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Oakley Factory Tour | Behind The Scenes Of Mountain Bike Product Development - YouTube
Channel: Global Mountain Bike Network
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- This is Foothill Ranch,
home not of Bladerunner,
[4]
but since 1998, of Oakley, one of the most
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important brands in mountain-biking,
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for probably the last 30 years.
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Now, we're gonna take a good look around,
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all 600,000 square feet of the place,
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including the part, where millions of
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pairs of sunglasses are made, every year.
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Oh and before you say,
"Isn't that Simon from GCN?
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"Cross-country mountain-biker?"
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Yes, I am and I've only
found one pair of bar ends
[27]
in the whole place to show you and I'm not
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going to wear lycra,
not this time, anyway.
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(upbeat music)
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Oakley's headquarters are
based in southern California,
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just south of LA, the building itself,
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is 600,000 square feet, most of which
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is taken up with manufacture.
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I'm not entirely sure
what it's doing here,
[70]
but this ejector seat from a B-52 bomber,
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is actually remarkably comfortable.
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And there's four of them,
right here in the lobby,
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at Oakley, along with a
load of other cool stuff,
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given that anyone can actually
walk in off the street
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and come here, there's a shop,
that you can buy Oakleys,
[84]
there's a customer service point,
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there is Greg Minnaar,
taking a starring role,
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fresh from winning the
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Pietermaritzburg World
Championships in 2013.
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But the first port of call for us,
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is the museum, that's just this way.
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(upbeat music)
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Right, well this is
our first port of call,
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1975 and a college
dropout named Jim Jannard
[108]
decided that motorcross grips,
didn't quite cut the muster.
[112]
Basically, as one of your
two points of contact,
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no-one had really put that
much thought into them.
[116]
So what he did, was went out and sourced
[119]
a specific type of rubber,
that became grippier
[123]
when wet, he then gave it
a catchy name, Unobtainium,
[127]
and designed a very
eye-catching looking grip.
[130]
So that was the first product,
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then the goggles came
next, motorcross goggles,
[136]
which look like you could use
them today, quite frankly.
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Those are bloomin' cool, but then,
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perhaps what we're more familiar with,
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the eye-wear, starts just down here.
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(upbeat music)
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These ones, 1984, the very first
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sports protection eyewear,
was launched by Oakley.
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These are called the
Factory Pilot Eyeshades.
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Bloomin' cool, quite frankly.
[165]
Then, the Blades came
next, swiftly followed
[168]
by the Razorblade, fully customizable.
[171]
They reckoned at the time,
there were 22 million
[173]
different customization options and this
[176]
is kinda where mountain biking comes in,
[178]
including a particularly
famous mountain biker,
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who's carelessly left his
bike, in the Oakley museum.
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My absolute all-time mountain
bike hero, John Tomac,
[189]
and this is one of his bikes, I guess from
[192]
about 1991-1992, carbon
fiber tubes, titanium lugs,
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got Manitou forks on there, Shimano XTR,
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three chain rings, hah,
those were the days.
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And look, at those bar ends.
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Oh, look at the bar ends!
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That takes me right back, that does.
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Now, moving on from
John Tomac, there was a
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really, really important
point to those early Oakleys,
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that continues to this day
and that was they're there
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to protect your eyes, as well
as making you look super cool.
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And this little display
here, sums it up very neatly.
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So those bottom lenses,
they've been shot at a distance
[231]
of 12 feet with a 12-bore shotgun.
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And that? That's all
that's happened to them.
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Which is more than can be
said for the rest of you,
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if they're on your face at the time.
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Then you go up one and that is the result
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of a high-velocity
impact, so the equivalent
[245]
of a stone flicking up and
hitting you in the face
[248]
and we're talking about
flicking up fast here,
[250]
that is over a 102 miles per hour.
[253]
Then this top one, with this quite
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terrifying-looking implement,
is the high-impact test.
[259]
So that 500 gram weight is dropped
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from a height of over a
meter, onto a pair of glasses
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and that is all that happens.
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And what it's doing is
it's simulating a crash,
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for example, where you
might end up landing
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head-first onto a particularly
pointy bit of bike,
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or maybe even worse, a
particularly pointy bit of tree,
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and if you're wearing your glasses,
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then your eyes are protected.
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And so that was the fundamental behind
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all of the glasses that Jim Jannard
[284]
and Oakley were designing,
as well as looking cool,
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actually, they're designed to work.
