News Roundup - Week of January 19th

Kona Bikes Sold to Kent Outdoor Group

At Kona Bicycles, we live for the long, sweet ride, and believe the journey is the best part of any adventure. Since our humble beginnings in Vancouver, we’ve spent the last 34 years building innovative, durable, fun, and eye-catching bikes for all kinds of cyclists. We’ve grown from a small Pacific Northwest company into a far-reaching global brand. As cyclists we know that every good ride has some memorable moments and our journey at Kona is no exception. Today we are dropping into new terrain and are excited to announce that we are joining the Kent Outdoors (www.kentoutdoors.co) group.

Our goal has always been to make great bikes that we love to ride. With the influx of resources from Kent we’re now able to dive deeper into our passion projects and build better bikes than ever before. We’ve built our brand on doing things differently, and we have no intention of changing that. We just get to do more of it now.

Kent is committed to ensuring we get to keep using our own special recipe when it comes to making great bikes—a lot of hard work, a little bit of weird, and a whole lot of good times. Our new CEO, Ken Meidell, is a lifelong cyclist. His history and experience leading respected outdoor brands like Dakine, Outerbike, Outdoor Research, and Cascade Designs sets us up for success and growth through our ever-expanding customer base and sales channels. He’s already accepted our invitations to join us on a bunch of our rides, be it exploring our favorite loamy singletrack, chugging gravel bikes up way-too-steep climbs, or partaking in the after-work pub crawl.

“I've been riding mountain bikes since the days of coaster brakes. I started with fully rigid forays into the forests where I grew up and the stoke never really left. It's safe to say it's in my blood. Working with Kona fulfills a dream of mine, and I can't wait to help bring more iconic bikes to cyclists all over the world.” -Ken Meidell, CEO

Kent’s portfolio of outdoor brands covers a wide variety of recreational activities and seasons. We’re joining the likes of Arbor Snowboards*, HO Sports, and Connelly Skis—all leaders in their fields. We’re excited to bring the Kona experience to Kent and carry them throughout all seasons, because there’s never a bad time to ride a bike.

Our founders at Kona—Dan Gerhard, Jake Heilbron, and Jimbo Holmstrom—will be staying on in their familiar roles to help a new generation of leaders at Kona guide our company to even greater heights. We’re keeping all our staff, all our offices, and all our history. We’ll never forget where we came from, and we’re eager to see where we go next.

“Kona remains committed to building great bikes, working with a rapidly growing network of independent bicycle retailers, and maintaining the Kona Way in everything we do. We’re excited about the future and look forward to growing with the Kent family.” - Jake Heilbron

Darren Berrecloth and Red Bull Part Ways

Darren Berrecloth has opted not to renew his contract with Red Bull for 2022. From his Instagram page:

Bike Yoke Launches New Grip

It's a grip. OK, it's a bicycle grip. We can't and won't say it the best bicyle grip, because bicylce grips are a particularly personal thing. Be it damping, thickness, length, texture, shape, there are simply too many boxes to tick to make a grip your favourite, there simply can't be THE ONE, can there? Well, we did try to make a grip with a lot of features that take away with some of the things we particularly did not like with some of the grips out there.

• Honeycomb design

On some of your favourite grips, you may notice that, in a matter of a few rides, you can see small parts of the rubber already get twisted/torn or sheared off. Some grips provide excellent damping but the rubber may be too soft/squishy/sticky to be withstanding rough use over a longer period if time. For our Grippy we settled for a surface structure which reminds of a honeycomb and combined it with a material that provides very good feel and grip, yet it is stiff and sturdy enough, you can not twist the rubber, which helps keep wear as little as possible.

• Inner sleeve cutouts

For even more damping on the outside palm area, we designed cut-outs into the inner Nylon support sleeve, creating space for more rubber material all the way to the handlebar for more more damping and support of the critical outside palm area.

• Eccentric/offset design

The Grippy, while featuring a circular diameter is offset from the middle axis. Thinner grips usually allow for a firmer/better mechanical grip, thicker grips can give more damping and comfort. With the offset design, we created more damping where you need it - on the rearward facing side (palm side) of the grip towards rider side - without increasing the overall diameter of the grip

• Integreated Endcap

One thing we found particularly annyoing is, the that outer ends of some grips tear too easly due to lack of or only little protection from improperly designed endcaps. Scraping a tree, going down, these things happen and we do not want the grip to get torn too easily, right? So the black, integrated endcap mainly has two functions: a) the slightly tapered shape gives you excellent tactile feedback to feel where the grip ends and b) it gives a solid protection against impacts.

Not really much more to say about a grip, eh?

Well, maybe some obligatory specs:

Rubber material: TPR
Inner sleeve/endcap material: Nylon
Clamp material: aluminum, forged
Color clamp: titanium grey anodised

Weight: 113g/pair
Length: 140mm
Diameter (rubber part): 31mm

Available now!