TECH BMX Pants — The Brand I Built at 15

TECH BMX Pants — The Brand I Built at 15

Written by Bill Ryan · firsthand · hosted on Legend Bike Co

I lost my first company to a letter. I was a kid with a frame brand called Hi-Tech BMX, and somebody with lawyers didn't like the name. The threat was simple — drop "Hi-Tech" or get sued. So I shut it down. But I wasn't about to throw the name in the trash. I cut it in half, kept the back end, and put it on race pants. That's where TECH came from. A teenager who got pushed out of one business and refused to walk away empty-handed.

TECH — quick facts
Owner / Founder: Bill Ryan
Started: 1984, at age 15
Ran through: 1993
Where: my bedroom — 6912 Tahiti Drive, Cypress, California
Lead product: TECH Racing Pants
Supplied: the Redline factory team, Haro, S&M, Cyclecraft, Diamond Back, and a lot more
Today: still operating as TECH BMX Products, under my guardianship

Where the name came from

Back up a couple of years. I started Hi-Tech BMX at 13. A frame company. Thirteen years old, building frames. That's how deep in this I was before I could even drive. The Hi-Tech name brought the lawsuit threat, and rather than burn money I didn't have fighting it, I closed the doors. The frame design didn't die, though — it carried on as the National Pro. And the name didn't die either. It just got shorter. Hi-Tech became TECH, and TECH went on pants instead of tubing.

People think a brand has to start clean, with a plan and a logo and a runway. Mine started with a problem. I took the part of the old company nobody could take from me and built something new on it. That's the whole origin. No boardroom. A bedroom.

Running a company out of my bedroom

6912 Tahiti Drive, Cypress, California. That was the address. The factory, the office, the shipping department, all of it, was my room. I was 15. I'd cut and sew and pack and figure out the next order, and then I'd go to school. There's a version of this story people like to make sound romantic. It wasn't romantic. It was a lot of late nights and a lot of getting it wrong before I got it right.

But it worked. The pants got good. And once the pants got good, the phone started ringing.

TECH Racing Pants — the product that built it

TECH Racing Pants was the lead. That was the product that put the name on the map. By the mid-'80s I wasn't just making pants for kids at the local track — I was supplying real programs. The Redline factory team wore TECH. Haro came to me. S&M. Cyclecraft. Diamond Back. And plenty of others through the '80s.

Think about that for a second. These were some of the biggest names in the sport, and their riders were racing in pants made by a teenager in a bedroom in Cypress. I didn't have a sales force. I had a product that held up and a price that worked, and word got around. That's it. That's how a 15-year-old ends up supplying half the factory teams in BMX.

It ran like that from 1984 all the way through 1993. Nine years. From sophomore in high school to a grown man with a real business.

One thing I want straight — TECH is not Max

People mix these up, so let me put it plainly. TECH was mine. I built it. Max BMX Pants was a different animal — a Torker brand that ran from 1980 to 1985. Different company, different roots, different story.

Here's the part that's funny if you've followed my path. Both of those pant brands live under my roof today. Max came in through Torker. TECH was always mine. Two separate threads from the early '80s, and somehow they both ended up in my hands all these years later. But don't let anybody tell you they were ever the same thing. They weren't.

TECH today

The thing about TECH is it never really stopped. It runs today as TECH BMX Products, and it's under my guardianship now. Same name I cut out of Hi-Tech when I was a kid, still going. There aren't many BMX brands that can trace a straight line back to a bedroom in 1984 and still be operating. This one can.

What I don't have nailed down
This is my own brand, so the spine of this story is solid — I lived it. But I'll be honest about the gaps. I don't have a clean record of every single team and brand that ran TECH Racing Pants over those nine years; the list above is the ones I'm sure of, and there were more. Exact year-by-year production numbers from the bedroom days aren't something I kept. And the precise date the Hi-Tech threat landed versus when the first TECH pant shipped — those run close together in 1983 to 1984 and I won't pretend to a calendar I don't have. If you raced in TECH back then and you've got photos or catalog scans, I'd love to see them.

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Sources

The spine of this page is firsthand — Bill Ryan, the founder and owner, telling his own story. Supporting and corroborating references: Supercross BMX official history (supercrossbmx.com), which records TECH as Bill's number-plate and racing-pant company; Torker Racing — Max BMX collection page, noting Ryan launched TECH Racing Pants at 15 in 1984 from his bedroom, supplying Redline, Haro, S&M, and Cyclecraft; bmxultra.com — "Interview with Bill Ryan: 30 Years of Supercross BMX"; FatBMX — "Preserving BMX History, Episode 86: Bill Ryan"; Legend Bike Co. — "How the Former Pro Got Its Name." Period magazine archives at oldschoolmags.com (BMX Action, BMX Plus!, 1986-1988) confirm TECH product in the BMX market of the era.