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And the fact that
they're designed to work,
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came before them looking cool.
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Have you ever wondered where
the name Oakley comes from?
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Well, if you had, here's your answer.
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That is Oakley.
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Found in Jim Jannard's English Setter.
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Ever wondered why Oakley
Mumbos were called Mumbos?
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Well that there, is Jim
Jannard's cat, called Mumbo.
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There we go, bit of trivia for you.
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Now the museum continues back here,
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not just for the evolution of sunglasses,
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and protection, but also
with the aesthetic, as well.
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Now in here, we've got the X-Metal series,
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which came out in the late
90s, with cast titanium frames.
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Super cool.
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Then, if we keep going
further on, we've also got
[335]
other products that start
to appear, like the apparel,
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the shoes, the watches
and now, another new
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development, well, at
least the last three years,
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which is helmets and for mountain biking,
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a new-new development, 'cause we learnt
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of their Dirt-5 helmet, which was actually
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announced just a few months ago,
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and is being officially
launched, very soon indeed.
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This is a particularly important
part in Oakley's history
[359]
with mountain biking, because
this, the aforementioned
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Dirt-5, is their first
mountain bike helmet.
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And Greg Minnaar here,
not just a pretty face,
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is a long-term Oakley
ambassador, has been consulting
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with them on the creation of this helmet.
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We've been teased with it before,
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but now it's ready for release.
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And we're going to have a quick chat,
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with a couple of designers.
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(upbeat music)
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Daniel, you're the design
lead here, so you can
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actually tell us, why the
helmet looks like it does.
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You're pretty much bound
by constraints, I guess,
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like making sure there's
enough coverage on the head,
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so actually the safety angle is covered-
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- Oh yeah, the safety,
the penetration test,
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there's a lot that is
regulating the helmet,
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to be safe, which also
drives a lot of the helmets
[412]
in the industry to look
the same, you know,
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they look really similar
and so that's kind of,
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it's important at the end
of the day, to have these
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visual philosophies to make our helmet
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look cooler than the other
helmets on the market.
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So we actually backed up and really looked
[428]
at the emotion of mountain biking and
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there was a lot of
interaction with Greg Minnaar
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during the development
process and we spoke with him,
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we kind of dug into the
emotion and watched his videos
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and at the end of the day,
as philosophical as it was,
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we realized there's a big kind of dualism,
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going on, right?
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Mountain-bikers are very
precise, they're really
[448]
studying where they're gonna
be, it's almost surgical,
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like, what's ahead of
them, whereas behind them,
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they're throwing up dirt
everywhere it can look
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a little messy, it can be
a little not orchestrated,
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so I thought, "Well how can we incorporate
[461]
"that emotion into the helmet?"
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And so, as small as it is, maybe something
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that not everyone might pick up,
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but we try to keep those
focal points very clear
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and simple towards the
front, almost clinical,
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whereas towards the rear,
we tried to break it up
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into these disintegrating forms and almost
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synthesize our own language, coming into
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this industry for the first time.
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- So the next step on from Daniel's work,
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creating the aesthetic of the helmet,
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lies with Chad, who you are,
head of the engineering team.
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So you literally make the helmet, I guess?
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- Yeah, yeah, we take it
from Daniel's sketches,
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and we turn it into a real 3-D form.
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- Helmet production at Oakley
started relatively recently,
[502]
I guess and that was your
first taste of making
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bike helmets and snow helmets.
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- Yeah, yeah and so what's
cool about it, is we've
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kind of turned the book
over, thrown it out,
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you know if you're like,
somebody who's been
[515]
in the industry for years
and years and years,
[516]
you kind of have your,
"This is what we do."
[518]
But we don't have one of
those, "This is what we do",
[520]
so we just try, you know and thankfully,
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we've got some guys that
are pretty okay with it
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and so they're like, "Yeah,
just make cool stuff."
[527]
And we're like, "Okay, we'll
make cool stuff", you know.
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We're gonna break stuff,
we're gonna fail a bunch,
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but when we fail, we're gonna learn
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and we're gonna have
better stuff that way.
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- Yeah, so when we're
talking specifics then,
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on this helmet, what's
been the hardest thing
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for you to get right?
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And to realize in terms of this?
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- So the toughest thing, I would say,
[547]
was getting the functionality
of these guys correct?
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- Okay.
