Today, as we come up on 15-years, Echo-Factory is primarily focused on industries like B2B, healthcare, manufacturing and aerospace. But there was a time not that long ago that our client roster was awfully heavy on mountain bike brands.
Agencies evolve, and we love what we do now. But that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate some of the work we did in the past.
With the mountain bike industry’s biggest freeride event, Red Bull Rampage coming back to Virgin, Utah this weekend, we got a little nostalgic. So, we thought it might be a good time to throw it back all the way to when Echo-Factory was, maybe just a little bit, rad.
Troy Lee Designs: MTB & Moto Gear, Cam Zink and Sean Palmer
Before there was Echo-Factory, there was Michael Schaffer Photography. And when Troy Lee Designs updated their product catalog every year, that’s who they called. For close to a decade, first as a photo studio and then as Echo-Factory, about 2-months of Mike and his team’s lives would be taken over by photographing mountain bike and moto helmets, pants, shorts, shirts and gear.
Echo-Factory’s studios, first in Upland and then Rancho Cucamonga, would be filled with racks of not-yet-released Troy Lee gear. Occasionally, we’d even get to meet a real-life action sports celebrity for an in-studio photo shoot.
Two of our favorites? Sean Palmer and Cam Zink. For the unfamiliar, Palmer is a professional snowboarder, former Olympian, mountain biker and motocross racer with his own video game. Zink is a freeride mountain bike icon responsible for some of the Red Bull Rampage’s most insane moments, who recently washed up in Maui.
Troy Lee Designs was recently acquired by France’s largest private equity group, but we’re happy that Troy himself is still painting rad bikes that will be riding Rampage on Friday.
Launching Kali Protectives
One of the dirtier secrets of the mountain bike helmet industry is that for a long time, no-one was really doing much to innovate safety. Brad Waldron was one of the first people to change that.
After a career in Aerospace engineering and as Specialized’s engineering director, he founded Kali Protectives in 2008. His promise was developing safer helmets with advanced materials. Echo-Factory was lucky enough to be Kali’s first marketing agency.
We helped Brad and his team at Kali develop the brand’s iconic look and feel, launch their first (and second) website, grow their market share and navigate the space between dealer networks and direct sales.
Today, in large part thanks to the work done by Brad and his team, the entire action sports helmet industry places more emphasis on safety technology, and thousands of riders are better protected every year.
Bringing Dainese and AGV to the United States, and Mountain Biking
If you’re into motorbikes, especially the very-fast-Italian-variety, you probably know about Dainese. They’ve been manufacturing high-quality, high-performance moto clothing since 1972. But, not too long ago, they were relatively unknown in the US, and the mountain biking industry.
Dainese came to Echo-Factory to help change that, alongside the launch of their first California “outpost.” We helped them build brand awareness in the US, and launch several mountain-bike specific products to this market.
One of those product launches was a collaboration with Paul Basagoitia, a mountain biking legend who would later crash in the 2015 edition of Red Bull Rampage suffering a severe Spinal Cord Injury, and become the subject of an inspiring documentary with Red Bull and HBO Films.
Looking Ahead
We don’t have the same action-sports heavy roster of clients we did a decade ago, but we’re still deeply invested in helping brands in any industry achieve their goals for growth.
Today we’re not specifically an action-sports marketing agency, but we’re also not-not an agency that works with action sports and mountain bike brands. Whatever industry you’re in, if you’re looking for a growth-focused marketing agency partner, we’d love to talk.
And, you can bet we’ll be tuned into Rampage 2023 on Friday morning to catch the next-generation of mind-blowing freeride mountain biking.
