Since mountain biking legend Steve Peat’s bike products hit the market a few years back, Peaty’s has gone from strength to strength. Their eco-friendly sealants, accessories and cleaners get the job done and fill the tool boxes of the world’s best racers and mechanics. We’ve been mega lucky to team up with Peaty’s this week for our Source Weekly Giveaway (enter HERE!). We were also lucky enough to meet the team last week while they were staying in Morzine for the MTB World Cup in Les Gets, and they were well and truly making the most of the trails! We had a quick chat with company director Tom Makin in the Super Morzine gondola on how Peaty’s got started and the art of the environmentally friendly bike product.
Hi Tom! So how did Peaty’s come about?
So Bryn Morgan (a product designer) and myself (a scientist) have known Steve Peat from riding and racing for years. Bryn and I came up with a sealant that would seal big holes [in tubeless tyres] but wouldn’t dry out or ball up in the tyre, so we took it to Steve and asked him to play with it, try it, give us some feedback. He liked it and he wanted to come into business with us, so from then it was the three of us. It was called Peaty’s Tubeless Sealant, we had no other products then!
Now there are five of us, which considering the company is only two years old is not bad. We’ve recently taken on ex-pro rider Martin Murray as a commercial director, he really knows his stuff, and Stru Clarke as head tea boy, operations and logistics manager. We all ride and race bikes as often as we can, and we all get along well together and have a good time, which is crucial to the company.
So how did you make it? Did you just start putting formulas together in your garage?
Yeah, at the start! We started out doing formulations in some laboratories we had access to thanks to my other company [Tom is also an environmental and microbiological scientist and has his own consultancy company]. Once we’d formulated the product and we knew what we were doing, it ended up being me, Bryn and Steve with a slab of tinnies and some catheter syringes filling up the pouches! It was really good fun times, but quite quickly we realised it wasn’t sustainable – we would fill about 250 each before the beer and boredom got the better of us. We decided to upscale it to a much more professional solution and since then it’s been one big learning curve. So that’s how it started. We were originally going to call it Unicorn Jizz because it’s white with sparkles in but we quickly aborted that!
What made you want to start making mountain bike products in the first place? Did you see a gap in the market or was it just a fun thing to do?
It started off with the sealant as we were sick of everything else on the market at the time. Steve was still racing World Cups, and we were racing in the Enduro World Series and enduro nationals. We’d all had a few issues where races were sacrificed due to poor performance of sealants, or they were drying out. We only design and release products that we, riders and racers would use and have tangible benefits compared to what’s out there already.
Tell us a bit about making your products environmentally friendly?
Unfortunately biking doesn’t appear to be as environmentally on-point as other sports – like surfing and climbing – and I’m not quite sure why it hasn’t caught up. What we’re trying to do is really push our environmentally friendly products, because we have to look after the environment for the next generation, and look after the trails we ride. At the moment we’re trying to tread that tightrope of making products that absolutely work, so there’s every reason for bikers to buy them, but then, whether they care about it or not, behind the scenes we’re being as environmentally friendly as possible. That’s everything down to the ingredients, the formulation, the materials we use, where it comes from, all of it. But we have to make sure it doesn’t impact the effectiveness of the product.
Sounds quite tough!
[Laughs] We’re trying!
We don’t see many other mountain bike companies doing a similar thing – is it just you guys?
We’ve seen this trend lately – whether it was us who tipped it over or whether it was something else, who knows – but there are a lot more companies now trying to be more environmentally friendly, which is really cool. So if we do nothing else other than try to lead the way a little bit in that respect, then we’re really happy.
Have you got any new and exciting products in the pipeline that you want to tell us about?
We’ve just released two brand new ones. Two aerosols that we’ve been working on for ages – XXX Solvent Degreaser and Disk Brake Cleaner. And again, we’ve built these from the ground up, they’re not just an off-the-shelf formulation, we’ve built them from scratch and specified them to be as good as possible, using biodegradable ingredients. Some people will say that aerosols are bad, and yeah, ok, they’re not that great for the environment because they’re in a tin, they’re an aerosol… but they can be recycled, and people are going to use them no matter what. We can at least make ones that don’t affect the people using them, that don’t stick around in the environment for ages afterwards, and that’s what we’ve done.
What does the future hold for Peaty’s?
Who knows! The beauty of this is that we aren’t confined to cleaning and maintenance products so if we can bring to the market a cool concept or invention that’s leaps ahead of whatever is currently out there then it’s game on!
You can find out more about Peaty’s and check out their products at Peatys.co.uk. And good news! This week we’ve teamed up with Peaty’s for the Source Weekly Giveaway and we’ve got a big bundle or Peaty’s products to give away to one lucky winner. ENTER HERE by midday on Friday 19th July to be in with a chance of winning! If you fancy some extra reading you can also check out the interview we did with the man himself, Steve Peat, for last summer’s mag HERE.
