Chapter 1 — Why
Before we started Supercross BMX, we had a little company called TECH BMX Products. Some of you who've been around the sport for a while may remember it, but if you came up after about '92 you probably don't, because that's when Supercross started taking up more and more of our time and TECH just kind of faded into the background. TECH was a number plate and racing pant company, we made Racing Pants for Haro, Redline, L&S, Cyclecraft, Brackens, S&M, and many others, and we had a small factory team: Glen Pavlosky, John Gonzalez, Brian Lopes, Kiyomi Waller, and Billy Harrison. Most of you will know those names from BMX history, and you'll definitely know Brian's from the MTB world.
Since TECH was a numbers and pants operation, we were working with a few frame manufacturers to get our riders dialed — SE, Free Agent, Diamondback, MCS and Elf at different points for different riders. The problem was getting AA Pro Billy Harrison a frame he actually felt comfortable on. We heard that Elf had made a batch of Boss frames that got rejected for bad chrome and was just sitting on them. So we had this idea: grab those Boss frames, repaint them, sell them under a different name, and use the money to fund Billy's racing. Except when we actually got one in Billy's hands, he hated it. Plan A was dead. But the whole exercise did get the wheels turning about building our own frame from scratch.
The original idea for Supercross wasn't to build a frame company and get rich. It was to get an excellent quality frame under a great rider, and if it helped pay for his entry fees and put some cash in his pocket while he went to college, so be it. TECH was paying its own way at the time. This was going to be a frame for the riders, by the riders. We figured if we ever sold a couple hundred of them that would be great. Nobody expected we'd sell thousands of them over the next decade — and then tens of thousands more over the three and a half decades that followed.
