From the Top: The Kona Collective
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Kona's office in Ferndale, Washington, is about as nondescript as it gets. There's no sign or billboard announcing the company's presence, just a blue warehouse situated in a small industrial park. Step inside the front door and the low key image remains – vintage photos, race memorabilia, and old catalog photos are scattered about the walls, forming a random collage of all things Kona. The warehouse space is vast and well lit, full of towering stacks of cardboard boxes containing bikes ready to be shipped out, and various bikes are on display, hanging from the bright orange walls, artifacts from bygone eras of mountain bike history. There's even the first Stinky prototype, circa 1997, a 1995 special edition HumuHumu singlespeed, and a 1992 Fire Mountain hardtail, complete with the ill-fated Kona Z-link fork. Kona's history dates back to 1988, but the origins go back even further than that, to the formative years company founders Jacob Heilbron and Dan Gerhard spent working in bike shops, years that inspired their decision to try running their own bike company. The two met in Vancouver, BC, during the early days of mountain biking on the North Shore, and they eventually decided to start Kona with Joe Murray onboard as a designer. As luck would have it, mountain biking was enjoying a growth in popularity, and the North Shore was on the cutting edge of technical mountain biking at the time as riders began to seek out more and more difficult trails. Kona's first bikes were steel hardtails, but as riding evolved on the Shore they were there to meet the demand, introducing long travel, full suspension bikes with three chainrings that were meant to be pedalled up and then ridden hard and fast down the trails, the first “freeride” bikes to hit the market. Kona's reputation as a “freeride” brand stuck around a little longer than the term itself, but the last few years have seen Kona broaden their product lineup, introducing carbon fiber into the mountain bike line, and making bikes more in tune with what today's mountain bikers are looking for. We sat down with Kona's owners and a core group of long-term employees that have been with the company for over twenty years to find out more about the company's history, as well as its future. The group included Jake Heilbron and Dan Gerhard, Kona's founders; Doug Lafavor (Dr. Dew), industrial designer; Paddy White, head bicycle product manager; and Maurey Olsten, production manager. | • Founded in 1988 by Dan Gerhard and Jacob Heilbron. Joe Murray is the first designer / product manager. • Doug Lafavor, "Dr. Dew" joins Kona in July 1990. • 1994: Steve Peat races DH in the UK on a Kona Hei Hei Ti frame. • 1995: Kona Europe is founded by Jimbo Holmstrom. It's now the largest division of Kona. • 1998: The Stinky Dee-Lux is introduced, the first production freeride bike, with 5" of travel and a triple front chainring. • 2000: Stab Primo DH bike with 8-inches of rear wheel travel is produced. • 2005: Fabien Barel wins the DH World Championships aboard his Stab Supreme. •2008: Graham Agassiz joins the Kona Clump. • 2011: The first carbon Konas are released - a 26' hardtail and a cyclocross bike. • 2013: The Carbon Operator makes its debut. |
What made you decide to start Kona? Jake: We were already in bikes. Dan and I spent our school years in bike shops – mechanic, manager, stuff like that. Dan was working in St. Louis and I was working in BC, and that's where we met. We had been at Rocky Mountain Bicycles – I was one of the founders there, and Dan became the sales manager. After we left we decided that we wanted to have our own bike company. There's a time element involved in working in bike shops; it's very intense, and of course when you're working in a shop, especially 30 years ago, there was a lot of really bad product - we kept thinking, "We can make better bikes than this."
I was working at Marin Bikes, and I met Joe Murray there. Dan had already started a company distributing Brodie Bicycles. Then he picked up Marin for Canada. Things weren't going so well for Joe and I at Marin – things were really scattered and confused. Anyway, Joe and I said, “Let's get together with Dan – we can do better than this." That was really the impetus – knowing that we could do better.
Dan: And Joe came up to the Northwest, to Vancouver, and said, “This is a groovy town.” He was looking for that kind of town. He rode on the North Shore with Dewey and the Cove boys, met Brodie, they synced, so a lot of ideas came from there. Being in the Northwest changed his ideas about bikes a little bit.
Where were the first Kona bikes made? Jake: We were making some bikes in the US, there were some frames being made by Tom Teesdale out in Iowa, and then we were making the titanium frames in Kennewick, Washington, at Sandvik Special Metals. But we had been making bikes in Taiwan right from the outset. The original bikes, which were called Cascade for about four months, were made in Taiwan at a factory that we still use today. It was always a combination of the two. We were familiar with overseas manufacturing - with Rocky we'd done manufacturing in Japan, and I'd worked with Tom Ritchey for a little while on Japanese fabrication. We recognized that the center of the bicycling world was moving to Taiwan.
