for bike-buying advice, the first questions are inevitably something along the lines of: “Do I actually need to buy a women’s bike? What’s the difference?”
I usually spare them the whole saga of the industry’s indecision about how to build and market bikes to women, and generally follow up with a question back about height. Unless the buyer is very petite and needs an XS frame, which not all brands make, I usually advise women to keep their search broad and don’t limit it just to bikes that claim to be for females—these days there just aren’t enough differences to count out a whole host of bikes that could be ‘the one,’ but aren’t labeled women’s-specific. With a few exceptions. One of those being the Juliana Furtado, a bike I almost always recommend to someone who’s already got the bug, and now needs the right bike to progress. Gender aside, the mid-travel, 27.5-inch-wheeled Furtado is a grin-inducing, do-it-all kind of bike, and always has been. Juliana has never been coy about the fact that its bikes share frames with Santa Cruz (the 5010 in this case), and instead focuses on what sets it apart—lighter suspension tunes, different contact points and Juliana-specific paint colors (usually way cooler than the unisex) on the tech side, and, on the not-so-tech side, a community of ambassadors and events built around the brand that aim to promote women’s cycling.
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