"My Job is To Keep People Loving Riding Their Dirtbikes" | Jason Gearld on Phoenix Handlebars 4

When it comes to aftermarket parts there are almost endless options. Handlebars are no different. There are so many bends, heights, widths, and sweeps to choose from that you could get overwhelmed if you don't know what you like. Jason Gearld spent many years working in the moto industry for numerous companies until he decided to start Phoenix Handlebars. He wanted to simplify the handlebar process and focus on the customer having fun riding their dirtbikes. Jason understands what it means when a customer spends their hard-earned money on a performance product and intends to make that experience special. I visited with Jason recently so he can tell us his story. Hope you enjoy it.

For the full interview, check out the Vital MX podcast right here. If you're interested in the condensed written version, scroll down just a bit further.

Jamie Guida – Vital MX: Let’s start with the normal question. What's your background?

Jason Gearld: I grew up in Putnam County, Indiana out in the sticks. More cornfields than sticks. Like so many of us, I just got entrenched in moto as a kid and wanted to follow that moto dream. I'm not very fast. I wasn't fast then, and still not fast today. I got lucky in the fact that I ended up at a really cool motorcycle shop right out of high school. It was a cool shop, especially in this pre-Internet period. The trade show came to our town back then. The Indianapolis trade show. Now it's basically the AIM expo. Because of that, I got a chance to meet a lot of the cool industry people because they would come to visit our store. I'm working in these shops, and I had set my dreams on, “Well if I'm not going to be a racer, I'd sure love to be able to figure out how to work in the motorcycle industry.” Lo and behold, here I am nearly, I don't want to date myself, but I dare say 30 years later, still doing it. It's pretty cool.

Vital MX: Growing up in Indiana, what was the motocross scene like? You said you discovered it, and you got entrenched in it. But how did you discover it? Was it family? Did you just run across it on TV?

Jason: This is what sucks. I had to leave Indiana and now it's like the hotbed of activity out there with everything from their races and all these really bitchin off-road races that are happening in people's cornfields, the National, and GNCCs. What gives? I grew up like 30 minutes from that. I had to move away and now it's super sick. For me, it was a guy down the road that rode a dirt bike and there happened to be a motocross track on our road. You'd see the bikes go by and in those days seeing a dirt bike was like seeing a celebrity. Just seeing the dirt bike itself was so rad. It just grabs you. You don't really know why. Motocross Action, Dirt Bike magazine, Dirt Rider, it's all we had to go off of. I can't do simple math these days, but I can tell you which page Rick Johnson was on in the Motocross Action and which direction he was going, and what gear he was wearing. Those things are stuck in my mind forever.

Vital MX: It seemed like a fantasy world.

Jason: Totally. Oh, yeah. Every study hall you had your MXA buried underneath three other books, and you're faking like that. You're not actually doing any real schoolwork. All you're doing is reading and figuring out how to eliminate arm pump.

Vital MX: I assume at some point you got a bike. Your family must have been supportive of that and helped you.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, they were. My family was awesome. I'm really lucky in that regard. But we didn't ever chase the dream. Daytona was just here, and I've got this photo from my first-ever pro race. My family went down to Daytona and my dad took me down there and surprised me. We knew we were going, but this is the pre-Internet era. I didn't know a ton about moto. There was this whole thing in my head like, I hope that we're not going down to some amateur event or something because I just wasn't as well versed on the sport at the time. As luck would have it, there was RJ (Ricky Johnson) and Wardy (Jeff Ward) and that was 1988. My first ever race. So yeah, they were pretty awesome. We'll get to this part, but my dad died way too early. As luck would have it, he did get a chance to see me end up in sort of a dream job. I'm glad he got to see that because I'm sure as a parent watching his kid fumble through a little bit of life, probably made them realize we did a great job on parenting. I'm sad that he didn't get a chance to see what I was able to create and that all that time spent reading Motocross Action and looking like I was pissing life away wasn't for naught, you know? It came around. It just took a little while. That part of me getting to follow my moto dream has a huge effect on how I treat both of my jobs.

Vital MX: What was your first bike?

Jason: A 1985 Honda XR80. Back then you wanted it to look like a race bike so much you could taste it. You wanted the little skinny footpegs and let's get that paint off the exhaust and try to make it look raw to make it look trick. The first real motocross bike was an ‘88 YZ125. That's when I did my first race. My family was cool and supportive and I did race a little bit off and on. But I didn't race too much until I started working at this motorcycle shop called Stoughton Cycle. That was after I was out of college and started working there. Then we'd go every weekend.

