celebrating 25 years of hoffman bikes

Mat Hoffman recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of Hoffman Bikes, a company he founded in 1991 when all others had decreed the sport to be deader than a spent mongoose. But Mat had plans. Big plans. I mean, obviously he had big plans, because when has Mat ever had small plans? That's just silly. Mat doesn't do anything small! Rick Kosick gets the skinny straight from the President of Hoffman Bikes himself...

RK: First off, I would like to say congratulations on your 25^th anniversary of Hoffman Bikes.

MH: Boom! Thank you, sir.

When you started your company did you see it lasting 25 years?

I didn’t really think about it, because I didn’t really start it as a business. I started it more as a necessity. I needed a bike that I could trust my life with and I needed to make my own equipment so I could push the sport to where I wanted to push it.

Is owning your own company everything you thought it would be?

Owning my own company is kind of a pain in the ass. Haha… but if you want something good you have to work hard for it and that’s what happened. It would be easier to have a sponsor or something, but then you have to compromise and Hoffman Bikes gives me the ability to not compromise and do whatever I think I need and make it a reality. So for that aspect of it, yeah, it’s everything I thought. I can create whatever I want to help me push whatever I’m doing. But it’s a great school for business because you have to engineer, manufacture, stock, resell, market—every little piece of the puzzle. It makes you have to learn how to do all that and it took me probably like 27 years to learn... meaning I still haven’t learned it very well. Haha!

How has BMX changed since you started your company?

It’s so much different. When I started my company people were saying BMX was dead. Nobody was riding. So I started events and shows to expose it to a new generation. When I did the contest series it was a way to recruit people and get them involved in a community and scene and then supply them with the equipment. So it was kind of a master plan on how to rebirth the sport and get people stoked on riding again. But in those days it was just a bunch of misfits that did it because they didn’t want to compete with the standard cool kid, you know, and now it's evolved to where the standard cool kid is the majority. Haha… but the progression is just amazing, man. I watch videos now and I can’t even believe what I’m seeing. It’s pretty spectacular. It’s almost comical.

So have you ever been approached by a large company to be licensed or bought out?

Yeah, I have. When we decided to have kids, I licensed Hoffman Bikes to Mark Owens, who is a friend of mine and worked at Hoffman Bikes. I employed him in ’91, so we worked there the whole time. I was like, “Okay, you run this. I can’t take a rain check on my family, so I’m just going to be dead for a while." Haha… So I started experimenting with licensing that way, but basically it’s still your company. You can do whatever you want, you have total control, you have to do everything, but you don’t have to be the guy that gets up at 8 o’clock and checks in every day. So I did that for a while, then I was approached maybe five years ago to buy Hoffman Bikes. It was a big company that wouldn’t really know how to run it, though, so I said let me run it and I’ll license it to you. So I've been working with them for about three years now. I never accepted a buyout proposal, because it’s my baby, you know. It’s got to be in the right hands with people that I can trust know how to run it.

Will there ever be that next great evolutionary leap in BMX design and construction, like using space-age polymers or anything?

Yeah, I feel there needs to be a lot more innovation. It seems like we’re all making the same stuff, and when I started Hoffman Bikes it was all about innovation. I mean Hoffman Bikes, we designed the first machined, one-piece steer tube that is industry standard on every bike out now. All the axels used to be 3/8" and we started doing 1/2" because we kept bending the axels. Now every bike is standard with 1/2" axels. I didn’t patent anything, but it’s all stuff that came from Hoffman Bikes. But I feel like it's an era of progression that our sport needs. Our equipment needs to evolve to support the profession more. So that’s what I’m kind of looking for in this 25th year. I have some ideas that I’ve been working on that I think could support BMX and have it so it keeps progressing.

For the past several years skateboarding companies have been reissuing their old crap from 25 years ago. Has that same kind of nostalgia hit the BMX industry?

Yeah, it’s crazy. If I would have kept the inventory that I wasn't able to sell back in the old days and just blown out, now guys buy that old equipment for like, you know, 10-20 times what they used to buy it for. But then there are all the old school guys trying to eBay a frame that used to cost 100 bucks for like 1000 bucks, and then there's a whole new generation of riders that aren't really interested in that. They're just interested in the current evolution of bikes. But I mean we re-released an old t-shirt I made and I printed like, I don’t know, maybe a 1000 of them, and before I got them back home they were sold out. And we’ve already ordered another batch and those are sold out, too. So that tells me everybody loves the old school stuff for sure.

After being in business for all these years, what is one of the biggest lessons you've learned?

That you you’ve got to listen to the current market, because I would come up with like the raddest piece of equipment ever that is completely passion driven and I’m like, “Wow, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” and then I‘m the only one who likes it. Haha… Then I’m like, “Oh yeah, wait, I guess I'm making stuff for other people. I need to start making sure this is what everybody else wants, not just what I want." But, you know, just always have fun. Never run it as a business. Do it because it’s what you love to do and it’s what you have fun doing.

If you were to give advice to anyone who wants to start a company, what would you tell them?

Do it because it’s what you love to do and just realize that you got to work really hard at it and you have to find another value in it outside of just getting rich—especially in the bike industry where you don’t really run companies to get rich. You run companies because that’s your passion and it's what you love to do.

Any last words?

Dream big. Go big.