Dan: Well, and the whole mountain biking thing was going off. People from all over the world were contacting us, saying, “Hey, can I get some bikes?” So that gave us the impetus. We were quite small – we did 600 bikes the first year – but we were able to go to the factories because the guys in the UK wanted some, the guys in Switzerland wanted some. We were able to be international right from the beginning, and overseas manufacturing was the key.
Jake: The original Konas were custom – there were frame kits, and you picked the parts group, you picked the fork.
Dr. Dew: We used to assemble the headsets – they came in parts, and we put them into plastic bags, but you'd get to the end and be one bearing race short. So you'd have to go through all the bags and find out which one had the extra bearing race. It was great though.
Pat: My first job at Kona was polishing titanium frames in between road and track racing, being on the National team, working on a fishing boat, and then going to school at Western Washington University. I'd come up for a couple of days and polish the frames. That was maybe 1991-92, then I came back as a sales person in 1994.
Dan: I think we all had a go at polishing titanium frames. In the early days you had to do everything.
Was there a certain time period where the company really started to grow? Jake: It was, and always has been pretty steady. It's almost like we've had some reins on the company, not wanting it to get too big, and trying to keep the fun aspect at the top of our minds. That's always the balance in work – how much fun is it going to be if you're a really big corporation? Although, there was a spike when “Stinky fever” really hit.
Kona was at the forefront of the "freeride" mountain bike scene, with some of the earliest bikes intentionally designed to handle the abuses that riders were subjecting their bikes to. Can you explain how this came to be? 
Paddy White on one of the original Stabs.
Jake: Well, when we turned Paddy from a sales guy into a product manager he started bringing in ideas about longer travel, downhill oriented bikes. That was the first Stab, then we added a triple chainring to a Stab and made it a Stinky. We brought in the Chute hardtail, kind of the forerunner to the Honzo.
Pat: I'd see people at 4x races using XC hardtails, and I realized that if we changed some tubing around, changed the geometry, we could make a bike that could handle stock trials, dual slalom and urban assault. This was when we were starting to go up to the college campus and hucking off structures and stuff.
Jake: Being in this region put us in the right place to know what these bikes were all about. The North Shore trails started getting more and more extreme, and the riders started doing more and more, and we happened to be making the bikes that worked ideally for that type of riding. It's never been our goal to be a big outfit. We are spread all over the world, but it's not real deep. We're constantly throttling back the number of models, keeping it at something we can manage, focus on, and do really well. That's been a consistent philosophy. In the beginning they were all steel hardtails, and then it became freeride, and we became a little pigeonholed, but we've always been accepting of different styles. We keep bringing in fresh people, fresh ideas, people like Chris Mandell and Jack Russell – that keeps things evolving in the company. This group sitting here is the foundation, what keeps it really balanced and focused, and moving forward in a controlled way.
Pat: I could see there was a need for downhill bikes in the market. Sure, there were guys like Nicolai and Turner, I was racing a Turner at the time, and I could see that it was growing. I was frustrated, and I didn't think we (Kona) had the resources to do it, but Dan pushed me, he said “you can do it.” And then with Doug's help we were able to put together a product that was successful and addressed the needs that I wanted to see.
Pat: I'd see people at 4x races using XC hardtails, and I realized that if we changed some tubing around, changed the geometry, we could make a bike that could handle stock trials, dual slalom and urban assault. This was when we were starting to go up to the college campus and hucking off structures and stuff.
Jake: Being in this region put us in the right place to know what these bikes were all about. The North Shore trails started getting more and more extreme, and the riders started doing more and more, and we happened to be making the bikes that worked ideally for that type of riding. It's never been our goal to be a big outfit. We are spread all over the world, but it's not real deep. We're constantly throttling back the number of models, keeping it at something we can manage, focus on, and do really well. That's been a consistent philosophy. In the beginning they were all steel hardtails, and then it became freeride, and we became a little pigeonholed, but we've always been accepting of different styles. We keep bringing in fresh people, fresh ideas, people like Chris Mandell and Jack Russell – that keeps things evolving in the company. This group sitting here is the foundation, what keeps it really balanced and focused, and moving forward in a controlled way.
Pat: I could see there was a need for downhill bikes in the market. Sure, there were guys like Nicolai and Turner, I was racing a Turner at the time, and I could see that it was growing. I was frustrated, and I didn't think we (Kona) had the resources to do it, but Dan pushed me, he said “you can do it.” And then with Doug's help we were able to put together a product that was successful and addressed the needs that I wanted to see.
Jake: That's where things originated, out of the North Shore and Deep Cove. Doug (Dr. Dew) was one of the founders of the Cove bike shop. He kind of stepped out of it for a while, and I said to Dan, “Let's phone up Dewey, let's see what he's doing.” He was cutting grass, right, so I said, “Why don't you come and work for us?” He'd never drawn bikes before, he'd never even turned on a computer, so we said, “here's your computer, here's a CAD program, figure it out.”