[550]
- So that we can actually
have your eyewear
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stay on your head.
[553]
- This is totally unique,
isn't it, to you guys, like?
[555]
- Yeah.
[556]
And so, as it being a
huge feature, we wanted
[558]
to make sure, like,
making a feature like this
[560]
is really easy, but making it work well,
[563]
is really hard.
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You know, you can have
something that's really clumsy,
[566]
or it's hard to actuate or whatever
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and then nobody wants to use it.
[569]
But when you have
something that works great,
[571]
and everybody just wants to try it,
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you know you've done your job great.
[576]
- Now, as well as eyewear,
the visual performance lab
[579]
has had to gear up to test helmets as well
[581]
and Janu is going to give
us insight into research,
[586]
not actually in here,
but out in the field,
[588]
so then in the overall R&D process,
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the overall design process, we've got
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Daniel doing the
aesthetics, and then we had
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Chad making sure that
the whole thing worked
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and then your intels, goes
somewhere in the middle,
[602]
to say, you know, "We need
therefore to make sure
[605]
"that it's well ventilated
and it's lightweight
[608]
"or whatever."
[609]
- Exactly so, where we're coming from is,
[612]
we're providing information, to help them
[615]
make better decisions.
[617]
What we're doing in user experience,
[619]
isn't the final say, but it's
great directional information.
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If you're searching for
"Which way should I go?
[625]
"Or what's most important
to the consumer?"
[627]
I can definitely provide,
a deck of information
[629]
that says, "This is more
important than that."
[632]
- Yeah.
[633]
- And here are some
ideas of what to look at,
[634]
for best in class, as we
think about bench-marking
[637]
against which helmet is
most important to us.
[640]
So, when we started the
project, we were noticing,
[643]
out in the field, that
the helmets were beginning
[645]
to interact with the eyewear
and from our perspective,
[649]
was that the helmet's fault?
[650]
Or were consumers thinking,
"That was the eyeglass fault."
[655]
And, we couldn't have it be our fault,
[656]
so it was an opportunity for us
[657]
to get engaged in the product development
[659]
and have something to
say about how the eyewear
[661]
and the helmet were interacting together.
[663]
- And so obviously, at
the point where you're out
[665]
in the field talking to
consumers about helmets,
[667]
you haven't got one yet,
so you're researching
[670]
your competitors
effectively, and finding out
[673]
exactly what people are
liking about their helmets
[676]
and what they're not liking or
[677]
perhaps what they're ambivalent about.
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- Absolutely, so one of the
advantages to where we work here
[682]
at Oakley, we have some of Orange County's
[685]
best mountain biking,
right across the street
[686]
from our office and we
have a pool of employees
[690]
that are avid mountain bikers.
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So what we did was we teamed up with 15 of
[696]
the most ambitious mountain-bikers here
[697]
in the building, and we asked them to ride
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in 12 different helmets that we bought,
[702]
so we could understand, what do they like
[704]
about the helmets?
[704]
What do they not like about the helmets?
[706]
And hopefully, in the end, we can get
[708]
to what's missing from these helmets.
[710]
For us, looking at those
comments and pulling
[713]
the analytics out of it, gave us a really
[716]
sure-footed drive, as to
say, "This is the direction
[720]
that we should be moving with the helmet."
[722]
- As for the manufacturing itself,
[724]
well I can't tell you
how fascinating it was,
[727]
which is a shame, because I
actually can't show you either.
[729]
Oakley are understandably guarded about
[732]
exactly how they do it.
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From the raw materials
entering the facility,
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through the molding of lenses and frames,
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right up to the iridium coating,
[740]
for sunglasses though,
it doesn't stop there,
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they head right back up to
the Vision Performance lab,
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for more testing, to
ensure that the glasses
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meet Oakley's stringent standards.
[750]
So this is Wayne, who heads
up the Visual Performance lab.
[753]
Which is kind of like
the R&D center of Oakley,
[755]
is that right?
[756]
- Yeah, it's where we do a
lot of our functional testing
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and performance evaluation,
validation, things like that.
[761]
- Cool, and can you show us round?
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Can we see what's going on in there?
[764]
- Happy to show you, not
many people go back here,
[765]
so, I hope you enjoy it.
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- Nice, come on then!
[770]
- So here's a lab.
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We share this lab with our quality team,
[774]
they're always testing products
[775]
off the manufacturing floor.
