Oakley — The BMX Grip Company That Became an Eyewear Empire (1975 to Today)

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

Before Oakley meant a hundred-dollar pair of sunglasses on a pro athlete's face, it meant a handlebar grip you bought out of the trunk of a guy's car in a dirt parking lot. Jim Jannard built the company on BMX and motocross gear for almost a decade before eyewear ever entered the picture, and for a few years in the early 1980s, Oakley's name showed up in the same BMX magazine pages as Haro, Skyway, and Torker. This is that chapter — the one before the sunglasses.

A grip, a car trunk, and $300

Jim Jannard started Oakley in 1975 in a Southern California garage, and the company he ran before it had a real product of its own wasn't really Oakley at all — it was a small operation called Oakley Products, a catalog business reselling other people's motocross gear: JT Racing, Scott goggles, Koho pads, Mikkola gloves. Jannard sold that stuff out of the trunk of his car at motocross and BMX races, the way a lot of the earliest riding-gear brands got started — not in an office, in a parking lot.

What changed things was when he stopped reselling other people's gear and built his own.

The Oakley Grip and "Unobtainium"

In 1975 Jannard released the first product to carry the Oakley name: the Oakley Grip, an anatomically shaped handlebar grip for motocross and BMX bikes, molded out of a proprietary rubber compound he branded Unobtainium — a material grippier when wet than dry, which mattered a lot to anyone riding through mud or sweat. That name alone tells you the pitch: a grip nobody else could get their hands on.

The grip line kept moving for almost a decade. Grip II followed in 1978. Grip Three and Grip Point Five landed in 1980. The F-1 Grip System came in 1981, the B-1B Guidance System in 1982, the B-2 Guidance System in 1983. The O-Wing Grip, released in 1984, turned out to be the last grip Oakley ever made — the same year the company's whole direction started to shift toward eyewear.

On the gate — Oakley in the BMX magazines

Oakley's grips showed up in BMX riders' hands early. A rider named Jeff Ruminer talked about running Oakley grips in an October 1978 BMX Action interview, and Oakley ran a full-line grip ad in the magazine's pages by July 1979. A May 1979 BMX Action ad for Oakley featured pro racers Bobby Encinas, Stu Thomsen, and Jeff Bottema — though the number plates on their bikes in that particular ad were Haro's Factory Plates, not Oakley's own. Whether Oakley ever sold BMX number plates itself, the way Haro and Wizard did, isn't something we could confirm from a period ad or catalog.

Backing Haro's freestyle tour

The clearest BMX moment in Oakley's early history is the one already documented on our Vans and Bob Haro chapters: in the summer of 1981, Bob Haro packed a Dodge Ram van with a portable plexiglass quarterpipe and drove it out of Torrance for what became the first national BMX freestyle tour. Vans, Off Shore Surf apparel, and Oakley put up the money — eighteen thousand miles, three months, riding trick shows in towns that had never seen freestyle in person. Nobody was getting paid to compete. Freestyle wasn't a sanctioned sport yet. Oakley was one of three brands willing to bet on it before there was any proof it would work.

That tour is the reason Oakley's name sits in the same sentence as Vans and Haro in BMX's founding freestyle story, even though the company's day-to-day business was still grips and moto gear.

From grips to goggles — the O Frame

Somewhere toward the end of the 1970s, Oakley started building motocross goggles alongside the grips, and by around 1980 the company had a proper goggle line — worn by motocross racers like Mark Barnett, Marty Smith, Johnny O'Mara, and Jeff Ward. One of those early goggle models carried the name O Frame. Oakley still sells a goggle under that same name today, the O Frame 2.0, which is worth clearing up here: the O Frame is a goggle product line, not the origin of the company's name. Oakley is named after Jim Jannard's dog. The two "O" names are a coincidence people run into online, not a real connection — we're stating that plainly so it doesn't get repeated as fact.

Ski goggles followed in 1983, widening the product line beyond motocross and BMX for the first time.

