Hellion is a new sub-brand of Early Rider that hopes to bring aggressive full-suspension and hardtail bikes to young riders.
Last year, Early Rider bought the popular kids bike brand Lil Shredder, and at the same time took on the Lil Shredder team to create a new Early Rider sub-brand. Called, Hellion, the company aims to bring aggressive, hard riding bikes to young riders. In fact, if you have been out to Whistler at any time over the past few years and was overtaken by a kid on a full-suspension bike, she or he was probably on one of these.
The Hellion range is made up of both hardtail and full-suspension bikes, all with the signature Early Rider raw finish, and all with the types of features we have come to expect from enduro and freeride bikes designed for us big kids.
We’re waiting for an email to arrive with the full specifications and geometry details of these bikes, but what we saw on at the booth at Eurobike are frames with stealth dropper routing, slack geometry, and sliding dropouts.
A few of the bikes are able to take either 24in or 26in wheels so that they can grow with their riders, and the full-suspension bikes use a simple single pivot system with custom made DNM shock, although the bikes on display had ex-Atherton Fox shocks installed!
We also learned that Hellion hopes to offer custom Hope bikes under the Hope Academy program too.
Once we have more details we’ll pop them up, but in the meantime just check these bikes out and wish you were small enough to shred them.
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“In fact, if you have been out to Whistler at any time over the past few years and was overtaken by a kid on a full-suspension bike, she or he was probably on one of these.”
Lil Shredder were certainly first to market for highspec kids bikes but their shockingly high price point opened the flood gates for other brands to launch and existing ones to grow their kids bike ranges.
Lil Shredder are now probably the least prevalent kids bikes in the bike park with Spawn, Norco, Commencal, Rocky Mountain and Transition taking the top spots respectively in the 20-26 sizes.
I don’t doubt that US based bike parks would tell a different story with Lil Shredder and Transition likely being the more common brands under kids there.
I didn’t know early rider had bought lil shredder, interesting decision as there’s no real IP with a single pivot frame with catalogue parts, however by rebranding as helion they’ve just removed the branding credibility that Lil Shredder developed for the simple full sus frame.
however, I do love the Belter, thats a real head turner of a kids bike and Early Rider have done a great job in developing their own superb brand identity already!
Good luck though.. the more the better!
My son has been riding the Hellion 20″ for the last 10 weeks so we wrote an in-depth review with photos and videos here https://unluckypete.com/2020/07/early-rider-hellion-20-long-term-review/