Pole Bicycles returns: Leo Kokkonen on CNC'd bike frames, bankruptcy lessons, and eMTB prototype
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2026
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Leo Kokkonen is the founder of Pole Bicycles, a boutique mountain bike brand based in Finland that's known for its innovative design and construction techniques. Founded in 2013, the brand was forced to file for bankruptcy in 2024, but now they're back with a brand new prototype and a desire to continue pushing the envelope.
- Why start a bike company in 2013? What did you want to do that wasn't already being done
- How did the mountain bike community react to your geometry ideas back then?
- In 2017, you were planning to produce a carbon fiber bike. But then you decided not to. Why
- How did you come up with your process for machining frames out of aluminum?
- What are the advantages of designing and manufacturing bikes in Finland? What are the challenges?
- What are the MTB trails like in your area of Finland?
- Tell us about the challenges Pole faced that ultimately led to bankruptcy. What happened? What did you learn?
- What can you tell us about the latest prototype you're working on?
- How has your production method changed?
- What's next for Pole?
Visit polebicycles.com online and follow @polebicycles on Instagram to see the bikes and to keep up with the brand.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. My name is Jeff, and today my guest is Leo |
| 0:07.1 | Cochonen. Leo is the founder of Pole Bicycles, a boutique mountain bike brand based in Finland |
| 0:13.7 | that's known for its innovative design and construction techniques. Founded in 2013, the brand was |
| 0:20.3 | forced to file for bankruptcy in 2024, but now they're |
| 0:23.7 | back with a brand new prototype and a desire to continue pushing the envelope. It's a story of |
| 0:29.1 | innovation, challenges, and resilience, and I think there's a lot we can learn from Leo's journey. |
| 0:34.1 | We'll talk about why he started poll some of the bold design choices the company |
| 0:38.7 | has made over the years and also what's next for this unique brand. Leo, welcome to the show. |
| 0:45.6 | Thank you. Pleasure to be here. So take us back to the beginning. Why did you want to start |
| 0:51.2 | a bike company in 2013? What were you trying to do that other bike brands |
| 0:55.5 | weren't already doing? Well, obviously, it was the geometry. Yeah, Enduro was getting bigger, |
| 1:06.0 | and I was mainly downloading myself. And I have a, like, well, when I was a kid, there was an amount of bikes around |
| 1:16.7 | and I had to save a lot of money to buy one. |
| 1:20.9 | And it was like a 90s on a bike, which was all of them pretty much XC bikes, or less. |
| 1:29.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:29.9 | And yeah, the geometry of the indoor bikes weren't there. |
| 1:36.5 | Actually, if you look everything back then, most of the bikes were quite horrible to pedal uphill |
| 1:43.8 | and quite horrible to ride downhill. |
| 1:47.3 | So the seat tubes were very slack and head tubes were quite steep. |
| 1:50.3 | So they were more like, I would say like from road bikes kind of, but downhill bikes were great. |
| 1:59.3 | They had like slack head angle and everything was fine. |
| 2:03.1 | However, the reaches of down the bike's also grown. |
... |
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