FERNDALE, Wash. (BRAIN) — When, in May 2024, Kona Bike’s founders re-acquired the brand from the private equity group that had bought it in 2022, they called the re-launch Kona 3.0.
This month the brand might be entering the Kona 3.1 era as co-founders,Jake Heilbron and Dan Gerhard step out of their day-to-day roles and join the board. Charles Russell, an industry veteran who joined the company last year as Chief Revenue Officer, replaces Heilbron as President and CEO.
Heilbron and Gerhard said they have restored stability to the company and brought on fresh management blood who can build on the growth of the last two years.
Russell, who has worked for brands including Rocky Mountain, Yeti, Cannondale, Sugoi, and POC, is part of a group of new executives Heilbron and Gerhard have brought on since the re-launch. Beside Russell, the group includes Scott Vogelmann, Kona’s new VP of Product, who has worked at Cannondale and Trek, Chris Newlin, VP of Sales, who comes from Rocky Mountain and POC, and CFO Scott Bly, who comes from outside the industry but is a long-time passionate mountain biker.
These new hires mesh with an array of Kona veterans, some of whom have been with the company 30 years or more. Russell said the mix creates “a cocktail” at the company.
“Sometimes you have staff that's all tenured, and groupthink starts to come in. You start to believe your own bullshit. What you need is a healthy mix of the old and the new,” he told BRAIN.
To be clear, Kona isn’t using the Kona 3.1 label — you can blame that on us. But in an interview with BRAIN last week, Russell did coin a new phrase that might have come straight from a slide deck: “a new irreverence.”
He noted that Kona is a brand known for its irreverence, most easily demonstrated by its model names — which include the Humuhumunukunukuapua’a and the Jake the Snake — and its willingness to take bold approaches to developing bike categories, like the Unity, a steel-framed, mixed-wheel-size offroad touring bike launched this year.
“What is irreverent today is different from what was irreverent in the 90s or the 2000s, right? I know we definitely have a counter view on ride and materials — like we are heavily invested in steel. We make some eclectic bikes and we are going to continue to do that,” he said
But irreverence doesn’t pay the bills. Some quirky bikes fill a desire from a certain region or international distributor, but Russell said the brand is being careful to get commitments from enough buyers to ensure the volume needed to make a model profitable. “I have a very strong commercial vein,” he said.
Russell said Kona sees opportunities to re-establish itself as a significant “b-level” brand for speciality retailers. Despite the recent hires of managers from some of the biggest brands, he said Kona has no desire to become a full-line “big three” brand. Instead it will keep its long-time emphasis on value-added entry-level bike-shop bikes, its irreverence, and a heritage in bikes designed for the dirt. Even though Kona has had success globally with city bikes, Kona’s hybrids look like mountain bikes and have knobby tires. Marketing photos show them being ridden on dirt, not pavement. “We are a dirt brand, first,” Russell said.
Russell has his own dirt cred. Although he entered cycling as a roadie, he’s now an avid cyclocross racer and mountain biker, who spoke with BRAIN last week hours after completing the fifth stage of the BC Bike Race, a seven-stage race. His two-man team, the Kona Kahunas, finished sixth in its age group. Russell said he focused on the timed downhill sections and cruised the rest of the race with his teammate.
