Brad Hodges grew up steeped in early mountain biking culture in the hills around Cupertino, California. After committing himself to a life of building bicycles for a living at an early age, Brad began his career heavily influenced by BMX bikes and still finds himself coming back to trick bikes.
These days, Brad has been flexing a broader repertoire. We can expect to see a full range of road, mountain, cyclocross, and touring machines at this year’s show. While he builds mostly in steel, rumor has it that a certain ‘Tytanium’ bike will ‘steel’ the show in the WH Bradford booth this year at NAHBS…
BIKERUMOR: What is your origin story? How did your company get its start?
BRAD: I grew up as a kid in Cupertino (yeah, that town your iPhone is designed in) riding my bike in the back trails of parks and up in the hills above our town. There was always a strong cycling scene in town so I just naturally thought that was normal. This was during the heyday of the late 80’s hardtail mountain bike craze. Our local shops had some amazing bikes from builders like Fat Chance, Klein, Mountain Goat, and others.
Yea, I was a mountain bike grom kid who dreamed of building frames like Keith Bontrager , Tom Ritchey and the rest of the builders I saw in magazines .
The turning point was when my grandmother took me to the “Mountain Bikes as Art” exhibit at the Braunstein-Quay gallery in San Francisco in ’88 . That show blew my mind and from that day on the only thing I wanted to do was design and build the best bikes possible.
For the past ten years, I’ve been building and designing bikes for my other brand, Nemesis Project, which primary sells more youth-oriented bikes designed and intended for Trick riding . That was always my strong point, taking existing forms of the cycling market and adapting them for trick riding.
I’ve always felt that I could do more than just building “trick bikes” so over the past few years, while building bikes for friends, I perfected my craft and designed a new line of bikes. The bikes I’m bringing to NAHBS this year reflect my past years from steel production bike design and fabrication experience, while offering my take on the current accepted forms of the steel frame market in Road, Mountain, Cyclocross, Track and Adventure touring.
