IN THE BEAR’S DEN
Designing bikes by day, riding them after hours and jammin’ into the night – Whistler-based Chromag might just be the dream place to work
Designing bikes by day, riding them after hours and jammin’ into the night – Chromag just might be your dream workplace
The clock ticks over to 5pm and around the Chromag office knee pads are pulled on, helmets are donned and trainers are kicked under desks in favour of clipless trail shoes and Five Tens. Reggae tunes blaze from the assortment of speakers perched on every shelf and, outside the big front windows, a crowd begins to gather, with bikes of all types pulled from roof racks or lifted over pickup tailgates. For owner Ian Ritz and his tight-knit clan of employees, tonight is the social event of the year – their annual ‘Show ’n’ Shine’ party, where proud Chromag owners from all around converge to display their pride-and-joys. It’s preceded, as any good mountain bike party should be, by a race, to give those taking part something to celebrate or commiserate later and, if nothing else, to make the après-ride pints taste that bit sweeter.
We can’t think of many, if any, brands that have as strong a relationship with the local riding community as Chromag. Born in the MTB mecca of Whistler, British Columbia, the Canadian frame and component designers are as proud of their hometown as their customers are of using their products. Venture out on the trails here and you’re guaranteed to spot at least one steel-framed hardtail emblazoned with their iconic ursine logo. Wander into town and you’ll spot that same bear stuck in the window of every second truck. It’s an almost cult-like following, which is now spreading around the globe, thanks to a reputation for building high-performing, bombproof kit.
We’ve heard it said that people are a product of their environment. Well, the same is true of the Chromag brand. The environment in this case being the Sea to Sky mountains. It was the allure of year-round fun amid those peaks that persuaded Ian to bid farewell to the prairies and settle here back in 1989. “I was just blown away by everything that was happening here,” he tells us over flat whites and pastries at the bakery next to Chromag HQ. “I got a bike, got into the trails and just fell in love with it.”
Made on the mountain
This was in the days long before Whistler Bike Park opened, but even back then, Ian saw a gap in the market for a bike shop and he and some mates clubbed together to open Evolution. “We sold a lot of early full-sussers and my intention was to push the future of mountain biking,” Ian explains. “I was the key mechanic and saw a constant line of broken frames coming in, and people who’d had problems with their full-sus bike, so they’d taken the fork or disc brakes off it, put them on their old hardtail and ripped the head tube off! People were saying, ‘Man, I wish there was a good, tough hardtail’ – something that you could ride like a full-sus and was modernised in all the same ways, except for the suspension bit.”
At that time, there was so much focus on suspension that the major brands had pretty much stopped developing rigid frames and Ian reckons that hardtails “were becoming a bit of a lost art”. It inspired him to make his own, so he got in touch with a frame builder in nearby Squamish called Mike Trulove and set about designing a frame for him to make. “I was living with a bunch of bikers,” he continues, “so we conjured up all the frames we liked, measured them and I basically laid out a big sheet of paper and did a full-scale 1:1 design and gave it to Mike. We made a prototype and then eight more frames that year.”
That frame was the TRL (trail). It may look old-school now, but its boxy appearance and chunky construction were a direct product of the gnarly BC trails Ian and his contemporaries were riding. The first TRL came into being in 2002, and it was what set Ian on the path to being a bike designer. What started as a hobby became a business a year later, when he sold his share in Evolution to focus full-time on this new venture he named Chromag.
The expansion into componentry happened soon after. Friends of Ian’s from a nearby
“HARDTAILS WERE BECOMING A BIT OF A LOST ART”