VISTA, Calif. (BRAIN) — The Haro brand is not shutting down nor pausing, CEO Bjarke Rasmussen told BRAIN, but it did cut its U.S. staff by about a third in the spring and reorganized its sales staff to adjust to a turbulent U.S. market affected by tariffs.
"The U.S. remains an important part of Haro's brand identity, and we're still fully committed to our facility in Vista and our dealers," Rasmussen said in an email following a tip from a Haro retailer that the brand might be on the verge of closing.
"As the market hopefully stabilizes, we fully intend to rebuild our footprint here. For now, it's about being realistic, staying focused, and making sure we're set up to come back stronger when the timing is right."
While legacy brands like GT, Redline, and Diamondback were pausing, the longtime BMX and mountain bike brand began expanding its lineup last year to include high-performance road and gravel models and made splashy personnel hires, including Rasmussen, the former vice president of global operations for Cycling Sports Group. But the trade war that began in the spring affected Haro, Rasmussen said. Haro bikes are manufactured in Taiwan and Vietnam.
"At the beginning of 2025 we were doing remarkably well," Rasmussen said in a follow-up call with BRAIN. "We had a pretty aggressive budget, and then the tariffs in the U.S. market challenged us to maintain that momentum, and that led us to say how do we respond to that in a way that we don't eclipse ourselves both financially and also in the way that we wanted to grow? But that doesn't necessarily mean we stopped producing bikes. We're still introducing both new bikes and also bikes that we launched last year in new colors as well. So we're still very much active in that, but we had to make sure we watched our expenses with what we could see happening in the market."
The sales team has undergone personnel changes, including naming Aidan Gould U.S. sales director and the team is currently reaching out to retailers, which number about 600, he said. "It's not that we let somebody go and didn't replace them. What we have usually done is that we brought in people whose portfolios aligned more closely with our current, broader direction."
Because of the tariffs, Rasmussen said complete bike sales dipped but frameset sales increased. "When we saw people getting worried about the tariffs, what I imagined would happen was one of two things: people would either start buying bikes because they would try and get them before they got more expensive or they would hold off and see how the economy would evolve. And what we saw was that people were holding off and didn't go into buying complete bikes and instead buying upgrades."
Rasmussen said he has no regrets about the aggressive U.S. expansion.
"It was definitely not a mistake. We had the right team in place for developing the products that we had, but also reanimating the brand. If you read any of our social media, you will see people saying, 'I thought Haro was dead.' And I think we've proven that that's not the case."
He added the industry-wide bike inventory dumping hurt Haro's efforts to sell its new models. Speaking of which, Rasmussen said Haro soon will introduce an e-MTB model. There are no plans to discontinue any model or abandon any category.
"We're not eliminating anything," he said. "There's been a lot of rumors, I think, over the past few years that we would get out of BMX and stuff like that. That's categorically untrue. We've actually, if anything, we've spent more on BMX than we have before. What happened in the past was that we had almost 250 SKUs on BMX, and nobody could really tell the difference between them. So what we've done now is that we've honed in on what we feel is the BMX of today.
"The brand continues to launch new products in the U.S. and will have a campaign that's running pretty soon on the e-mountain bike. So we're still launching products in the U.S."
