Dirt

Chicago-based SRAM manufactures bike components including trigger shifters, twister shifters, front and rear derailleurs, cranksets, cassettes, chains, brakes, rotors, wheels and hubs. It also sponsors a number of gravity and enduro teams, including Giant, Specialized, Devinci and Lapierre, as well as individual riders such as Nicolas Vouilloz, Brandon Semenuk and Cameron Zink.

The company was founded in 1987 by brothers Scott, Stan and Sam Day with the goal of creating the world’s best shifting system and went on to change the cycling world forever with the introduction of Grip Shift. To support the innovation, SRAM invested in Sachs Bicycle Company and built a state of the art manufacturing facility in Schweinfurt, Germany.

Now based in Chicago, SRAM Corporation has gone on to invest in some of the world’s leading bike component makers, and its family of brands now includes SRAM itself (the name used for most of the company’s groupsets), leading suspension company Rockshox, brake maker Avid, Truvativ (makers of bottom brackets and cranksets) and Zipp, a company designing and manufacturing high-end carbon wheelsets for use on road bikes.

In 2012, the company celebrated its 25th anniversary, and released a book telling the SRAM story from the very beginning, when employees shared a single computer and used a drafting table and pencil for engineering drawings, to today, when it has an estimated 15 percent of the $3.5 billion global bicycle components market, second only to Shimano.