We don't keep our passion for tyres a secret. Hell, the first thing we ever made was a tyre. And since then, we’ve spent countless hours perfecting our craft, creating tyres for every situation with revolutionary tread patterns and rubber compounds. You could say it's been a quest for the ages, but now, with the World-Championship-winning GRIPTON® compound technology migrating from the road to the dirt, our quest is finally complete.

The recipe for our proprietary blends of synthetic rubber and an activated Silica compound delivers the goods on the mountain. GRIPTON® maximizes mechanical grip, damps vibration, and offers unparalleled traction in either wet or dry conditions. How? You can thank the proprietary soft compound that filters low and high frequencies, keeping your tyres planted and you in control.

"Regardless of Your Experience—XC or Trail—Gripton Tyres Give You Improved Traction and Speed, with More Grip and Lower Rolling Resistance."

But as any good cook will tell you, the recipe is only half the story. You also need a world-class kitchen to prepare your revolutionary product in, a place where you control the layout, choose the equipment, and can taste-test the results. Having a great place to prepare things you care about, like our entire mountain tyre line, is essential. And that’s why we built a tyre factory to scrutinize and control every step of production. It's like farm-to-table, but with inedible tyres.

Butcher, Slaughter, Purgatory, Hillbilly, Ground Control, and more—made with the right ingredients, from a secret GRIPTON® recipe, all in a factory built by us.

When we ride mountains, we dream. We dream of ripping down trails with ruthless precision, carving through corners, railing berms, flowing along endless ribbons of dirt with an air of supreme control. The keyword here is "control." For riders, skill is part of the control equation, and sure, the bike is, too. Tyres, however—tyres are what dreams are made of. And it should come as no surprise that ensuring those tyres deliver on your dreams is important to us. In fact, it’s a key reason that we severed ties with our previous tyre production partner to invest in our factory in Vietnam. With the previous partner serving multiple tyre brands—and often less-than-willing to try new things—our dream of being more hands-on in mountain bike tyre production became a reality.

We sat down with two members of the tyre team—Wolf VormWalde and Mike Taylor—to talk about how this new tyre factory came to be.

The Japanese partner we went with (Innerware) had a factory in Vietnam that handled the production of OE domestic scooter tyres for large motorcycle brands. What’s the advantage of them having no other bicycle brand’s tyres in their factory?

Wolf: “The biggest thing is control. Control doesn't mean you can just order something and it's always done the way you want it—it’s still a discussion—but at least we’re having the discussion [with the new factory]. If we go in with an idea, then they have to discuss it with us because we're their only customer. It's exclusive. That way, we can control what happens in the factory and [ensure] that the direction [we’re both] taking is aligned.

How involved were we in the switch to bicycle tyres? How has the factory itself changed?

Mike: “We got to be involved with what equipment to purchase, the layout of the facility, and of course looking long-term, [we want to] leave room to expand a little bit. We're already seeing that we're doing that after the first year of production.”

Wolf: Before there was just an empty hall—I think it was a storage unit? Now they are [something like] 180 or 120 workers in three shifts, working seven days a week. It's buzzing. It started very small and slow, but now you come in and you're like...wow! […]

Full production began Feb. 1, 2016, but this process started two years ago. Was there a long ramp up to the first tyre coming off the production line?

Wolf: We gave them two tyres initially—a road tyre and a mountain tyre—to basically represent the whole breadth of tyres we wanted to build there. We didn't change the tread or hot patch or anything, so we could just make this tyre that we previously made at other factories and feed it into sales. […]

Mike: Yeah, we brought in that Espoir [road] and Purgatory [mountain], and eventually we brought our whole mountain program in, from Renegade to Hillbilly. We released the Renegade, Fast Trak, and Ground Control last year for this current model year, and then coming up in July, we'll be releasing the Butcher, Slaughter, and Hillbilly—so kind of the second half of the mountain program.

Wolf: And so now we have our whole mountain tyre program [coming] out of this new factory. It means all the new tyres have GRIPTON compound. It means formulations are from us—they’re all different formulations, but they're all from us—and the factory is mixing them up per our recipes. For the start, we went with construction layups that we had already. But now we are developing new ones […] I think we’ve introduced 40 new/different tyres there now? Forty different specs within half-a-year, it’s just crazy. […]

How is this new factory affecting us as a company? Are processes changing? How is the relationship with this factory different?

Wolf: “[Now] we can plan the projects together with them, so we have a better idea of how long they take. […] They have standard materials, but we can always come in with our materials and suggest a source."

Dream Factory