What’s In A (Bike Company) Name?

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!

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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. 

Lezyne

Slurred speech has a bit to do with the Lezyne name. Micki Kozuscheck says a group was drinking Martini’s while discussing “design” as the backbone for the prospective brand and its new name. With the alcohol running freely, “design” soon slurred into “Lezyne,” a name that stuck with the accessory manufacturer. 

Transition Bikes

Owner Kevin Menard says Transition has two meanings. One is the definition of changing from one state to another, matching the company goal of creating an accessible, open bike company. The second was the actual meaning of the landing of a jump. “We would always say after landing a nice jump, ‘Man, that was a nice transition,’” he says, “so we thought it would work great as a brand name since everyone knew what it means.” 

Cotic Bikes

Don’t fret, Cy Turner isn’t crazy, but that didn’t stop him from getting the “Cy-Cotic” or “psychotic” nickname in university. And with Turner such as popular surname in the bike industry — GT is Gary Turner, Turner Bikes is David Turner and Paul Turner founded RockShox — Cotic, short for ‘psychotic’, fit personally and also had a nice symmetry from a design point of view that Turner has played with graphically. 

Park Tool

Howard Hawkins and Art Engstrom bought a bicycle shop in the Hazel Park neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota in the 1960s and soon started creating their own tools for repair. But expansion forced the shop from St. Paul to Maplewood, leading Hazel Park Cycle Center to become Park Cycle Center. It was a natural leading, then, that when the company started selling the tools they made, they used the Park name. Park Tool was a fit. The only problem, though, was when the calls started coming in for Mr. Park they had nobody to take the call. 

SRAM

Think acronym, but one that isn’t totally clear cut. Starting with a grip shifter in 1987, a company founded by Stanley R. Day, Sam Patterson and attorney Scott Ray King needed a name. And after spending a couple of months as OLLO Bicycle Components, they switched to SRAM, taking the “S” that led each of the three’s first names, the “R” that was two of their middle initials and the “AM” to finish off Sam and mashing it together into SRAM. 

Kona Bikes

In 1988, Jacob Heilbron, Dan Gerhard and Joe Murray got together to form a new mountain bike company in British Columbia, Cascade Bikes. But trademark issues scuttled those Cascade Bikes plans and instead the love of Hawaii from Heilbron and Gerhard led to naming the company Kona Bikes, after a region on the “big island” of Hawaii. Early bike names from Kona featured volcanic-inspired names. 

Moots

Mr. Moots, the small alligator that serves as the figurehead of Moots, was born well before the 1981 birth of the Colorado-based company. The founder’s favorite pencil-top eraser was a little alligator, which legend has it cried “moots” when Kent Eriksen squeezed it together. Moots became the obvious choice for a company name and Mr. Moots is now a key part of the company, complete with his own bio page on the company website. 

Knolly Bikes

Knolly Bikes is Noel Buckley. Buckley started his company in 2002 and to give it a name that tied to him personally without simply taking his last name, the Noel was played into Knolly Bikes, a British Columbia-based company that still holds the same ethos as when it started. 

Evil Bikes

Kevin Walsh loved skateboard and snowboard culture. When the marketer and designer at heart helped launch the Evil Revolt downhill race bike it gave life to an Evil brand that he’d already been toying with. Eventually Evil Bikes was born, a way to let design, culture and art take the focal point of a new mountain biking company.

Canyon Bicycles 

Roman Arnold first had a bike parts company, Radsport Arnold GmbH. But about 11 years after Radsport’s founding, the name Canyon surfaced from the brand in 1996 and was then adopted in 2001 when Canyon Bicycles started making bikes. In the past, Roman has said the name was chosen for its uniqueness and that a canyon can leave a big impression on people. Plus, a canyon is wide, giving the feeling of open space, all reasons he gravitated toward Canyon Bicycles. 

Nukeproof 

Launched in Michigan in 1990 by John Muenzenmeyer as Nuke Proof Industries, a company experimenting with new materials, such as titanium and carbon fiber, the strong-sounding name was menat to tie with its fresh approach to emerging cycling materials. The company sold and moved to Ireland in 2004 and is now known simply as Nukeproof.

Shimano

The 1921 start of Shimano Iron Works in Japan was thanks to the efforts of Shozaburo Shimano. Starting with a single lathe on the site of an old factory, Shimano Iron Works grew thanks to the efforts of Shozaburo Shimano and his name continues to lead the company to this day. 

