FEATURE
THREE DECADES IN THE MAKING
Muc-Off marks its 30th anniversary in 2024. BikeBiz sits down with CEO Alex Trimnell to look through the history books
Can you tell Muc-Off’s founding roots? Muc-Off started back in 1994, but important context for its founding roots comes from X-Lite. That story goes back to 1990 – My bike was stolen when I was at school and when we went on a family trip to America, we visited a Klein dealership where I convinced Dad to buy one, it had an oversized Aluminium frame and internal cable routing, it was way ahead of its time, but it paired with a cheap pair of chromoly forks. With his motorcycle heritage, Dad believed he could reinvent these forks and went on to create the world’s first twin crown fork. I helped by doing lots of development riding even though I was still at school. This step led to Dad being inspired by the MTB world and started looking at lightweight bar ends, which were the hot product in the market at the time, and set to create the world’s lightest bar ends, all in our garage at home. The first cleaner was developed in response to a large number of X-Lite parts coming back with corrosion damage to anodised parts, which was caused by household cleaners. We wanted to offer riders a cleaner which was safe to use on delicate finishes, as well as being kind to the environment. We worked hard to develop the original formula with our knowledge of riding, real world testing
32 | April 2024
and working with some expert chemists we set to work on the many pre-launch formula iterations. We then quickly moved to in-house development and filling – that was the start of the pink story.
What are your earliest memories of the Muc-Off brand? Muc-Off has become a name which is synonymous with bike cleaning globally, but that obviously wasn’t the case in those early days. We were the first bike-specific cleaner anyone had ever seen, so it was a challenge to make bike shops pay attention. The name helped, of course, but we found that once we demonstrated how well it worked, and the damage that household cleaners were causing, particularly to anodised parts, they were convinced. It was safe for the bike, the user and it was biodegradable from day one. The job then became about getting the products into the hands of as many riders as possible, so they could experience it and spread the word throughout the close-knit MTB community. We were a very small family business with precious few resources, so it took many years to grow the number of riders who were using the product into our flagship product today.
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