Inside Yeti: The Turquoise Legacy Continues
It would have been easy for Yeti Cycles to fade into mountain bike folklore, much like the mythical abominable snowman that the company's name is derived from. While the company now approaches its 35th anniversary and continues to grow in size and stature, its ride to success wasn't exactly plain sailing.
Few bicycle brands manage to capture the imagination quite like Yeti, rolling back the decades to legendary days when Missy “The Missile” Giove, John Tomac, and Myles Rockwell were flashing through the race tape in a blur of turquoise and yellow.
Yeti is seen as a Colorado brand, and for the most part its history does lay in The Centennial State, but it was born in the Agoura hills of Southern California in the hands of John Parker back in 1985. Racing quickly became the backbone of the company as Chris Conroy – the current president of Yeti – explains: “He was really at the forefront of the whole racing thing. He came from a racing background, he was a sprint car racer and knew the racing scene from a SoCal perspective. He was the first to roll up to a mountain bike race in a box truck, full Yeti'd out. From the earliest days, Yeti had a pro race team in Southern California.”
The company relocated to Durango not long after the 1990 World Championships and started the Yeti / Colorado marriage. “...there were legendary teams during that time, Myles and Missy, Deaton... the whole crew. People remember Yeti for the turquoise and yellow during that era, the turquoise and yellow was all the rage,” Conroy continues. It was this period in time that began to create such a rich heritage and legacy that still surrounds the brand.
Jump to the mid-90s and Schwinn purchased Yeti, the beginning of a crucial chapter in the company's history, and it was at that time that Chris Conroy first entered the Yeti picture. It wouldn't be the most fruitful of times, leading to Volant taking over the reins in '99 with Conroy at the forefront of it all:
 | I was the brand manager for Yeti and also the product development manager for Scott for the US. I was able to work with Brett Hahn and John Parker back in the day when the factory was still in Durango. I left the company a couple of years later and then I was working with the guys at Volant Ski Company, they wanted a counter-seasonal business. I called the guys at Schwinn, the VP in marketing at the time, (Gregg Bagni). He was a big Yeti fan, but Schwinn had other ambitions. We both agreed Schwinn was focusing on the brand, and I told him they couldn’t let the brand die. He agreed. So we were able to put together a deal for Yeti in 1999 and I became the general manager, the only person I inherited from the Volant side was Hoog. [Steve Hoogendoorn, Vice President of Yeti Cycles] |
They relocated to Golden, remaining there to this day. Just two years after the Volant sale, it was Conroy and Hoog who took control, purchasing the company together with some friends. Yeti now had the people it needed at the wheel to at least give it stability, but it was no easy task to right the wrongs and get back on track taking “a solid 5 years just to right the ship.” Hoog says: “We were living week-to-week, manufacturing in-house and trying to push the product forward. The first bike we designed and built was the AS-R. Fortunately, it was a hit.”
Yeti has been on a steady upward trajectory over the past couple of decades but they seemed to gather some serious momentum in recent years with the rise of enduro. Coincidence? Perhaps, but I doubt it. Right place right time? A certain degree of that, yes. Reading the market and getting the foot in the door early? Undoubtedly. Yeti had been making longer travel trail bikes for a while, the likes of the ASR and the 575 proved popular, but it seemed like a real turning point came during the introduction of their "SB" lineup and the fulltime switch to EWS racing. Their pairing of Jared Graves and Richie Rude at the time proved deadly. Jared famously took the SB66 to bronze at DH World Champs, then the following season they went 1-2 on the SB6 and SB5 at the Winter Park EWS, and further down the line they'd both clinch the series overall with a handful of wins. Having two prolific racers at the top of their game banging in race wins and overalls is certainly one way to provide validation to your new line of product.
As I mentioned previously, Yeti is set to tick off its 35th anniversary in 2020. What's changed? In some ways, it’s changed quite considerably. The size is the big one, they now sit around the 65 employee mark, aside from that there are things like the absence of alloy frames, and their manufacturing taking place in Vietnam. But in other ways, they've not changed much at all. Racing is still at the forefront of what they do, turquoise remains the color of choice, and as Chris continues to stress for them “it's really important that we can continue to fund and invest in innovative product design and development,” something he says the brand has done since the very beginning.
