Pivot Founder Chris Cocalis on Bike Manufacturing, e-commerce, and Adopting New Tech
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2020
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chris Cocalis is the founder and president of Pivot Cycles based in Tempe, Arizona. Pivot is known for creating cutting-edge, high performance mountain bikes and also for sponsoring many talented athletes over the years while giving back to the community.
In this episode we talk about the mountain bike design process and how bikes are manufactured. Chris fills us in on current trends in the bike world, the benefits of sponsoring and working with pro-level riders, e-commerce challenges, new technologies, and why Pivot doesn’t offer builds priced less than $5,000.
--Keep up with the latest in mountain biking at Singletracks.com and on Instagram @singletracks
Transcript
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| 0:41.6 | Hey, everybody. Welcome to the single tracks podcast. My name is Jeff, and today my guest is Chris Kocalis. |
| 0:48.8 | Chris is the founder and president of pivot cycles based in Tempe, Arizona. Pivot is known for creating cutting edge, |
| 0:56.4 | high-performance mountain bikes, and also for sponsoring many talented athletes over the years, |
| 1:01.8 | while also giving back to the community. So thanks for joining us, Chris. |
| 1:05.8 | Thank you. So tell us a little bit about your mountain biking background. |
| 1:09.5 | Well, I started actually racing BMX when I was about 12 or 13, and then came out to, I used to come out to Arizona for the Winter Nationals, and you could race every night of the week out here. |
| 1:22.4 | I grew up in Chicago, and that wasn't the case, certainly. |
| 1:25.3 | So I chose to go to school out here mostly so I could get my pro BMX license and race every night of the week. |
| 1:33.3 | Wow. |
| 1:34.0 | When I came out here, I was doing that, but quickly discovered mountain biking. |
| 1:38.8 | It's in about the first three months I was here, and the BMX thing faded away pretty quickly. |
| 1:45.6 | Yeah, I got pretty excited about mountain biking. |
| 1:47.7 | And yeah, it was an interesting time back then because the mountain bikes, I was in 1987. |
| 1:55.4 | And the mountain bikes then were just getting going and they were total piece of |
| 1:59.9 | shit compared to what we have today. |
| 2:02.4 | Yeah. |
| 2:02.7 | And everything that we had seen break in BMX in the 80s, it was like reliving the bad dream. |
| 2:09.6 | Spindles, crank arms, wheels, hub axles, basically everything. |
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