S&M Bikes
The Rider-Owned Brand That Wouldn't Quit — 1987 to Today
A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co
Two kids in Santa Ana, tired of watching their frames snap clean in half, decided to build their own. The big bicycle companies came for nearly every brand around them with a checkbook — and S&M is the one that never sold, never moved offshore, never quit. This is how Chris Moeller built a rider-owned brand that's still welding frames in California today.
Where it started
There was no factory. No business plan. Two friends out of Southern California who were tired of bikes that snapped on them — that's the whole origin story.
Early 1987. Chris "Mad Dog" Moeller was 16, racing all over the West Coast and doing test rider work for BMX Action. He destroyed equipment. The bikes the industry was putting out front weren't built for what he and his buddies were doing — big jumps, hard landings, that heavier new style nobody had a name for yet. It would get called dirt jumping later. Across town in Santa Ana you had Greg "Scott" Swingrover, 19, racing, jumping, working the floor at South Coast Bike Shop. And Scott had something nobody else in that crew had: a frame jig, a TIG welder, and the patience to actually build the thing himself.
By the middle of 1987 they were in business. The name took about five seconds. Two founders, two initials. S for Scott, M for Moeller. S&M Bikes. Done.
The K-9 D-Zine, the Mad Dog, and the early frames
First thing out the door was a frame and fork set, the K-9 D-Zine, summer of 1987. It didn't last. By that fall it was already gone, replaced by Moeller's own signature frame, the Mad Dog.
1988 gave us the Slam Bar, a one-piece chromoly handlebar that turned into one of the first parts everybody knew by name. Collector sourcing credits Voris Dixon's VDC shop with building an early bar for Moeller ahead of the Slam Bar becoming S&M's own in-house design — the same Santa Ana contract shop that was bending bars and building frames for half the BMX brands of the era at the time. Then 1989, and the Dirt Bike — the frame that literally named a whole discipline. Oversize 4130 chromoly. A 1-1/2 inch downtube. A 1-3/8 inch top tube. 3/4 inch chainstays. Flame-cut dropouts, 5/16 inch thick. Heavier than a race frame, and it didn't care one bit. This thing was built for the new post-race riding — trails, dirt jumps, the kind of repeat hard landings that were folding the lighter frames clean in half.
1990 — the year the partnership reshaped
By the summer of 1990, Scott Swingrover had a young family to feed and an offer on the table from GT Bicycles. He took the GT job and walked away from S&M, handing the company to Moeller. This wasn't some big buyout. Scott left to take a real paycheck somewhere that had a payroll department. Moeller stayed. And from that day on, S&M was Chris Moeller's company. Nineteen years old. No business school, no investors, nobody backing him — and a frame catalog selling faster than the shop could weld them.
The rider-owned model — and why it mattered
Plenty of BMX companies got started by riders. Here's what usually happened next: a few years in, the big bicycle conglomerate writes a check and the brand's gone. Redline. Mongoose. Haro. GT. SE eventually. By the late 1990s, damn near every brand at the front of the catalog answered to a parent company full of people who didn't ride.
S&M went the opposite way. Moeller kept it small, kept it private, kept the calls in the hands of riders. The product, the marketing, the videos — all of it came from guys actually on the bikes. And that became the blueprint. Every rider-owned BMX brand that came after in the '90s and 2000s was running a playbook S&M wrote first.
The bikes that built the brand
- The Dirt Bike (1989) — the original oversize chromoly dirt frame. The template for the category.
- The Holmes (early 1990s) — the first extra-long S&M frame. Still in the catalog today.
- The Heavy As Fuck — the HAF, released in 1994. Built on the same jig as the Dirt Bike, with extended seat stays forming a flat platform behind the seat tube.
- The Slam Bar (1988, updated repeatedly) — the original S&M bar.
- The ATF — the base S&M race-positioned frame.
- The Pitchfork — and its later XLT revision — the S&M fork that has been spec'd onto more complete bikes from more brands than any other single S&M part.
Same thread running through every one of them: 4130 chromoly, built thick, built in California, built to get the hell beat out of it.
The team — racers, freestylers, and lifers
Stu Thomsen rode for S&M for a short stretch in the late 80s, back when the brand was just getting off the ground. One of the most decorated racers the sport ever had, a Hall of Famer — and most people tie him to the SE Racing years, not this one. But that brief run handed S&M an early bit of credibility on the racing side, and it counted.