In the last few years Yeti have refurbished the entrance to their facility and built a showroom that the public can have a nosey round.
There's a wide range of bikes from the past and present on display.
The bike that Carolyn "Curly" Curl used in her speed World Record way back in 1997.
Fancy going 122mph on that setup? Yeah, me neither.
There's no shortage of racing memorabilia within these walls, that's for sure.
| Because I knew the original Yeti crew and I knew what the brand was, there was this tremendous pressure not to f*** it up. It's a legacy brand and we’re honored to be associated with it. We made a very conscious decision not to make it a personality-based brand because John was such a big personality back in the day, we didn't want it to be Chris' Yeti or Hoog's Yeti...We wanted it to be Yeti. We felt is was important to pay deference to our past, but we had to push the brand forward. Instead of just being an iconic brand that relied on its past success, which some brands did and went away, we decided we had to continue to take that innovation that made Yeti great in the late 80s early 90s and just ramp that up. |
It was Yeti who gave Aaron Gwin his first taste of World Cup action in 2008.
Some of the greatest racing successes have come in the hands of Jared Graves and Richie Rude.
Graves finally got his 4X World Champs gold in 2009 on Australian soil.
| It's funny. Those were tough days back then, there was no guarantee it was going to work. There was no guarantee we were going to be successful. We made a ton of mistakes... We were super motivated and focused on innovation and, at the time, in-house production. The race team was a cornerstone of what we did and if we could make bikes that made the fastest racers in the world go faster then we knew we would win. Ultimately we kept chipping away and we've had some success but in the bike industry when you say that, you knock on wood because it can all change tomorrow, so we don't take it for granted. |
Beer is serious business at Yeti with six different options on tap.
The front and rear triangles are shipped in from Vietnam before undergoing further quality control, then the frame or complete build can begin.
Frames racked up and awaiting their turn in the stand.
| We've had great success with racing and people ask all the time how we keep finding the next great rider and really there is no magic formula. The fact of the matter is we go to the races...We structure our program so we have a regional, national, and World Cup level team and we've had that for over a decade. What ends up happening is that we find someone who is a regional rider who is just crushing it and they are running the same equipment, same sponsor equipment, so we can move them to national and world cup pretty easily back and forth based on their performance. Our biggest success story there was Aaron Gwin, who started as a regional rider. He had done a few races and was beating the pros down in California and Rich Houseman got him on our regional team. At that point we had Blenki, Jared, and Leov, on the team… I still think back to how lucky we were to have such a stacked team. I asked those guys, do you think he could race World Cup? They said to me not only could he race World Cup, but he could also finish top 10. First World Cup we sent him to was Mont Sainte Anne and he finished 10th. Everyone was just like, who the hell is this guy?! |
There's not actually a massive stock of frames which, I guess, is a good sign for Yeti as it means they're getting sold.
All the small parts that start to piece together the frame puzzle.
Josh Conroy, chief Switch Infinity bearing presser.
| We raced both a World Enduro schedule as well as a DH schedule. We are a small company. You can imagine that any one of those is a huge commitment but to run both of them was a massive commitment. We'd just come out with the SB66 and Jared took 3rd place in the DH World Champs on a trail bike which was pretty cool. Richie also won Junior World's that year. We decided it made sense for us to move into enduro, we asked Jared what he thought and Jared said yeah, rock on. We asked Richie what he thought and he was like, yeah, let's try it. Jared won the EWS overall that next year and then Richie won back-to-back titles the following years. DH technology really lives about a year, a year and a half if you're really on it. It was time for us to update our DH bike, but with our limited resources, we decided instead to come out with the SB6. From an enduro perspective, it was definitely the right move. Everybody at Yeti still talks about downhill racing and about making a downhill bike again, it's still a huge passion of ours. |
Neatly laying out all the small parts before the build can begin.
The workforce varies with size in accordance with frame demand throughout the year.