Do you think that having everyone do a little bit of everything helps keep employees around? Pat: Oh yeah, I still unload containers and take out the trash.
Jake: It's that kind of a company – everyone is capable of doing everything. Obviously, Dan and I started out doing everything.
Pat: A real well known story is that when the company was starting out and it was getting bigger they kept interviewing industry guys for the sales position in Eastern Canada. I introduced Dik, and during the interview he took a shit and plugged up the toilet. He came back into the interview and asked where the plunger was so he could clean up the mess, and they thought, 'That's the kind of guy we're looking for – someone that can make a mess and then clean it up.'
Dan: Or what about Willy (Willy Warren, Kona's outside sales rep - Ed)? I came into the office and there's a Columbia one speed out front, and this guy in his snow pants who's been working in a gas station all night so he can get up to snowboard at Mt. Baker. I asked him if he'd ever worked a 9-5 before and he said, “No, but I'm willing to try.” He's a nut, right, but that's the kind of person we like.
Pat: I'd seen him doing downhill and dual slalom races, so I knew he could ride, which was a big part of why he fit in so well.
Dan: And then to put him at a desk and teach him how to use a computer... He could barely write a sentence, but he did it. We kept him in house long enough to show him how things worked before we said, 'You can leave now,' and sent him out onto the road.
Jake: Maurey came from unconventional beginnings too – he was a fisherman. We needed someone to keep our building organized, and now he oversees all of our production. He's at the factory every month watching our bikes get built and making sure that we're not shipping problems around the world.
 | Being in this region put us in the right place to know what these bikes were all about. The North Shore trails started getting more and more extreme, and the riders started doing more and more, and we happened to be making the bikes that worked ideally for that type of riding. It's never been our goal to be a big outfit... We're constantly throttling back the number of models, keeping it at something we can manage, focus on, and do really well. |
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| Willy Warren, one of Kona's outside sales reps, flying high on a Stinky circa 1999. |
Kona's factory riders seem to have unique personalities - they're a little different. How do you find them? Jake: I think it's like almost everything we do – it's being at the ground level of things. We've always thought that everything in cycling develops from the grassroots level, and that's how we found a lot of riders. Geoff Kabush is one that came out of grassroots, plus Tracy Moseley, Graham Agassiz, Steve Peat, Greg Minnaar. It's the same with bikes – it's happening at the grassroots level, and you can see what people are doing to modify their bikes to make them work for the kind of riding they're trying to do. That's really how you find out what's happening – this industry has never worked from the top down. That's why we're out there trying to figure out what people are doing with their bikes.
Dan: And our sales guys aren't traditional sales guys. They're riders, and they love going out and doing events and riding, and that's where they find out what's happening - because they're out there. They might be going to Vermont to sell, they'll do three events when they're there. A lot of it comes from our sales guys - “you've got to see this kid – he's unreal kind of thing.” It's getting the right personality type.
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| Kona factory rider Graham Agassiz doing what he does best at the Red Bull Rampage. |
Any thoughts of growing the World Cup team?Dan: We had Barel and Moseley, and we love doing it, but it's hard to financially support something like that.
For a number of years, Kona was a major supplier of bikes for the Whistler Bike Park. What was the reasoning behind ending this relationship?Jake: At the outset it was beneficial; we were making good bikes that the parks could count on in their fleet. After a while it changed and seemed like Kona was just supplying rental bikes – we were the Ford Taurus of the mountain, and we didn't want to be that. We wanted people to bring our bikes to the mountain, not go to the mountain and ride our bikes. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we stopped being the core bike because of that. When we introduced the Operator we decided we didn't want that to be the rental bike, so we backed off a little bit. We've always tried to stay away from the race to the bottom of the price point. It's not about the price point. Obviously, you need to make commercial bikes that are going to sell, but when everybody is focusing on one category, that game is not one that we want to be in right now. It doesn't make commercial sense to just give away your bikes.
| After a while it change and seemed like Kona was just supplying rental bikes - we were the Ford Taurus of the mountain, and we didn't want to be that. We wanted people to bring our bikes to the mountain, not go to the mountain and ride our bikes. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we stopped being the core bike because of that. When we introduced the Operator we decided we didn't want that to be the rental bike, so we backed off a little bit. |
Are there any bikes you wish had never made it to the market? Pat: For me it was the Stinky 9. It didn't ride right – to me it just felt wrong. We definitely had a request from several of our markets to do such a beast. Just putting it together and then riding it, it was one I didn't really want to see come to market.
Dr. Dew: I think there's a number of bikes we made that just weren't quite right, but I don't regret any of them. I think the fact that you f*ck up and make mistakes makes you a little more sharper and a little more grounded. If you just rolled along and everything turned out perfect all the time it just wouldn't be that much fun.
