Sea Otter 2026 Recap

I just got back from a weekend at the Sea Otter Classic in beautiful Monterey, California. It was really nice. What is the Sea Otter Classic? To be honest I am not totally sure. As far as I know, it started off as a bike race and over the years the expo portion grew and grew and then when Interbike shut down it became the last big bicycle industry trade show in the US. It's put on by Lifetime Fitness, the mega corporation that brings us Unbound and gyms around the country... that's actually about the extent I know about it.

Recently I have been leaning more into not pretending to know things, which has been pretty freeing. This weekend I got to exercise some of that. 

On business, we did a little expo-ing this year at the off-site bikepacking event that our friends at Old Man Mountain put together. The other thing I was there for, aside from talking to the hundreds of industry pals who came out for the event, was chatting with component companies about sourcing parts and looking for cool new stuff to put on our complete bikes. 2026 (and 27 and 28…) are going to be a lot about moving towards more complete bikes for us. Selling frames is awesome, but at the end of the day we know we will have to move towards more complete bikes to really serve more customers. I think Sklar is in a fun place right now where we are doing just enough business for these component manufacturers to start to take us seriously but I found myself asking them for advice too which was nice. How are other brands making it work? What are they ordering? Of course we are looking to carve our own path in an ever-changing industry but It’s cool to have lots of people in one place and make comparisons on the spot, not to mention put a face and personality to the email address we’ll be working with for the next while. One cool thing about the bike industry is that almost everyone is a fellow bike dork and we can connect on that. Lots of nice chats over the weekend.

Sea Otter represents a corner of the bike industry where I don’t necessarily feel like I belong. Sure, I am a mechanical engineer who has designed bikes for 15 years and used to race them for fun, but everyone there seems to take it so seriously. I was glad we had our little bikepacking haven, tucked back in the beautiful, rolling green hills with a bunch of chill people who are more our speed. At the bikepacking zone we watched some fun videos from adventures around the globe. They played our video from Japan which was fun. I love the level of DIY-ness we have going on with the brand right now. I dunno, going to these events, everything feels so polished. I am starting to feel less insecure about not having our “content” be so polished and more proud of it reflecting who we are: a tiny team making stuff that we genuinely think is fun. Maybe that polish will come as we grow, but for now it feels so authentic and fun, and if nothing else, it makes me happy.

On my drive back to San Francisco I was thinking back on some of my conversations. I spent a lot of time chatting with Kevin who is doing Pine Cycles now. I know him from when he worked at Enve way back. Martina from Swift Industries, even my shop neighbors at OuterShell – we all sort of came up in the last decade or two. I mean, that is really community. To grow separate but together. We’ve all had humungous changes in work and life and ups and downs but we are still plugging along and that is cool to see. I got to chat briefly with Scot Nicol, founder of Ibis Cycles. They (the company) just turned 45 years old and he still rides bikes and is excited about them. I got to spend a bunch of time with my friend Graham who swept the floors in my framebuilding shop one summer when he was 15 and now is having a ton of fun working at SRAM teaching bike mechanics to be better bike mechanics. So cool.

Sure, there were a lot of 32ers and e-bikes and talk about how they wouldn’t save the industry. But… uhh… that talk was right. It made me think about how I have benefited from the work that the larger industry has done, how we can do more of the work that they consistently fail to do. Talk to the people they exclude and ostracize. Nick and Graham and I talked about how, despite it’s shortcomings, there are a lot worse things we could be spending our time making than bicycles and I do feel that more and more each day. They really are pretty fun, they make a lot of people's lives better.

Anyway, I just got back. And these are some quick thoughts I had. It is cool to be part of a community like this. It takes all sorts, and it was nice to see everyone.