Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is an exclusive bicycle manufacturer focused on sporty and extremely high-performance mountain bikes. Founded in 1994 by MTB fanatic Rob Roskopp in the eponymous Californian city of Santa Cruz, the brand's first model followed in the same year—a full-suspension trail bike that hit the mountain biking scene like a lightning bolt at a time when there were virtually only XC hardtails or clunky downhillers. Since then, Santa Cruz has been known for incomparable MTBs across all categories, which again and again redefine the limits of riding fun and downhill performance. Over the years, the small garage company has grown into a premium brand internationally valued by athletes, which, in addition to high-quality bicycles, also produces carbon wheels in its own carbon frame factory.

As a premium manufacturer, Santa Cruz sets the highest standards in its production and places great value on good customer service. For this reason, they offer a lifetime warranty for original owners on frames and some other parts, such as their Reserve carbon wheels. In addition, if the warranty does not apply, they offer their customers the option of crash replacement—an offer of spare parts at a reduced price.

Today, Santa Cruz is particularly popular for its carbon expertise. In their in-house carbon lab, research is constantly being conducted into the development of new manufacturing processes and different carbon layups. The bicycle frames produced in their own carbon frame factory and all other carbon parts benefit from this. Furthermore, since 2001, they have been using their Virtual Pivot Point technology, a rear suspension system with two counter-rotating links that ensures robust, reliable, and high-performance damping.

Santa Cruz is a great promoter of cycling itself: in addition to the world-famous Santa Cruz Syndicate downhill team, which boasts a multitude of world championship titles, they also sponsor other well-known mountain bike teams and individual athletes from all over the world. But that's not all—Santa Cruz stands for mountain biking out of passion, and so they support cycling events and projects such as the PayDirt trail building project and, for example, offer their employees paid time off for engagement in trail maintenance.

Santa Cruz offers high-performance mountain bikes in the categories of downhill, XC, enduro, and trail bike. A Santa Cruz bicycle is always the result of many years of development and optimization of geometry, pedaling efficiency, downhill performance, and suspension, so that every rider receives a bike perfectly tailored to their riding style. Well-known Santa Cruz MTBs include the enduro MTB Santa Cruz Nomad, the cross-country racing machine Blur, and also the mountain-oriented gravel bike Santa Cruz Stigmata. Many of these bikes have already achieved podium finishes in various international races and have a large community of enthusiasts all over the world.

Although the brand's focus is on sporty, non-motorized mountain bikes, Santa Cruz cannot entirely escape the E-MTB bug: the premium manufacturer's product range now includes two e-mountain bike models that combine its carbon expertise with many years of experience in building the most powerful mountain bikes in the world. The Santa Cruz e-bike, the Santa Cruz Heckler, is trimmed for all-round performance, offers well-balanced handling characteristics on any surface, and above all, is fun! This inherent riding pleasure is also characteristic of its big brother, the Santa Cruz Bullit: this brutal enduro E-MTB with a downhill character acts confidently and agilely even on the longest and most demanding trails.