Dan: At one point we had this great idea for a way to grease the bottom bracket called the 'Grease Sealer.' You could push new grease in and purge out the old, but the problem was it wouldn't seal that well, and we had a guy call up wondering when to stop pumping – he'd filled his chainstay up with grease. And then there was the Z-link fork. We had all the parts and stuff, but started riding it and realized we had to destroy it.
Dr. Dew: An interesting thing about the job that we talk about a lot is that you can do something really well, and it's not like dealers phone you up and say good job – it doesn't happen. But you do anything wrong and you hear it. It's a tough part of the job. As the expression goes,'you have to build 100 bridges to be called a bridge builder, but you f*ck one goat'...
What does the future hold for Kona?Jake: We used to look forwards about six months at a time, and have never spent that much time on long term planning. Not that it's reactive, we try to stay just a little ahead of the curve, but I think we have been forced to look a little bit further ahead because it takes longer to develop products now. That happened about five years ago – the way that we had been developing bikes just wasn't good enough anymore. When the big four started making really great high-end bikes in a category that they hadn't concentrated on much before (they'd been concentrating on making lots of volume, lots of cheap and middle priced bikes), and then all of a sudden they were making really great bikes at a higher price point that was our domain for a long time. They started surpassing us, so we had to reorganize the way we develop products and look a little farther into the future, a couple, three years ahead, recognizing it took longer to make a really great, perfect product. So that's been the evolution of the company, planning a little farther in advance, and it's starting to show now. For a time we said “our bikes aren't good enough,” and I think now we're at a point where we are starting to get a little bit ahead in some categories and being right there in some others. That development cycle too is really helping us get to where we really want to be.
Dr. Dew: We've always been relatively conservative as far as development goes – we have to feel really convinced about something before we get behind it, but at the same time we've sometimes been so far ahead of the curve that people haven't understood it. A lot of stuff is driven by guys that are enthusiasts within the company.
Jake: As far as what's happening in the company in the long term, fresh ideas keep coming in. People keep getting drawn to Kona, they want to be a part of it. We have people in the company that haven't had the opportunity yet, and that evolution will continue, with people that understand the way Kona works continuing to bring in those ideas – they'll keep pushing us.
Dew: There are no plans to sell to a bike factory or anything.
Jake: (Laughing) Nobody wants to buy us.... It's a little bit of a quirky operation I think. We just keep attracting oddballs and weirdos, but that's how it continues to exist, with a little bit of weirdness.
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Now that's pure awsome
www.pinkbike.com/photo/9780119
www.pinkbike.com/photo/2844552
www.pinkbike.com/photo/1533401
And for the people that liked the glow in the dark logos
www.pinkbike.com/photo/781938
Only one color option per bike is kinda weak. Hopefully a repaint doesn't void warranty.
THANKS!!!
www.pinkbike.com/photo/10333943
poor bloke only got it like 3 weeks ago
My Kona Bear was the first bike I bought with my own money, and I loved that thing, wish I hadn't grown out of the frame, by the time I switched to hydraulic brakes and some wider tires, it was an amazing trail bike. Also had a Stink Dee-lux after I decided the 9 was too much bike, briefly had a Stab, and had a Cowan I wish I never sold.
Really eyeballing the Process line, just wish they came in the cool color schemes like the late 90s/2000s bikes. A Process 134 in the same black/white/green color scheme as my Bear would be amazing, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
But it was an awesome huck/drop bike - it just weighed a ton, I shot out the top of a berm a couple of times on this one haha.
www.pinkbike.com/photo/639991
But word on the inside is that 2014 153 models ars sold out already. Huh, not enough ordered?
weld some more,...
Guess I'm going to gt force or scott lt, then maybe canfield balance.
Tuff to make a comeback without bikes available!
You're making HUGE assumptions by assuming the rider was JRA.
ge.tt/2grNrh71/v/0
(As I did yesterday on trance sx/fox 34/140 rear sucks). My bike is a 2010 gt force carbon/150, 28lbs.
Wow! Kona is back. Dh feel- confidence enducing bike. Reviews have been spot on for its poppy playfulness (16.9cs), deep rear susp. AND, IT CLIMBS! Kept up w/sum rad goats, fireroads and quick up down single.
Very well spec dl. Weight unknown, but it didn't feel hefty.
Now give it some up to date paint schemes (new gt, carbines, range/sight) and make this in carbon stat!
Really happy that they have been back on it recently, well done Kona.
What does Kona have to say about this?
I just thought before 50 people start dissing KONA for this stuff again we should ask these Q's. I don't not know the answer to the questions, they just pop into my head when I see these photos.....
Why do you have to be THAT guy?