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Pablo does all the suspension work, and I do all the other stuff. The suspension designs are a collaboration between my parameters and Pablo Tafoya doing the design work. Who comes up with the frame designs, particularly the suspension designs of the Killswitch and the Roam? It's just me and Jess Sims, my sales and warehouse guy. I love Black Market, I love bicycles and the bike industry, and I'm not lugging around 100 pound concrete hoses. I had to go from being a concrete guy to being a bike brand owner. At the end of those five years I had the choice of taking over the brand or losing it to S&M as others had been lost.but that couldn't happen - it just wasn't going to work. He said, “I'm not going to make a bike, but if you want to do a brand I'll build your bikes and sell them to you.” So basically, that's start of Black Market.įor the first five years S&M funded everything. I convinced him to at least come to a race with me, and when he showed up it was a lot different than he thought it was going to be. I called Moeller ( S&M CEO – Ed.) up and said, “Dude, you need to make a 26” dual slalom bike,' (back then dual slalom was big). I built it, stood back and looked at it and just started laughing. I started trying to find a bike to buy, and went through about two years of buying frames that sucked, and the final straw was when Avent sent me a Jibster. That gave me a really good idea of what my geometry felt like. She really liked the bike, but by that time she'd starting riding for Yeti, so I ended up riding on the bike I'd designed. It was really well received, and I ended up doing a drawing for Tara Llanes for her personal frame. BMX bikes were getting steeper and harder to ride, so we redesigned the S&M cruiser, and that was the first bike I ever had a hand in designing. I had ridden a mountain bike brand called Storm, and really liked how those bikes rode. I've always been a bike rider, and in my late twenties I was riding a lot, getting some support from S&M for racing and stuff. I owned a concrete pumping business and lugged around 100 pound concrete hoses when they were empty.that's why my hands are so messed up. After that, I was a police officer for Chino PD for two years, and then went into the concrete business. I did five years in the Marines - I was an airframes mechanic and door gunner on CH53E helicopters during Desert Storm and Operation 'Restore Hope' in Somalia. I went into the military when I was 20, actually I was 19 when I signed up, but started right when I turned 20. What were you doing before you were a bike company owner? How did you end up owning Black Market Bikes? I had a cutty track, me and Jared Rando built one, and I discovered that flat turns were one of my favorite things to do.

RAY CARTER FLATOUT 2 HOW TO

That opened my eyes to places like Whistler, and learning how to turn. Later on, mountain bikes started coming my way through Tara Llanes - Giant used to hook me up with bikes because I would do her component switch overs so they wouldn't have to send her bike to Colorado, and in change I would get frames, which let me go mountain biking. At that time most bikes sucked – it didn't make sense to go out and spend money on anything except an Intense, which I couldn't afford. When I moved farther away from the mountains I just rode Sheep Hills, and it was easier to do that.

I have a lot of history mountain biking, but BMX was my love. I had a Foes Weasel, I raced Hannebrink forks. I rode that bike for a long time, and then I raced downhill, all through the Big Bear days. My first mountain bike was a GT Karakorom, all steel, and I rode it one day in the mountains and then went home and bought a Univega something-or-other with an AMP fork that used to rip the knobs off my tires. I've been riding pretty much my whole life, but I've had times when I didn't ride – military, or skateboarding, those kind of things. My dad taught me how to ride on a little 10 inch, hard wheeled bicycle it looked like a little motcross bike. I've been riding bikes basically since I was four years old. I had kind of a crazy childhood – I didn't meet my mom till I was 11. I grew up in a Volkswagon van – my dad was a hippie. What was your childhood like? Have you always ridden bikes? We spoke with Carter to find out more about the path he took to go from being a police officer to bike company owner, as well as what the future holds for Black Market Bikes. He's no slouch on a bike either, equally at home at the dirt jumps, the skate park or the trails. Carter has been a fixture in the bike industry since the late nineties, and over the last nine years has helped evolve Black Market into the brand it has become today. For this edition of Pinkbike's 'From the Top' we interviewed Carter Holland, the owner of Black Market Bikes.

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