ODI — The Torrance Molding Shop Behind BMX's Mushroom Grip and the Lock-On

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

Two things about ODI turn out to be wrong in the way most people tell the story. It was not a motorcycle grip company that later got into bikes. And in the years when BMX was at its loudest, ODI grips were almost certainly not on your bike when it left the factory — they were what you bought to replace what came on it. Both of those are better stories than the ones they replace. This is the history of a small Southern California injection molding shop that got lucky with a nubbed rubber grip, nearly went under twice, and then quietly changed how every handlebar on earth is assembled.

A molding shop that made anything

ODI started as a job shop. Herb and Kay Guerr ran an injection molding business in Torrance, California, and what came out of the presses was whatever there was a market for that year — skateboard rails, handles for boogie boards, Christmas ornaments. Herb made his own molds, which in a small plastics business is the difference between waiting on a vendor and simply cutting the thing you thought of on Tuesday. That flexibility is the whole reason the company exists today.

The name was Ornate Designs Incorporated. ODI's Johnny Jump gave that expansion on the record in a 2024 interview, and it fits a shop making decorative consumer plastics far better than it fits a grip company. The modern "Observe, Design, Innovate" reading of the letters is a later marketing rebrand, and the company is open about that.

On the founding date, we are stuck, and honestly so. In the same December 2024 Mountain Bike Action feature, ODI's Colby Young dated the founding to the early 1980s and Johnny Jump dated it to the 1970s. Two people from the same company, in the same article, one decade apart. No incorporation record turned up to settle it. ODI's own website markets a "40 years" line, which points at the early 1980s, but that is a round number on a homepage, not a document.

The motorcycle question

ODI is a motocross name today, so it is easy to assume it always was. The company's own account says otherwise. Motocross grips were in the mix early — ODI has packaging in its archive showing Rick Johnson as an amateur, which puts moto product in the 1970s — and for years ODI molded private-label motocross grips for other, deliberately unnamed brands. But when the Mushroom hit, per Jump, the Guerrs turned toward the bicycle side and stopped pushing as hard on moto. The ODI-branded motocross line as riders know it now is an early-2000s relaunch, not the origin.

One detail from ODI's own archive is worth keeping, because it sets the competitive board for this whole corner of the library: the company's original motocross grips were up against Oakley and A'ME. Same three names, moto and BMX both.

The Mushroom

The Mushroom is the grip that made ODI. A field of soft rubber nubs — the mold pattern credited to Herb Guerr's brother, a mold maker whose name nobody seems to have written down — sold into a BMX market that was expanding faster than anyone could supply it. It is the grip a generation remembers peeling off the card and gluing on, and it is still in the catalog as the Mushroom II.

ODI also ran a Mushroom Gold Collector Signature Series, rider-branded pairs sold in the aftermarket. Greg Hill's red signature Mushrooms are confirmed by a published magazine photo caption. A collector reference index appears to catalog a wider roster of names from the era, but we could not render that page to read the roster first-hand, so we are not printing a list we have not seen.

Nobody knows when the Mushroom came out. A collector thread ran from 2013 to 2024 without resolving it. Guesses cluster around 1980 and 1981; one first-hand account puts the first sighting at a local bike shop in 1983; another notes the grips turning up in 1984 magazine advertising and dealer mail order while the actual release date stays a blank. ODI still has original grips in-house. Someone should simply ask them.

Two near-death experiences

Somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s the Guerrs sold ODI and planned to retire. The buyer defaulted on the contract. Rather than fight it out, the Guerrs came out of retirement and started a second grip company, ATI — competing directly with the business they had built. ODI then passed through several owners without any of them making it work.

The rescue came from a supplier. Dave Grimes ran his own molding shop and had been a contract molder for ODI. When the owners hit trouble they came to him, and he bought the company — 1992 by one account, 1994 by another, both from ODI. He bought the assets without assuming the debt, then voluntarily paid every athlete and every dollar of back royalty the previous ownership had left unpaid.

