If you happen to go up Guadalupe right now, on the outside wall of a bike shop on the Drag near MLK there's a big sign for Orbea bikes.
I was a little startled to see this. I've heard that they're good bikes, but I'm surprised to see a big banner for them in a major part of Austin. Why? Orbea isn't just a bike maker. It's a company in the Mondragon cooperative chain from the Basque country of Spain. This means it's a worker cooperative, owned by its workers and managed through democratic assembly. Mondragon is one of the greatest living experiments that testifies to the strength of the cooperative model. Tens of thousands of workers in hundreds of companies confederated together produce an array of products and services, have their own bank and technical school, etc.
Orbea itself started as a rifle manufacturer during the Spanish Civil War, making guns for the Republican partisans trying to beat back Franco and the nazi-supported fascists. After the Republicans (comprised of liberals, anarchists, communists, socialists, Basque and Catalan nationalists, etc.) were defeated, Orbea converted to peacetime production, ultimately becoming a world leader in high quality bicycles. Their US sales branch doesn't focus on the worker control angle much, but Orbea has been part of Mondragon for decades.
Definitely an amazing business.