It’s been said that Kona is 'The Smallest Biggest Bike Company in the World'. They’re best known as the quintessential North Shore bike brand, yet their global head office is just down over the border in Ferndale, Washington.

The quirky company stood out with outrageous bike model names such as the Stinky Dee-Lux, Sex One, Sex Too, and, Jackshit, which placed them well and truly as the "alternative" bicycle company.

The business was founded by Dan Gerhard, Jacob Heilbron in Vancouver, BC along with mtb hall of famer Joe Murray as their designer.

With a rich history of iconic bikes and factory race teams, it was all overshadowed by the recent events of their former owners, Kent Outdoors, who were responsible for running Kona into the ground (my words, not theirs) before the original founders bought the company back last month.

Only a few weeks after Dan and Jake bought the company back, I spoke to Jake about Kona’s founding story that dates back to 36yrs ago in 1988, the sale of the business to a private equity-backed company, and what happened that led them to buying Kona back.

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In our final episode of this limited series, we turn the floor over to member questions. Thank you to everyone who became members throughout this series. Every single one of you helps make us produce more content like this. If you're not a member, you can join here: https://escapecollective.com/join/

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In EP3, we heard about what much of the bike industry experienced during that dramatic slowdown of bike sales, and what resulted. In this episode, EP4, we'll hear about some of the learnings and takeaways from the past three years, and put forward some tough questions for the bike industry to ask itself.