The coat-hanger sunglasses that changed the company

The moment that actually turned Oakley into an eyewear company, by the account of longtime Oakley executive Brian Takumi, happened in 1983. Jannard was driving from San Diego to Los Angeles, straight into the sun, and cut down a motocross goggle lens, taped on a pair of bent coat-hanger ear stems, and had a working sunglass prototype before he got where he was going. The production version — the Factory Pilot Eyeshades — launched in 1984, the same year the grip line ended with the O-Wing.

Cyclist Greg LeMond wore Eyeshades to second place at the 1985 Tour de France and again to his historic overall win in 1986, putting Oakley's new sunglasses in front of a global audience that had nothing to do with dirt bikes or BMX. Frogskins followed in 1985, and from there Oakley's identity as a performance and lifestyle eyewear brand took over completely. The company went public in 1995, raising roughly $230 million, by then a long way from a garage and a car trunk.

Where BMX fits in the Oakley story

Oakley isn't a bike brand and never was one — it's an accessory company that grew up riding alongside BMX and motocross for its first decade, the same way Vans grew up as a shoe company that BMX and skateboarding adopted rather than the other way around. The grips came from the same trackside world as Skyway wheels and Haro plates. The freestyle-tour money came from a company still small enough that $18,000 miles in a van was a real bet, not a marketing-budget rounding error. By the time Oakley was a household name in eyewear, the BMX chapter was already closed — but it's the chapter that paid for the garage to become a company in the first place.

Timeline

• 1975 Jim Jannard founds Oakley in a Southern California garage. The first Oakley Grip ships, molded from Unobtainium rubber.
• 1978 Grip II. BMX riders are already using Oakley grips — confirmed in an October 1978 BMX Action interview.
• 1979 Full-line Oakley grip ads run in BMX Action, including a May 1979 ad featuring Bobby Encinas, Stu Thomsen, and Jeff Bottema.
• ~1980 Oakley's motocross goggle line launches, including the O Frame model.
• 1980 Grip Three and Grip Point Five.
• 1981 F-1 Grip System. Oakley joins Vans and Off Shore Surf to bankroll Bob Haro's first national BMX freestyle tour.
• 1982 B-1B Guidance System grip.
• 1983 B-2 Guidance System grip. Ski goggles launch. Jannard builds the first sunglass prototype from a cut-down goggle lens and a coat hanger.
• 1984 The O-Wing — Oakley's last grip. The Factory Pilot Eyeshades, Oakley's first true sunglass, launches.
• 1985 Greg LeMond wears Eyeshades to 2nd at the Tour de France. Frogskins launch.
• 1986 Greg LeMond wins the Tour de France in Eyeshades.
• 1995 Oakley goes public, raising roughly $230 million.

Sources

Gear Patrol, interview with longtime Oakley executive Brian Takumi — the Oakley Products catalog-reseller origin, the 1983 coat-hanger sunglass prototype story, the Eyeshades launch and Greg LeMond's Tour de France results. Wikipedia, "Oakley, Inc." and "Jim Jannard." Company-Histories.com (International Directory of Company Histories) — 1975 incorporation, goggle-line timing, 1995 IPO figure. o-review.com, "Get a Grip on the Timeline" (Lee Silver, 2005, compiled with BMX-forum collectors) — the full 1975-1984 grip generation list. oldschool-bmx-parts.blogspot.com — the October 1978 BMX Action Jeff Ruminer grip mention and the July 1979 BMX Action full-line grip ad. bmxaction.org, "The History of BMX Number Plates" — the May 1979 Oakley ad featuring Bobby Encinas, Stu Thomsen, and Jeff Bottema wearing Haro plates. Legend Bike Co.'s own Vans and Bob Haro chapters — the 1981 Haro Freestyle Tour funding by Vans, Oakley, and Off Shore Surf. bmxsociety.com community threads on early Oakley grips and goggles, checked for consistency with the sources above.

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