Mark Eaton was one of the guys doing real, current riding for the S&M videos in the early '90s. Brian Foster ("BF") and Mike Aitken both sat dead center of the S&M and Fit picture once Fit got going in 1999. Jimmy Levan, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Sean Butler, Mike Cardiel — a long list of names rode through that program. And Dave Mirra shows up in early S&M footage, years before anybody outside BMX knew who he was.
Cease and Desist — the in-house magazine and video machine
Here's something no other BMX brand in the '90s had: their own publication. Cease and Desist (C&D) was the in-house magazine and video imprint, run out of the same building:
- Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer (1991) — S&M's first full-length.
- 44 Something (1993) — VHS, made for under one thousand dollars, reported to have sold more than eight thousand copies. BMX Plus named it one of the top ten BMX videos of the 1990s.
- Please Kill Me (2004) — S&M's fifth full-length, filmed and edited by Bob Scerbo and Brian Wizmerski.
The shield logo
One shield logo, since day one. Printed, embossed, decaled, welded onto every frame, fork, bar, sticker, and t-shirt the brand has ever shipped. No rebrand. No refresh. Nobody woke up one morning and decided the mark needed modernizing. It just is what it is, and it has been the whole time.
Fit Bike Co. — the 1999 spinoff
By the late 1990s S&M was sitting comfortable at the top of the market — which meant it wasn't really chasing the kid walking into a shop to buy his first serious BMX bike. So the answer was a sister brand.
In 1999, Chris Moeller and Robbie Morales started Fit Bike Co. Morales was about to leave Terrible One and walked the complete-bike idea over to Moeller. Moeller owned the parent company; Morales ran the brand and the team. Fit got built around an in-house frame, the Series 1, and a team that filled up fast — Morales, Nate Hanson, Brian Foster, Mike Aitken, Van Homan. The frames were built in Taiwan to land at a different price.
Morales left in 2010 to go start Cult, and he took a chunk of the Fit roster with him — Dakota Roche, Chase DeHart, Trey Jones, Chase Hawk. Fit kept rolling under Moeller and still shares The Building with S&M to this day.
The Building, and the continuous USA-made run
S&M and Fit work out of a shop in Santa Ana that everybody — staff, riders, all of them — just calls The Building. Frames, forks, bars, still TIG-welded by hand in California. Design, manufacturing, team, marketing, video, all under one roof. That kind of setup is rare anywhere in the bicycle business and damn near unheard of in BMX.
Read the other brand chapters on this site and you'll spot the same pattern over and over: starts in California, hits scale, gets bought, production heads to Taiwan. Redline, Mongoose, Haro, GT, SE, CW, Torker, Schwinn — the story rhymes every time. S&M is one of the few that doesn't: frames built in California from 1987 forward, no offshore break, same owner, same shield. That's it. That's the whole rare thing.
Behind the Shield — the book
Late 2010s, S&M put out Behind the Shield, a 174-page hardback coffee-table book on the brand's first thirty-plus years. Melissa Moeller wrote and edited most of it. Closest thing to an authorized S&M history you'll find in print.
Where S&M sits in the BMX story
BMX's first wave in the 1970s — that's the History of BMX piece, plus the BUMS, NBA, NBL, ABA, IBMXF, and USA BMX sanction chapters — got built by racers. Scot Breithaupt, Perry Kramer, Stu Thomsen, Greg Hill, Mike Miranda, Tommy Brackens. Then the early-'80s freestyle boom, with Eddie Fiola and R.L. Osborn out front, handed BMX a second life and a second pile of money.
Then the crash of 1986-1988 wrecked all of it and forced a reset. The brands that climbed out the other side were smaller, leaner, rider-owned, pointed at the new stuff — dirt, street, park. S&M is the cleanest example of that whole shift. Founded right before the crash, designed for exactly the riding the crash made room for, and built on a structure the old guard couldn't copy even if they wanted to.
Sources
S&M Bikes — "About S&M" company history page (sandmbikes.com). DIG BMX — "Behind The Shield — 30 Years of S&M Bikes" feature. BMX Museum — S&M Bikes brand and model reference pages. BMX Wiki (Fandom) — S&M Bikes entry. Melissa Moeller (editor) — Behind the Shield, S&M Bikes, 174-page hardback brand history. ESPN Action / Robbie Morales — "The Fit Morales Years" feature. FAT BMX — coverage of the Robbie Morales departure to Cult, 2010. BMX Movie Database — S&M video catalog references. BMX Union — Chris Moeller interviews. USA BMX Hall of Fame. Snakebitebmx.com, "BMX Handlebars // Through the Years" — collector sourcing on the early S&M bar built by Voris Dixon's VDC; see also our Voris Dixon Bikes (VDC) chapter.