Vital MX: You mentioned this shop a couple of times. Talk about it a little bit. What did that help you develop as far as skills you use today?

Jason: I could spend way too much time on this. But the shop was called Stoughton Cycle and through the 90’s we were one of the coolest places around. We didn't sell units; we were just an accessory store. But Wilma Stoughton was the one who really took me under her wing, and we spent a lot of time merchandising. We always had all the cool stuff. When the Spy goggles came out, I remember there were three colors. They had a black one, a blue one and a purple one. We bought 100 of each. That seemed almost unfathomable. It's like, “Holy smokes, 100 goggles”, again, it was a much different era. But we always had all the cool stuff. We were that destination place where the states around us would come to see us for Supercross and Supercross parties came to town. When the Indy Trade Show would come to town, we would go in and do all the seminars. That was the thing that made me look at the industry as this was starting to be my college education. I was taking it seriously because I wasn't college material. It wasn't just a job where you were getting $8 an hour. I was really enjoying learning how to merchandise and how to sell and getting to know these industry folks. Guys like Marcel Fortney, who at the time was the Fox National Sales Manager. A lot of them would come into our store. It was one of those things where it really set the stage for how the rest of my life would go and for being somebody in the industry. Because I looked up to those people and that's what I wanted to be. I want to be an industry guy like that.

Vital MX: You do get an industry job pretty early on. I think in 2000, one of those dream jobs, as you talked about. Talk about that.

Jason: Total dream. I broke the seal when I moved to Montana from Indiana. Sometimes it's like, “You're not traveling West of the Mississippi. I don't know what's over there, but I'm not going to go find out.” But I went to Montana on a snowboarding trip, fell in love, moved back to the mountains, and broke the seal. About a year later, my inside sales rep over at Fox Racing was taking another job within Fox and I threw my name in the hat and said, “I can do it.” He gave me a plethora of expensive reasons why not to move to California. Of course, I'd never been to California. I just thought everything was LA and Hollywood. Morgan Hill, California, where Fox and Specialized were located was far from that. I loaded up my truck. No cell phone back then, even in 2000, I still didn't have a cell phone. I was such a country bumpkin and I drove to Morgan Hill in January of 2000. I walked through that front door and was slapped in the face with Donny Schmit's Chesterfield Yamaha and all the memorabilia. I'm like, “Holy smokes, I can't believe I'm here.” I became an inside sales guy for Fox Racing, and it was pretty darn amazing.

Vital MX: What were some of the highlights of that? Some things that you learned, people you met.

Jason: Too many, dude. I was 12 years at Fox. It was a dream being in there. I did inside sales for seven years. One of my really exciting things was Mark Finley, who's still at Fox. Chip Jones, who's now, I think, up at Western Power Sports. They gave me a very lucky nod. I say lucky because I don't know why they did it, but they allowed me to come upstairs and become a product developer. Going upstairs at Fox was getting to see what was on the other side of that door. Working with the designers and being up there with Pete Fox and always working multiple seasons ahead. As a ‘Chatty Cathy’, I thought that I was supposed to be a sales guy. I didn't know what a product developer even really did. Once I got up there, the creative side that I had forgotten I had started to come out. Guys like David Durham, who was our lead designer, those guys would ask me my opinion on things. I'm like, “You're going to listen to me?”  I didn't think I was going to be given that opportunity. That was just too sick. I got to work on the Fox Instinct boot and the Fox V4 helmet. I've got countless stories, brother. The things that I got to be there and see, and working with Dungey. The day Jason Lawrence walked into the building, and we thought we were signing him. If I remember Beaker did a really cool podcast with Steve Matthes, and it was awesome to listen to because I was there a little bit before Beaker was. It was cool listening to all of Beaker’s stories because it was like reliving all my own.

Vital MX: You were part of a period of time at a company that a lot of fans would just love being there for.

Jason: The 2000s was such a strange time. When I came in, that was right around the time that the apparel side of things was starting to end up in the ‘mall stores’. It was going into PacSun and Tilly's. That was a real disruption for our industry. We were grenading on moto sales. If you were out of stock, everybody was blaming it on the fact that you were in the mall stores, but the mall stores were only getting t-shirts and sweatshirts, and hats. They weren't getting moto gear. The reason why we were out of moto gear was that sales were going through the roof. We had this really crazy dichotomy where people hated us and loved us. They loved us because they were selling the product. Dealers were selling the product, but they hated us because they felt like you were alienating them by selling out and putting it into mall stores. But it was awesome, you know, getting Ricky (Carmichael) and James (Stewart) that year. Then owning every magazine cover for the next handful of years. Sales meetings were really cool. We got to do so much cool stuff. So again, my dad got to see me get the Fox job and he died about a year later. I'm always like, “Man, at least he got to see that.” At least he got to see his son make it to that really cool environment and sort of chase this dream.

