Born in the USA

Forty years is a good age. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that a mere 30% of businesses survive past their 15th year, so by making it into its fifth decade Moots is something of an outlier. More impressive still, it has made it to 40 without losing touch with its roots.

‘What we’re doing here isn’t rocket science,’ says Moots’ brand spokesman Jon Cariveau. ‘It’s making the best product out of the best material that we can.’

Moots has built a reputation for hand-crafting beautiful, rugged, uncomplicated bikes from titanium tubing, and Cariveau is well placed to explain the company’s ethos, having now worked here for just shy of a quarter-century. As such he’s Moots’ longest-serving employee, and when he arrived in Steamboat Springs, Colorado in the mid-1990s, the company was still just four people building frames in the back of Sore Saddle Cyclery, the repair shop opened by a fellow named Kent Eriksen in 1980.

During the 1970s Eriksen drifted around