Ventana Mountain Bikes USA: Still Rockin’ it Gringo Style

Sherwood Gibson, owner of Ventana Mountain Bikes USA, has been enjoying the mountain bike scene longer than most of us have been riding. Coming from a BMX background, Gibson built his first steel hardtail in 1985. The past twenty years or so has seen Ventana catapult from humble beginnings to one of the more recognized high-end mountain bike manufacturers in the United States. Unlike most companies that have been around for the past few decades, Ventana still produces bikes exclusively sourced and assembled in the U.S.A. The company’s philosophy places an extraordinary emphasis on quality control and drive for impeccable manufacturing. Mountain bikers lucky enough to own a Ventana are a critical source of marketing for the company. Like many builders, Sherwood admits he enjoys building bikes more than selling them. He was kind enough to talk with me from his shop outside of Sacramento, California. Feel free to drool at Ventana USA.

MTO: So,where were you guys at the National Handmade Bike Show this past weekend?

GIBSON: We didn’t go.  We were planning on it but my wife ended up having to travel for her work and that kept me home. The other thing about that venue is that there isn’t a category for best aluminum bike or best aluminum weld, so quite honestly it was for the old-school steel guys, it’s a better venue for them, we’re not really even thought of as a custom handmade bike company even though we are.

MTO: That’s what I wanted to touch on right away. Your company, and I hesitate to use the term “boutique,” but being a popular high-end brand that isn’t one of the big three, have truly maintained the “handbuilt in the USA” standard, do you face any challenges in keeping things American? Is any level of production or sourcing done overseas? Is it a point of pride for the company?

GIBSON: Not at all. [As for company pride], I guess you could say that, but really, I like making stuff. I got into making bikes because I like making stuff and I thought I could do a better job. And so with that in mind, since I’m the guy that’s out there making it happen, if we can bring it in house and it makes sense and we can have better control and have a better product, then we do. At some point in time, maybe our customer base shrinks and we’re priced out of the market, but for now people who appreciate that we can give them a product, and so I don’t have any interest in going offshore because quite honestly I’m way better at building bikes than I am selling them. So if I were to go offshore I would have to be better at selling them, and I’m not very good at that! A lot of times I can build a bike quicker than I can tell you about it. It’s crazy that way, but that’s the way it is.

MTO: Before we go any further, you are privately owned?

GIBSON: Yup.

MTO: Would you be willing to divulge your sales in terms of bike production?

GIBSON: In terms of bike production, right now we’re doing between 600 and 800 year, which sounds like a lot, but when you spread it over 15 models it’s not that many. What that has allowed us to do is get really good at doing one-off bikes. We do a lot of custom bikes for people. Of those 600 to 800 bikes, 200 to 300 are customs in one form or another. And we’re able to respond to that demand because we’re in-house. So that works out quite well. In general, a custom frame that gets ordered today likely gets started tomorrow or within the next couple of days. And we also do production of our main selling models, we keep those in stock in various sizes, we do powder coating in-house so I go next door and shoot whatever colors we’re gonna shoot, and that’s how I keep up.

MTO: You say you have 15 different stock models, I’m familiar with the product line, but is that the official number in production right now?

GIBSON: Well, there’s not really an official number, if you go to our website and you change the model name in the URL to a previous model name, all the geometry and information is still on the website, and if someone really wants it, we’ll still build it. As long as we have the capability to build it for someone we will. That 15 is not a hard number. We probably do 10 very regularly, and then we do road and cross bikes, so it’s a fluid number. We used to make bikes for Tomac, Specialized, Ellsworth, a bunch of different bikes for a bunch of different manufacturers. At that time, we were doing about 3500 frames a year. So we have more capacity than what we do, but what that does is allows us to focus on our customs in more detail. I would have to add some employees to get back to that number. We have six employees now, had 11 when we were at that number. Read more