Vital MX: When Fox started going into the malls, what was the mindset at the time? Was it, “We're going to make a lot of money?” What was the game plan?

Jason: It's funny. I actually told this story yesterday to Dennis Bloch over at Seven Motocross. I said, “I'll never forget the National Sales Manager for the apparel lines had told us one of the important things for them was for Fox to be where better brands were sold. You wanted to be on the same wall as Billabong and O'Neill and Hurley. Those were the cool core surf brands and we needed to be beside those. We used to get beat up a lot of times and people would say, “Fox is coming to a JCPenney and Walmart near you.” It was like, “No, no, no, no.” That was never the MO, you know? That wouldn't have been cool. But being in PacSun and among those other brands, well, that was cool. That's a better question for Pete and Greg (Fox) to know why they decided to do it. But I think it helps bring so much attention to moto, whether people wanted to accept that or not. There was always that complaint when you saw a guy walking down the street wearing a Fox shirt, “Do you moto?” Like what? Did you ask him if he pedaled, if he skated, or if he wakeboard or he snowboarded? It could have been any one of those other sports because we were still involved with all of those. When you see a dude with a Dallas Cowboys jersey on, I'm not necessarily sure he lines up every weekend out there on the field. He could just be a fan. I felt like Fox did their part to help bring attention to moto. To walk into PacSun and Tilly’s and see imagery of James and Ricky on the walls in those stores was no doubt pretty rad. It definitely helped bring some good mainstream exposure to our sport.

Vital MX: You were at Fox for 12 years. Where does that lead next?

Jason: After that, I went up to Hammerhead Designs. John Fox, the youngest of the Fox brothers, we had this Morgan Hill poker tournament. Everybody played all weekend. It was a pretty big deal back then. John Clark, who owned Hammerhead Designs, the shift lever and brake pedal company, he was always playing, and I got to know him. It was the opportunity to be able to break away and be a part of something small. I was living in Silicon Valley and I think that's where my entrepreneur bug started. I was seeing companies like Netflix and these little disruptive tech companies doing badass stuff. It was always inspiring to me. So, to be able to be a cog in the machine at Fox after a while it was like, I need to go be a part of something small with Hammerhead Designs. A friend of mine at Fox had always said, “You have to go to grow.” I didn't realize how much I knew about running a business until I got to Hammerhead Designs, and I was a part of, I think there were like six of us. So, even though I never worked in purchasing, I'd have many conversations with people in purchasing. Now, all of a sudden, I'm over here reflecting back on those moments and thinking about that. I wasn't a designer, but I knew how to work my way around Photoshop and Illustrator. Next thing you know, I'm designing header cards or doing ads for whatever. At the time there were Pit Bits presented by Hammerhead. So, I'm creating all that. I'm drawing on all those experiences and then learning to manage people and production. It was a real stepping-stone moment for me. I went to a smaller place to discover how much I had to offer. I was there for I don't remember how many years. I was married to Pete Fox's assistant and when they moved the office to So-Cal, she moved down there. We had a son together named Phoenix and I needed to get down there to be with him. We made it work. I was able to find a job down in SoCal and became the brand manager of MSR, Malcolm Smith Racing. I was the Brand Manager on the hard part side. So now taking my experience from Hammerhead and working with hard parts, now I become the hard parts brand manager at MSR, which was another one of those, “I can't believe I'm doing this” moments. They were owned by Tucker Rocky at the time, now Tucker Powersports. I got a little bit more of an insight into being under the thumb of a distributor, which was pretty interesting because I'd worked with the distributors at Hammerhead, but we were just a vendor. Now I'm a vendor but owned by Tucker. They always talk about how all the little things weave the fabric that creates our lives. Mine was most certainly going from Fox to Hammerhead to now MSR and just learning little pieces along the way.

Vital MX: All these pieces eventually in 2016 add up to you creating Phoenix Handlebars.

