The history starts a long time ago... But let's keep it short - in 1986, Brant's mum and dad bought him a mountainbike for his 16th birthday. After hanging out at the bike shop for days on end, he ended up with a job there, and it was there, as a Saturday boy, he first bumped into Dave who was driving his mums Mini Metro around the UK, selling triathlon bits, Odyssey mountainbike parts and Powerbars.
Dave and Brant kept bumping into each other over the years - at races, at shows... and eventually when Dave started Planet X (originally a dirt jump brand!) and wanted a website, he turned to Brant, who had worked his way through various magazines and websites (Tech Ed on MBUK, Editor of MBR, Editor of Bikemagic) and was currently "between jobs".
Payment for getting a website up and running was being discussed when Brant spotted a steel sample frame hanging up - with horizontal dropouts. It was a sample Dave had had a factory make up a year previously when he was looking for new areas to move into.
There's more to it than that, but basically the two hatched a plan to start an "online singlespeed only" brand, and that's how on-one started. That was the Inbred. Well it was once the factory fitted the right length head tube. Then came Gimp, our jump bike, then the Compo and Armadillo alloy extreme hardtails (which were actually sold as Planet X bikes, with a free Chinese banquet thrown in).
We tried some 853 inbreds which were nice but prices and the then spent ages getting our heads round 29er geometry to make what are still the best handling 29in wheel bikes around.
Then we made the ScandAL alloy bikes. Actually we might have already made those by this point. We'd definitely done a few different dropout tweaks on the Inbred too.
Oh and the titanium bikes. They were relatively simple copies of the steel Inbred and a cyclo cross bike that Nick Craig designed for us to race the 3 Peaks on. Well for him to race on, but you get the drift. Anyway they worked really well.
Then came the 456 which was designed for longer forks and involved geometry that made sense for riding up really steel hills with a trailer bike. Exactly. Anyhow, it worked really well, at just the time long travel trail forks became worth having and magazine testers and real people loved them.
Then we got chatting to Lynskey about something else entirely and he ended up making some Ti456s which won us a couple of perfect ten reviews, rode like a technical trail dream and sold far better than any titanium frame has a right too.
We did a handful of heavy duty plain gauge steel 456 Summer Season bikes out of curiosity too. They sold so quickly and rode so well we had to make them a regular item on the On One site.
Oh we did a singlespeed/fixie road bike too, the Pompino, and we sold loads of those too.
Brant and Dave had a fall out, and Stevo came along we've added carbon to the mix as well as a bunch of tech innovations such as tapered headtubes, oversized bottom brackets and ISCG mounts.
We moved HQ with Planet-X to a proper posh warehouse in Rotherham where we can build your bike in the same place you'll ring to talk to us. You can even talk to us while we're building it, to get exactly the bike you want under your bones.
Brant came back and, hey, sure we've missed something, but basically it's been pretty crazy since we cracked open that first container of fresh frames with our little Inbred man on the seat tube. What we're still definitely doing though is building bikes that are just great for riding. We just cover a lot more different sorts of riding than we used to.
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