A SB165 comes to life. The SB165 and SB140 are the most recent additions to the Yeti line up, replacing the SB6 and SB5.
| We are a small company and we always say we make bikes that we want to ride and that is true, its a rider driven company and the legacy of the Yeti. I think we perpetuated it, but all kudos to John Parker, Chris Herting, Brett Hahn and the crew back in the day that made Yeti legendary. We humbly carried that on and we've grown the company fairly substantially, but back when John Parker was doing that the company was a fraction of the size we are now, and we're not a big company. So if you talk about punching above your weight then the punching above your weight was done by Parker and the crew in the mid-90s cause they were absolutely crushing it with a super small company. |
The "Lunch Ride"
An integral part of life at Yeti headquarters is the daily lunch ride where employees ditch their desk or down tools and grab their bike, hitting the trails of Colorado's Front Range a few pedal strokes away from the front door of the headquarters. These are the trails that Yeti's lineup is conceived on so it'd be rude not to grab one of their latest offerings and tag along for the ride. I quickly learn a few things. First off, the pace is fast and things get competitive, especially for my sea-level legs and lungs. Secondly, there's a wide range of riding styles and choices of bikes, each spec'd according to the individual's taste. It's this crew that gave birth to the idea of offering a burlier build "Lunch Ride" / "LR" guise in selected models over the last few years.
Hitting the Apex trails.
Yeti say the trails of Colorado's Front Range have helped shape the bikes they design.
The lunch ride is an important part of day to day life at Yeti.
Downtown Denver on the horizon as Ben hits the descent on the way back to Yeti HQ.
| We came out with the 575 in 2004 and it was a direct reflection of the trails we rode every day. The trail bike market was in its infancy, I remember the Turner 5 Spot and a few others, but it was pretty lean. We made the 575 because it's super chunky where we ride and more travel helps but you still have to climb to get the goods. That has always been important to us when designing a bike, you have to be able to climb really steep alpine stuff without losing efficiency, but our bikes are built for the downhill. It was our gravity roots that spawned the SB66 and launched our Switch Technology. Then we moved to the Switch Infinity technology on the SB6 and Richie and Jared kept winning races. a whole new era happened on the race side. We've had a lot of success with enduro and it's core to who we are as a company. |
Between 11:30 and 13:00 tools are left and desks abandoned as the staff hit the trails.
The engineering team are now in a different building up the road, but as it happens they're now even closer to the trails and the crew from the main headquarters have to pass the building on the way to the trailhead!
Peter Zawistowski or "Stretch" as he's affectionately known has been in the company since high school, first working out back building bikes and machining alloy frames. He then went on to to study at university, coming back into Yeti as a fully qualified engineer. He's been in the company around 15 years and is one of their 8 strong engineering team.
An early sample of the new SB140 frame.
| There has been a tonne of growth at Yeti and that's a double-edged sword as we always built the company not to grow the company, as the growth for us isn't all that important. What's really important is that we can continue to fund and invest in innovative product and design and development. That requires money. We are stoked that we've had some success because then we can pour back more money, we were 3 engineers including Hoog for a long time, now just in the last year and a half we've bumped that up to 6 engineers and an industrial designer so that department is 7 people now which would have been unheard of. That would have been over half of our company 7 years ago. |
Yeti are looking at adding composite capabilities into their engineering building. It wouldn't be for production though and would just help the engineers in fast-tracking prototypes and experimenting with different carbon layups.
A prototype SB66, the first bike to feature the "Switch Technology" which would later be refined into the "Switch Infinity" system that now features on all of their models.
A rack of various past prototypes and test frames.
The main reason that the engineering team now has its own facility is that they were running out of space and they wanted to expand their in-house machining capabilities.
They've only been in the new building for a matter of months and are still adding equipment and machines in.
| As we enter our 35th year, we know what we do well and who we are as a brand. We continue to make big investments in our race teams, our engineering and product development. This focus means we exist in the high-end of the market and our products are out of touch for some people (insert dentist joke here), but we’re committed to making the best mountain bike product. |
Yeti work closely with Fox and have special permission to create their own shock tunes.
Dave Ziegman is the man behind all the shock tuning at Yeti. Having Dave in-house is invaluable according to the engineers, mentioning that they can pay super close attention to the relationship between the shock tune and their suspension kinematics.
Getting the frame packaged up and ready to ship out to an excited customer.