Specialized

When Mike Sinyard traveled Europe looking for bike components, he landed in Italy. Upon returning to California to start selling those Italian parts he said “Mike’s Bikes” just didn’t sound very international. He liked how in Italy if someone was an artist, they were an artiste and people were labeled a specialist. That’s how he came up with Specialized Bicycle Components, an internationally relevant name that tied to his Italian connections. 

Oakley

James Jannard started with The Oakley Grip, selling them from his car at motocross events. The grip may have originally come from him making them in his garage, but the Oakley name comes from Jannard’s English Setter dog, named Oakley Anne. 

Giro

Jim Gentes simply liked the sound of the name Giro — a common banking term in Europe, no less — and being a designer first and foremost, decided the potential for the name as a logo with a rider with arms outstretched in victory was too good to pass up. 

Orange Bikes

When Roger Tushingham started a mountain bike company, he knew his last name wasn’t going to work as the brand name (though he did try…). Tushingham and Lester Noble also knew they wanted their bikes to attract a lot of riders, an “all around range” bike option. That “all around” mantra was verbally jumbled into “o round” inside the company and eventually “orange,” leading to Orange Bikes taking over as the name of the company. 

Dakine

Look to Hawaii for this surf, snowboard and bike company’s name. Hawaiian slang for “the thing” or “the best,” Dakine — pronounced dekein — means to have the best gear. That Maui-based surf slang started stretching beyond the waves and now Dakine has plenty of bike gear to match. 

Ibis Cycles 

Large birds dominated the naming thoughts of Scot Nicol. Ibis, a graceful, long-legged bird, won the Audubon challenge for Nicol, though. Reports are he ruled out Merlin because it was already used in the cycling industry and Kestrel was in the mix — another bird that eventually found its way to the cycling industry — until Nicol rested on Ibis and then designed around that moniker. 

YT Industries

Young Talent. That’s what YT stands for. Markus Flossman started his company in Germany with the goal of connecting youth to the joys of mountain biking, leading to the Young Talent name. 

Trek Bikes

The Wisconsin founding of Trek Bikes by Richard Burke in 1976 was, according to the company, a name chosen to reflect “the journey and adventure that every bicycle ride can bring.” The Trek name, then, means exactly what likely every person thought it did, a focus-group worthy name from over four decades back. 

Fox Racing

Geoff Fox was at Grand Prix Cycles in 1973, but by 1974 he, along with his son, Peter, started Moto-X Fox. The pair, making motocross and cycling clothing, have used their last name throughout the iterations of the brand, with Fox Head Inc. the parent of Fox Racing. 

Mondraker

Miguel Pina loved comic books, especially Mandrake the Magician. The Mondraker name, then, was a loose tie to Mandrake the Magician, which Pina once claimed could create something out of nothing. 

Orbea

While not always a bike company, Orbea started before any other bike company did. Orbea got its start manufacturing handguns in 1840, ahead of the Bianchi company making bicycles. But it wasn’t until 1920 that Orbea had shifted into cycles and baby carriages. The name Obrea derives from the last name of the three brothers who founded the company. 

Rocky Mountain Bikes

The 1981 founding of Rocky Mountain Bikes doesn’t surprise on where the name came from. Co-founder Grayson Bain, with roots in both Edmonton, Alberta, and Vancouver, British Columbia, says he was flying between the two and looked out onto the sun-drenched peaks of snowy rock formations making up the Rocky Mountains, thinking then about naming the new company after the mountain range that ran between the two cities. So, while the company is based near Vancouver, outside the Rocky Mountains, the connection remains. 

Pivot Cycles

Pivot Cycles founder Chris Cocalis knew he needed a name that fit well on the downtube, was easy to pronounce without being offensive in any language and was just, well, rad. He kept a running list of potential names with his team, but the first run of frames was nearing production and he hadn’t settled on a name. In came a voicemail from a friend that went like: “Hey Chris, how about Pivot? Oh, never mind. Now that I say it out loud, it sounds pretty f-ing stupid.” The voicemail was over. But Pivot fit the criteria and with Cocalis at a pivotal point in his career, having moved on from Titus Cycles, and the new company’s suspension placement important do the design, Pivot caught. All thanks to that voicemail. 

How was that? Knew all of those? (We certainly didn’t…) and do you have ones of your own to add? Let’s see some more in the comments if you can shed some light on more company names for us.