Ten years ago Dave wanted a new frame and Brant had got bored of playing with bikes for magazines and needed a job. So Dave got Brant to design him one. Funny how things get out of hand.
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. Since 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.
Now we've moved HQ with Planet-X to a proper posh warehouse in Rotherham where we'll 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.
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 Frank 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.