The Stories Behind Some of the Bike Industry’s Most Well-Known Monikers
Our super-sleuth, investigative reporter, Tim Newcomb has been digging around to find exactly what’s in that company name. Some are obvious, but some are more than obscure!
For the most part, you can forget about focus groups and market research when it came time for some of the bike industry’s most well-known companies to settle on a name. Instead, you’ll find plenty of acronym figuring, location loving, pun hunting and, in some cases, quick thinking gave your favorite companies the name you splash across your bike. And your body.
Salsa Cycles
Ross Shafer didn’t want to name his bike company after himself, so he named it after his lunch. A typical lunch for the hot pepper nut was a jar of Pace Picante sauce dumped into cottage cheese with a bag of chips. Shafer says he wanted a name that offered “something hot” and “something spicy.” He came up with Salsa.
Cannondale
Peter Meyers needed to order a phone line for a new bike company in Connecticut in 1971 so he went to the nearby Cannondale Metro North train station to use a pay phone. When asked how the new phone line should be listed, Meyers froze a little and responded with Cannondale, borrowing the name of the station. The name stuck and Cannondale has lived on for decades.
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With 22 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)