Final destination. Next stop, the trails.
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It's a shame that just the recent jerseys are up on the wall.
They need a Spencer's Gifts style poster shelf with all the people who've raced for them.
Jimmy Deaton
Greg Watts
Joe Lawwill www.instagram.com/p/Ba4eV3blZgT/?hl=en
John Tomac (or Eli Tomac's dad for the next gen)
Missy Giove
Juli Furtado
Johnny O'Mara
Kirt Vories
Nathan Rennie
Myles Rockwell
Those are the bikes and jerseys I clicked on here to see.
Who else sees an ovbious issue with this?
Yeti...designed around flat corners and flat trails.
I feel badly for dental students these days. They've been sold a profession that is going down the tubes thanks to corporate dentistry and the insurance industry. Come out owing $400K+ only to be the dental insurance industry's bitch. That's not including the absurd costs of tuition for undergrad, plus losing those prime years of your life.
We wear masks, you know.
Plus I'm an orthodontist, so I deal with different mouth shit
www.specialized.com/us/en/s-works-turbo-creo-sl---founders-edition/p/184043
So in short they accused me of lying and that there was nothing wrong with their product. I get that they need to be wary of scammers but yeah not the best way to treat a customer.
Meanwhile an ebike is the only thing missing in Santa Cruz lineup at this point.
So yes, that 20k eMTB must be just around the corner.
Today, Yeti doesn't really float my boat. Nice bikes though.
*Metaphorically speaking
anyhow, that's when they switched to the sb platform and for me, the aesthetics just kinda went out the window. ahhh well, they do make nice bikes, just no longer for me.
See what I did there? Yeti? Monster? I'll get my coat....
@yzedf We shall see. Be sure to check back in and gloat if you are right. I know I will
Why is assumed that a more complicated design is better? GG uses a Horst link which is the same suspension design that a lot of other manufacturers use. Yeti manufacturers there bikes in Vietnam. GG manufacturers there bikes in Denver. I know which one I ended up selling and going to.
GG frames are pretty tough.
Neither approach is wrong, I was just trying to highlight the differences in each companies approach as I see it. I'm all for vertical integration like Guerrilla Gravity has done, that generally nets a higher quality product.
You don't think a rearward axle path is a desirable characteristic of a suspension system?
I am also confused on what you're argument is, are you saying the Switch Infinity system wasn't a difficult engineering problem?
Yeti not only invented a novel suspension system that apparently works quite well (never really ridden one). They also worked with FOX on the execution of the translating pivot, and had to fit the entire system that has never been seen before on a bike. Pretty impressive for such a small company and it tells us what they have been spending their time on.
Not to say that inventing and developing a novel manufacturing process like GG have done is any easier, just different approaches to the bike biz.
www.pinkbike.com/news/field-test-2020-guerrilla-gravity-trail-pistol-down-for-whatever-country.html
+I'm the chief Switch Infinity bearing presser.
-...
Kashima coated knee caps ?
Understatement of the year, did you think we´d forgotten ? Or worse, believed the bullsh1t excuses?
@ubermodelr thanks for pointing this out. I was getting ready to post it, but I scanned the comments and to had beat me to it.
So is this true for EWS or National team riders? oh and the Regional riders, and all their ambassadors?
Your an idiot
National pride?
youtu.be/ik-p8KicfqA
I don’t Know if I would owners shmucks. Maybe more financially sound.
We use low torque electric ‘drivers’ at work daily, not impact drivers, not drills, electric screwdrivers designed for low torque, fast tightening of small fasteners.
Read. Learn. Think. Information has never been more readily available.
www.tetongravity.com/story/bike/is-yetis-new-switch-infinity-system-the-pinnacle-of-bike-design
Bearings are one of the marvels of modern manufacturing. They are low cost, commodity parts available anywhere around the globe. They are durable (if properly sealed), and have very low internal friction. Yeti's design is proprietary, expensive, prone to wear/failure, and not to mention heavy. If anything it is beyond under-engineered, it's "switch infinity", because they didn't stop halfway through designing it and ask themselves if it's a good idea.
Oh but it has shiny kashima and says FOX so it must be good....