That decision is why one of ODI's best-selling grips has a strange name. The mid-1990s hit was the Tomac Attack, made for John Tomac. The previous owners had failed to pay Tomac his royalties, and ODI lost the right to use his name. Grimes caught up the money anyway and never got the license back, so the grip carried on as simply the Attack. ODI would not put another rider's name on a grip until Aaron Gwin's AG-1 in 2014, nearly twenty years later.

The Lock-On

Before 1999, attaching a grip was a small ritual with no good version. Glue. Hairspray. Safety wire. Compressed air. None of it held reliably, and all of it was slow to undo. Grimes was working race pits after buying the company and kept watching the same problem: grips were the hardest part of the cockpit to change, because in the era before faceplate stems and hinged levers, everything on the bar had to come off past the grip.

ODI's answer was a rigid inner sleeve with an integrated clamp at each end, torqued to the bar with a hex key. Racers who needed fast changes between motos drove the requirement, and sponsored riders and teams tested prototypes. It took time. The first version used an expensive aluminum core; cheaper versions failed ODI's own safety standard. All of this happened before 3D printing, so every iteration was real tooling.

Two patents underpin it, both printed in ODI's own installation instructions: US 6,035,742, "Handlebar grip assembly," filed June 16, 1997; and US 6,263,759, "Removable, non-turning handlebar grip," filed September 13, 1999 and assigned to Edge Plastics, Inc. in November 2013.

The launch is dated 1999 by ODI's own brand manager and by two magazines, and late 1998 by a third. The Bonus Pack cost $19.99 and the press thought that was absurd money for grips. Colby Young's line on the reception, from a 2018 Bike magazine piece: there was "quite a bit of skepticism initially." At trade shows, people treated the display as a challenge and generally broke it rather than move the grip. The core dual-clamp design has run essentially unchanged for more than twenty years, later refined into the v2.1 system that rolled out to motocross first and then to bicycles, ATV and watercraft.

On the gate — what the spec sheets actually say

Here is where the received story falls apart, and we think the real one is more interesting.

We could not confirm a single 1980s BMX complete that shipped with ODI grips. Every factory spec sheet checked for this page named something else. The 1985 Mongoose Californian ran Team Mongoose grips. The 1985 Mongoose Eric Rupe Signature Edition and Pro Class 24 ran Oakley O Wings. The 1986 Mongoose Expert was back on Team Mongoose. Later on, the 1996 Dyno Nitro, the 1997 Mongoose DMC and the 1999 GT Power Series all ran house-brand Kraton grips.

The earliest ODI factory fitment we can put on a BMX complete is the 1992 Hoffman Condor, whose original spec lists the ODI Toadstool. That is a decade after the Mushroom's presumed arrival.

So the honest framing is this: in the boom years ODI sold to riders, not to factories. Mushrooms were an upgrade you bought at the shop and glued on over whatever the bike came with. The OEM story starts in the 1990s. It is a different kind of success than the one people assume, and it happens to be the same one Grab On had in the same market at the same time.

The caveat that matters. Period magazine bike tests are the best evidence for grips, and the main archive of scanned BMX magazines stores them as image-only PDFs with no searchable text layer. We could not keyword-search a single period spec panel. Absence of evidence here is not proof of absence, and we are flagging it rather than dressing it up.

ODI's confirmed OEM work outside BMX is substantial and worth stating for scale: Grimes molded all of Trek's original-equipment grips while Trek bikes were still built in Waterloo, Wisconsin, and ODI makes the lock-on grips fitted to KTM, Husqvarna and GasGas motorcycles. The company has also molded branded grips for Troy Lee Designs, Vans and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Today

Dave Grimes retired in August 2023 and sold Edge Plastics and ODI to M.R. Industries LLC of Corona, California, which reorganized the business as ODI Manufacturing LLC. The company still operates from Riverside.