Jason: Yeah. It was totally that. When I was at MSR, we called ourselves AMP for Answer/MSR/Pro Taper. It was all three of us under the same roof there in Irvine. Ironically, it was in the old Fox building. That was really strange. Fox had moved to that new badass building that they're at now. But Dave Casella, who was the manager, he had put the brands in the old Fox building. So, it was really strange to walk through those doors as an employee when prior I used to come down and walk through those doors and it would be the Fox SoCal office. Pro Taper was a couple of offices down from me and we all shared information. We weren't a very big team and that was a little bit of the catalyst. Even take it one more step, Mag Group owned a bunch of brands, including Renthal, Vance and Hines, Performance Machine, and Roland Sands. For a brief period, Renthal and Pro Paper actually were owned by the same company and sat down when we'd have meetings. It was pretty bizarre. It's like Coke and Pepsi being in the same room. Everybody was cool and cordial, but you also were playing stuff close to your chest going, “Well, I don't want to tell them what we have going on.” I'm just MSR hard parts, so a little brand. We did really good numbers. I've always had a thing for acronyms and in our industry, there are lots of three-letter acronyms. MSR was one of those. MSR stood for something. I had come from the school of Fox Racing where everything was just so bitchin and cool. Now I worked for MSR and at the time I didn't really see it as a cool brand. Until one day I thought about it, and it wasn't me that brought it up. But one of our designers had brought up that somebody had said something like, “Did you know that MSR stands for Malcolm Smith Racing?” We kind of laugh. We go, “Wow, we've done a really shitty job of telling that story now, haven't we?” Malcolm is still a living legend. It's hard not to love the guy. He smiles. He loved moto. Whether you're a racer, whether you're a rider, as long as you rode a motorcycle, that's what his life is about. So, with marketing, I didn't come up with it, but I will say that I was really pushing, I wanted his name under the logo. Let's make it stand for that again. We were working on that and trying to put more imagery, get helmets off of people and show their faces. The thing that makes moto so sick is, half of it's the riding. The other half is the part that happens on the tailgate, the bench racing with your buddies, telling the stories, all the fun. The thought that when you're putting your head down on a pillow that night and you're still doing laps in your head remembering how sick your day was. That's what I felt like MSR stood for.

Vital MX: Yeah, I think that there's a lot of history there with that name. So, that makes a lot of sense.

Jason: Yeah. That's what I was doing. I was working on a handlebar for MSR and that's where I had some insight into some things I was trying to do at MSR. Tucker ended up selling off the brand. Rather, they killed the MSR hard parts brand, licensed off the apparel to Rocky Mountain ATV, and I was kind of sent packing. For the first time in my life, I was unemployed, and it was a scary place to be. Then I'm sitting at home, and I thought about my son and all the things that I wanted to do. That's when Phoenix Handlebars got conceived in my noggin and I never looked back.

Vital MX: What was the process of getting that started? I also want to get into your philosophy on bars.

Jason: It was a few things. One was I was doing a takedown of a Pro Taper bar for MSR. All these bends are fantastic for people who know what they're talking about. I just don't think that we need to make it so complicated. Not for everybody at least. So, it was a two-part thing. One was to simplify the bend offerings. All four of my bars, we call it the 118, which is an inch and an eighth bar, I made them all the same width. They're all 800mm wide. They all four have the same sweep. It's now a 55-millimeter sweep. Then there are four height options. You have a 70-millimeter height, an 80, a 90, and a 100. So we had four options just to make it simpler for people. Also, using even increment numbers so the math wasn't so complicated. Some people might want something that's a little bit more specific. I always felt that a lot of people might like the simpler offering as long as we give them a good, solid bar. Some people are going to adapt and be 100% fine. From a marketing standpoint, I loved everything that we were doing at MSR. I knew we weren't going to have pro-riders. The hero of the story is the person who's listening to your show and reading Vital. The person who's plunking down 10K for a bike and showing up to Chicken Lick’s raceway this weekend and paying $30 to get through the gate. Those people are the ones who love the sport so much that they're spending all their hard-earned money. We often hear people talk about how it's an expensive sport to which it's not cheap. Even my stepson plays paintball and that's not cheap. He's constantly getting paintballs. Everything has some level of expense. I think people who are spending their money to go moto every weekend are the real heroes of this sport. My thing is trying to create marketing that would tell their story and keep them jazzed on loading up every weekend.

Vital MX: How did you go about sales and promotion and getting the word out to the public?

