wheels and tires. Upon seeing Joe's bike, he said, "I think I’ll build something like that also." Breeze returned to his home of Fairfax, CA and told Gary Fisher of Ritchey's intentions to build a 26" "ballooner." Immediately, Fisher called Ritchey and asked Ritchey to build him one as well. Because of Ritchey's production mindset, he built a third frame. When Fisher picked up his frame a few months later and learned of the third frame, he told Ritchey, "I can sell that." The seeds of the new "mountain bike" company were sewn, beginning with Fisher selling bike #3 to a fellow Marin resident. These "ballooners" were first featured in BMX Plus magazine, before the world identified them as a mountain bike, and a new buzz surrounded this new style of off-road bike. Fisher enlisted the help of his friend and roommate, Charlie Kelly, to market and sell the bikes Ritchey was building. Because Ritchey had years of custom frame and component manufacturing experience, he was uniquely suited to tackle and establish many of the new designs and standards this new breed of bicycle would require. The company initially was called Ritchey MountainBikes, with Ritchey fillet brazing over 1000 bikes over the course of those beginning three years. This high volume of production lead to Ritchey becoming mountain biking's first production frame builder, earning him the moniker, "The General Motors of mountain bike frame companies," from Mike Sinyard of Specialized. The informal business lasted about three years, with Ritchey building the bikes in the mountains of the south bay peninsula while Fisher and Kelly sold them out of Fairfax and Marin. In 1983, Ritchey left the relationship. Kelly also left due to personal reasons. On his own, Ritchey sold his remaining frames to a new company out of British Columbia, called Rocky Mountain Bicycles. Out of this turbulent time Ritchey built his own sales and marketing company, hired a retired professional road racer, Mike Neel, as his salesman and created Ritchey Design. By the early 80s general interest in cycling was in decline, however, mountain biking was growing. Events like Pearl Pass and the NORBA '83 National Championships drove interest in the emerging sport. By the mid 1980s, over 25 percent of the bike industry was based on mountain bikes, with Ritchey emerging as the #1 off-road component design company outside of Shimano. Innovations Again, Jobst Brandt was crucial to