Stuff We Like: Old Mountain Bike Ads

Standout advertisements from the 90s mountain biking boom

Whilst the last few batches of ads we’ve featured here were straight out of the big leagues, commissioned by the world’s biggest sportswear companies to some of the most acclaimed agencies of the day, these scans here prove that you don’t need major budgets to create memorable adverts.

Pulled from a selection of cycling magazines from the mid-90s, they show mountain biking at a fork in the road as it was morphing from a fringe activity to a mass movement—with small rider-owned brands like Fat Chance and Dekerf holding their own on the same pages as huge operations like Specialized and Shimano.

There was no set format or style, with a vast array of styles and techniques used to flog bikes (and the related odds and ends that come with ’em)—from earnest copywriting to loose comic-book style illustration. Whilst some were maybe made by agencies, a good deal were presumably created by the brands themselves, giving a real home-brewed flavour which is seldom seen today.

Respect to whoever it was who managed to make Datatag, perhaps the most boring (albeit actually fairly useful) bike-related product ever conceived, look kind of interesting.

Want more bike stuff? Read our interview with Rivendell main-man Grant Petersen here.