The current BMX range runs the Longneck family — Longneck V2.1 Lock-On, Longneck XL, Longneck SLX, Longneck ST, Soft Longneck — plus the Ruffian, the Rogue, the Aaron Gwin AG-1 and AG-2, a Hucker signature, the Mushroom II, and collaborations with Vans, Tangent, Box Components and Stay Strong. Forty-odd years after a molding shop in Torrance cut a mold full of little rubber nubs, the grip is still the product.

Timeline

• 1970s or early 1980s Herb and Kay Guerr found ODI — Ornate Designs Incorporated — in Torrance, California, as a general injection molding shop. Decade disputed by ODI's own people.
• 1970s ODI packaging in the company archive shows Rick Johnson as an amateur, confirming early motocross product.
• Early 1980s The Mushroom grip lands during the BMX boom and becomes the company's first real hit.
• Mid-to-late 1980s The Guerrs sell ODI and retire. The buyer defaults. They come back and found ATI grips in competition.
• 1992 or 1994 Dave Grimes, previously ODI's contract molder, buys the company and pays off the previous owners' athlete royalties.
• 1992 The Hoffman Condor ships with ODI Toadstool grips — the earliest BMX factory fitment we can document.
• Mid-1990s The Tomac Attack loses its name over the previous ownership's unpaid royalties and becomes simply the Attack.
• 1997 First Lock-On patent filed (June 16), later issued as US 6,035,742.
• 1999 Lock-On grips launch. Second patent filed (September 13), later issued as US 6,263,759. Launch Bonus Pack, $19.99.
• Early 2000s ODI relaunches ODI-branded motocross grips after years of private-label work for other brands.
• 2014 Aaron Gwin's AG-1 becomes ODI's first athlete signature grip since the Tomac Attack.
• 2023 Grimes retires in August; M.R. Industries LLC of Corona acquires Edge Plastics and ODI, reorganizing as ODI Manufacturing LLC.
• Today ODI operates from Riverside, California, with the Longneck, Ruffian, Rogue, Mushroom II and Lock-On lines still in production.

Sources

odigrips.com — About Us, company address, current BMX and powersports catalog. Mountain Bike Action, "The ODI Brand Story," Ron Koch, December 2, 2024 — the single richest source, carrying on-record interviews with ODI's Colby Young and Johnny Jump; source for the Guerrs, Torrance, the Ornate Designs expansion, the early product mix, the ATI split, the Grimes purchase, the Tomac Attack naming, the Trek OEM work and the Greg Hill signature Mushrooms. Motocross Action, "Johnny Jump on ODI Grips' History, Struggles and Opportunities," 2021 — the motocross timeline, the Rick Johnson packaging, the Oakley and A'ME competitive note, the private-label work and the early-2000s moto relaunch. Pinkbike, "Inside ODI: Keeping It In The US," 2014 — Riverside factory visit, Edge Plastics as parent, the late-1998 Lock-On date, branded molding for Troy Lee Designs, Vans and Pabst. Bike magazine, "Spray No More," Travis Engel, May 7, 2018 — the fullest account of the Lock-On's development, the 1992 Grimes date and the $19.99 launch price. MBS Advisors deal notice, August 16, 2023 — the M.R. Industries acquisition and the ODI Manufacturing LLC reorganization. bmx-catalogue.com — original catalog specs for the 1992 Hoffman Condor (ODI Toadstool), and the 1985–86 Mongoose, 1996 Dyno, 1997 Mongoose and 1999 GT models that specced other grips; note this is a modern reproduction of factory catalogs rather than period scans. bmxmuseum.com — forum thread 561314, the eleven-year Mushroom dating discussion, and reference entry 1194 for the Mushroom Gold Collector Signature Series (metadata only; page body would not render). ODI V2 Lock-On installation instructions — the two patent numbers. Sources attempted and unavailable: oldschoolmags.com period bike-test PDFs (image-only, no text layer), bmxsociety.com (unreachable), 23mag.com (no ODI entry exists).

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