S&M Bikes — The Rider-Owned Brand That Wouldn't Quit (1987 to Today)
S&M Bikes
The Rider-Owned Brand That Wouldn't Quit — 1987 to Today
A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co
We're telling this story the same way we told the origin piece and the SE Racing chapter: neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is contested, we say so.
Where it started
S&M Bikes did not start with a factory or a business plan. It started with two friends from Southern California who wanted bikes that did not break.
In early 1987, a 16-year-old Chris "Mad Dog" Moeller was racing all over the West Coast and working as a test rider for BMX Action magazine. He was hard on equipment. The bikes the industry was selling were not built for the kind of riding he and his friends were doing — long jumps, hard landings, the new heavier discipline that would eventually be called dirt jumping. Across town in Santa Ana, Greg "Scott" Swingrover, 19, was racing and dirt jumping and working at South Coast Bike Shop. He had access to a frame jig, a TIG welder, and the patience to build something himself.
By the middle of 1987 the two had decided to go into business together. The brand name was the simplest possible thing: the initials of the two founders. S for Scott, M for Moeller. S&M Bikes.
The K-9 D-Zine, the Mad Dog, and the early frames
The first S&M product was a frame and fork set called the K-9 D-Zine, released in the summer of 1987. It did not stay on the catalog long. By the fall of 1987 it had been replaced by Moeller's own signature frame, the Mad Dog.
1988 brought the Slam Bar, a one-piece chromoly handlebar that became one of the brand's first widely recognized parts. 1989 brought the Dirt Bike — the frame that named a discipline. Oversize 4130 chromoly: a 1-1/2 inch downtube, a 1-3/8 inch top tube, 3/4 inch chainstays, flame-cut 5/16 inch thick dropouts. It was heavier than a race frame and it did not care. It was meant for the new post-race style of riding: trails, dirt jumps, the kind of repeat hard landings that were folding lighter frames in half.
1990 — the year the partnership reshaped
By the summer of 1990, Greg Swingrover had a young family to support and an offer from GT Bicycles. He took the GT job and stepped away from S&M, leaving the company in Moeller's hands. It was not a buyout in the traditional sense — Scott left to take a real paycheck somewhere with a payroll department. Moeller stayed. From that point forward, S&M Bikes was Chris Moeller's company. He was 19, with no business school training, no investor backing, and a frame catalog that was selling faster than the shop could build it.
The rider-owned model — and why it mattered
Plenty of BMX companies were founded by riders. Most ended up sold to larger bicycle conglomerates within a few years — Redline, Mongoose, Haro, GT, eventually SE. By the late 1990s, the major BMX brands at the front of the catalog were almost all owned by parent companies that did not ride.
S&M went the other direction. Moeller kept it small, kept it private, and kept the decision-making with riders. Product, marketing, and the videos all came from the people on the bikes. That model became the template. Every rider-owned BMX brand that followed in the 1990s and 2000s was working from a playbook S&M had written 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.
The pattern across all of them: 4130 chromoly, built thick, built in California, built to be ridden hard.
The team — racers, freestylers, and lifers
Stu Thomsen — one of the most decorated racers in BMX history and a Hall of Famer most associated with the SE Racing years — rode for S&M briefly in the late 80s as the brand was getting going. A short stretch, but it gave S&M an early credibility marker on the racing side.
Mark Eaton was one of the riders doing real, current riding for the S&M videos in the early 1990s. Brian Foster ("BF") and Mike Aitken were both central to the S&M and Fit team picture once Fit was established in 1999. Jimmy Levan, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Sean Butler, Mike Cardiel, and many more rode through the program. Dave Mirra appears in early S&M video footage from his pre-fame years.
Cease and Desist — the in-house magazine and video machine
One thing that separated S&M from every other BMX brand in the 1990s was that S&M had its own publication. Cease and Desist (C&D) was the in-house magazine and video imprint:
- 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
S&M has used the same shield logo since the brand started. Printed, embossed, decaled, and welded onto every frame, fork, bar, sticker, and t-shirt the brand has ever shipped. No rebrand, no logo refresh.
Fit Bike Co. — the 1999 spinoff
By the late 1990s, S&M was healthy at the top of the market and was not really competing for the kid buying his first serious BMX bike off a shop floor. The answer was a sister brand.
In 1999, Chris Moeller and Robbie Morales founded Fit Bike Co. Morales had been on the verge of leaving Terrible One and brought the idea of a complete-bike-focused brand to Moeller. Moeller owned the parent company; Morales ran brand and team. Fit was built around an in-house frame design (the Series 1) and a team that quickly included Morales, Nate Hanson, Brian Foster, Mike Aitken, and Van Homan. The frames were built in Taiwan to hit a different price point.
Morales left in 2010 to start Cult, taking several Fit riders — Dakota Roche, Chase DeHart, Trey Jones, Chase Hawk — with him. Fit continued under Moeller's ownership and still shares The Building with S&M.
The Building, and the continuous USA-made run
S&M and Fit operate out of a shop in Santa Ana that the staff and the riders just call The Building. Frames, forks, and bars are still TIG-welded by hand in California. That kind of vertical setup — design, manufacture, team management, marketing, and video all under one roof — is rare across the bicycle industry today and almost unheard of in BMX.
Across the BMX brand chapters on this site you'll see the same pattern: brand starts in California, hits scale, gets acquired, production moves to Taiwan. Redline, Mongoose, Haro, GT, SE, CW, Torker, Schwinn — the story rhymes. S&M is one of the very small number of exceptions: frames built in California from 1987 forward, without an offshore break, under the same ownership, under the same shield logo.
Behind the Shield — the book
In the late 2010s S&M published Behind the Shield, a 174-page hardback coffee-table book covering the brand's first thirty-plus years. Melissa Moeller wrote and edited most of it. It is the closest thing to an authorized S&M history in print.
Where S&M sits in the BMX story
BMX's first wave of the 1970s — covered in the History of BMX piece and the BUMS, NBA, NBL, ABA, IBMXF, and USA BMX sanction chapters — was built by racers like Scot Breithaupt, Perry Kramer, Stu Thomsen, Greg Hill, Mike Miranda, and Tommy Brackens. The early-1980s freestyle boom, driven by Eddie Fiola and R.L. Osborn, gave BMX a second commercial life.
Then the crash of 1986-1988 forced a reset. The brands that came up out of it were smaller, leaner, rider-owned, and aimed at new disciplines — dirt, street, park. S&M is the clearest example of that shift: founded just before the crash, designed for the discipline the crash made room for, built to a structure the older brands could not easily copy.
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.