[778]
From our side, the R&D side,
we're trying to validate
[780]
new technologies, innovations,
[783]
and how that really fits
within our performance
[786]
[Inaudible] our products.
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- So what tests have you got
rigged up at the moment, then?
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What have you been
researching most recently?
[793]
I guess there are the
new eyewear, you've got
[796]
what, the advancer nosepiece?
[797]
- Yeah, you know we've been
working on that for a while,
[799]
but we have a couple of
tests set up to showcase
[802]
that for you and-
- Cool.
[802]
- ... how cyclists can really
leverage that technology.
[805]
So one thing that's really
valuable for us in R&D
[810]
and super-valuable for cyclists,
[812]
is this environmental test chamber.
[814]
- Okay.
[814]
- In here, I can simulate any condition,
[816]
any humidity level, any temperature
[821]
and we learn a lot about products,
[823]
especially when it
comes to fogging, right?
[824]
And advance is really built
around anti-fog properties.
[827]
- Okay.
[828]
- And at some point, you get hot enough,
[831]
you're going slow enough, chances are
[833]
you're gonna fog your lens.
[834]
- Yep.
[835]
- I'm sure you've
experienced it, especially-
[836]
- I've experienced it.
[837]
- ... in the UK.
(laughs)
[838]
- And one thing we learned
from being on the field,
[841]
is consumers will solve that problem,
[843]
by sliding the frame down their nose.
[845]
- Yeah.
[846]
- And by doing that, you're
just creating airflow. Right?
[848]
So, we took a long look
at that consumer behavior
[851]
and we realized, okay, we
can do a better job than that
[853]
existing, solved by, what
people are doing naturally.
[856]
- Yeah.
[857]
- So this advancer mechanism,
just pulls the frame off,
[860]
away from your face far
enough, to get enough airflow,
[862]
to eliminate that fogging situation.
[864]
- Okay.
[865]
- So, what we had to learn,
[867]
is how much to advance this frame?
[869]
- Okay. So he looks like he's
been in there for a while.
[872]
- Yeah, this test chamber,
along with this head form,
[874]
this head form is actually
to mimic a sweaty human.
[877]
- Yeah? That sweats?
[879]
- Yeah, this guys sweats.
[880]
The chamois on there is to mimic some skin
[883]
and the system in here
heats up this water enough
[885]
to create steam and fog, right?
[887]
- Yeah.
[888]
- So we gotta-
[890]
- You made a sweaty head?
- We made a sweaty head.
[892]
- That's amazing, to test
your eyewear, fantastic!
[895]
- It's been invaluable for
eyewear and goggles, for sure.
[898]
- Yeah.
[899]
(gentle music)
[908]
- Now I've just popped round
the side of the factory,
[910]
to come and check out the
legendary Oakley dirt jumps.
[913]
And I must say, I don't quite know why,
[916]
despite knowing I was
coming with my crazy,
[918]
dirt-jumping skills, they've actually made
[920]
the jumps themselves, off-limits,
[922]
which is a bit of a shame, really,
[924]
because I was gonna
show them how it's done.
[925]
But, never mind, they've
had some half-decent riders
[928]
on here in the past and you've gotta
[930]
be half-decent as well, because look,
[932]
you've gotta jump over a tree,
[934]
straight out of the blocks.
[936]
Mad skills.
[937]
Now, as well as the giant dirt jumps,
[939]
that thank God, I've not
been allowed anywhere near,
[941]
there is a pump track, out in the backyard
[944]
of Foothill Ranch, as well,
but even more importantly,
[946]
for me, is the fact that those hills,
[948]
in the near distance there,
that's Whiting Ranch,
[951]
which apparently some of the
best mountain bike trails
[954]
in this part of California
and it probably explains
[957]
why there are so many mountain bikes,
[959]
knocking around the
offices just over there.
[961]
Because most people in
there, ride those trails,
[965]
during and after work.
[966]
There can't be all that
many brands that have a tank
[969]
in the car park, but Oakley
is certainly one of them.
[972]
I'll have to check out
with Martin, to find out
[974]
where the order for the GMBN one's gone?
[977]
Anyway, this does seem
like an appropriate point
[980]
to bring our factory tour to a close.
[982]
Do make sure you give it a big thumbs-up
[984]
and if you want to check
out some more videos
[986]
here on GMBN, then why not click on that
[988]
one on screen now.
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