Jason: Social media for so many of us has been the catalyst to get things going. With good imagery and trying to post up when people would buy bars from us. In our case, I've always been blown away, you're putting your trust in this little brand that you've either just barely heard of or maybe somebody told you about. There have been plenty of people who bought it because they knew me and that was always flattering. But it was even cooler when you didn't know the person's name. I sent you a package and how I sent that to you is how that goes to everybody. We try to really put some care into what it's like for them to receive that. If you plunk down 100 and some dollars to get bars from this little brand, I feel like I've got to make sure that it really matters, too. That was special to me, and I want you to feel special about it. When you unwrap those utilitarian handlebars, the things that you need, I don't want them to be like you got them out of a box and throw them over there like, “I'll put those on when I get around to it.” I want you to crack that box open and be like, “Holy shit. I cannot even wait to get in the garage. I cannot wait to mount these things up and I cannot wait to hit the track and get a chance to ride on them.”

Vital MX: It's very cool that you know how important that is.

Jason: I do. I remember my mom let me call Fox racing in probably ’87. I had ordered a set of Vectors, I think. I had a dirt bike, but I mean, that was like talking to a celebrity. Just talking to a call center. I'm sure that whatever that package was probably wasn't all that exciting back then. Lord knows how it showed up. My son and I screen-print the boxes. The logos on the outside, we're not farming that out. That's us. That's us doing it. All the little details you hope that when somebody gets it that it adds value to the product. At the end of the day if the handlebars are junk people are going to see through all the BS. The bars have to be good. I'm not saying that you can get away with a product not being good. People will see that. But if I can do that little something extra then we can create something that makes it even more special for the rider.

Vital MX: One of the things I saw on your website that I thought was cool is if you buy a set of bars and you're not completely happy with the height, you'll switch out for another height.

Jason: If you don't like the bars send them back. If you hate them, the last thing I would want is for you to be out there riding on something that you're like, “Well, that was a waste of 114 bucks.” I'd rather you go buy another set of bars that you're stoked on and still be riding. It's one of the beautiful parts of being small. My job is to make sure that I keep people loving riding their dirt bikes. No offense to all you golfers out there, I'm not a golfer. If you decide this weekend that you don't feel like moto’ing and you'd rather go golf, not only did the track now lose you coming through the gate, but there's a good chance that maybe a buddy or two is also not going to go. The track just lost $75 from people riding this weekend. You do that time and time again and people are like, “Yeah, yeah, I'm not really into it. I'm just going to go golf. You want to keep them wanting to go to the track?

Vital MX: You mentioned the other career path you've taken. You're working with MotorcycleIndustryJobs.com. How did you get involved with that?

Jason: As I told you, I lost my job at MSR. About six months later I landed on my feet with Bonnier, which is Dirt Rider Magazine, Motorcyclist, and Cycle World, and they own tons of other brands outside of moto. I was working with that group and it was really brief. I was doing ad sales which was another little piece of the puzzle. I had no idea how that aspect of the industry worked, selling ads and digital print, you name it. I learned a lot of stuff in six months. Unfortunately, in the motorcycle industry around 2018, we were dealing with our own struggles. The print world was definitely going through some struggles and I lost my job again. I've been unemployed now twice in a really, really short time. I'm still working on Phoenix handlebars during this period. I knew that it wasn't ready to stand on its own, and a good buddy of mine said, “Hey, you need to call Alex Baylon. Alex owns Motorcycle Industry Jobs. He needs somebody to help do ad sales.” To do sales and business development. I reached out to Alex and ended up getting the job. He's down in Carlsbad. I started helping him and part of my job was to reach out to dealers. Dealers are the bread and butter of our business. In case anybody doesn't know, Motorcycle Industry Jobs is a job board. Think Indeed or Ziprecruiter, or Monster but for the motorcycle industry. Given how long I've been in the industry, my contacts, and connections, it kind of started to take off. I'm not a recruiter, but I started wearing that hat where people would reach out to me and be like, “Hey Jay, what do you know about this job?” Or “Hey, Jay, what do you know about that one? Do you know how much this one pays?”  In spite of not being a real recruiter, I kind of always call myself the facilitator. I’ve done what I can to help make connections for people. If somebody finds themselves in that unfortunate place that I found myself in twice and I've talked a lot of people off the ledge. I’ve said, “This is what I did. Don't worry. Let's keep an eye on these jobs and you'll find a home.” I've been doing that now for almost five years. I love it. It's my way of being able to hopefully create that dream story for somebody else.