About the Saris brand

Home for CycleOps/Saris is in an old farmhouse in bike-crazy Madison, Wisconsin. Their production facilities are behind the farmhouse. Believe it or not their origins are in curtain rods. Two brothers had a company that made window products. After the Graber brothers sold their company they needed something to do. They experimented in their garage and came up with a bike rack. They sold lots of racks under the Graber name and then sold the company. That was sometime back in 1973. Chris and Sara Fortune purchased the company in 1989 when it was selling 80,000 bike racks a year. In 1990 and 1991 Sara and Chris introduced a high end brand of bike rack, renaming them “Saris.” Today Saris is a leading supplier to the bicycle industry in 30 countries. The company expanded in 1999 by acquiring the Cycleops brand of bike trainer. As usual they set out to improve on the design and by 2001 they created a new trainer frame and in 2002 they debuted the world’s first progressive resistance magnetic trainer. It was in 2001 that they heard about a hub that could measure power output and they jumped at the chance to bring this product to cyclists. They bought the company that invented Powertap and started a new round of innovations Dede Demet won the gold medal at the 2002 Montreal World Cup on her powertap.