We had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Bell, a former AMA Supercross champion and employee of Oakley who started in 1985, to tell the story of how Oakley went from a small grip company to one of the biggest eyewear brands in the world.

Thanks to Brian Takumi, Mike Bell, Dylan Radloff, and Mark Scurto for making this happen.

This year, Gatorade’s theme is “Go All Day.” In celebrating that theme, Gatorade wanted to start doing research on the non-traditional sports like BMX, so they hit up Nigel Sylvester, who rides for Gatorade and asked him a pretty crazy question: If you could go anywhere in the world to ride bikes with his friends, where would you go? That’s a very heavy question to ask someone, even Nigel… so after lots of research and different ideas being thrown around, Japan was chosen as the destination! With it’s huge city, amazing architecture, and lots of un-tapped spots, Japan would be the perfect location.

To document the trip, Gatorade invited a few key BMX media outlets, including Defgrip, to go along for the ride. The video we put together documents the trip from the riding and research, to the culture and adventures and to coincide with the video, we will have a photo gallery with a more detailed story online soon.

In his early 20’s Chase Hawk is already a legend of our sport and an icon of what is “current BMX”. With amazing style on and off his bike, Chase lives the life that every kid dreams of. Traveling the world for tours and contests as well as growing up and living in the most iconic BMX city in the world–Austin, Texas.

The concept of this project was to document Chase’s riding and lifestyle and share with the world what it’s like to ride BMX all day, party all night, and live in a house with your best friends, who also happen to be some of the best BMXer’s in the world.

The project was split up into two parts consisting of an exclusive video and a photogallery – the two most viewed types of content on Defgrip.net. Known for the quality and exclusive access, these two sections of the website attract hundreds of thousands of views and are what separates Defgrip from the rest of the websites in BMX.

The filming took place over the summer of 2010 in Austin, TX and the project was debuted at the Oakley booth at Interbike in Las Vegas, one of the biggest bicycle tradeshows in the world.

To go along with the project, Defgrip consulted on a one of a kind bike that was built up with parts from Chase Hawk’s sponsors Cult and Odyssey, with custom Oakley graphics and Oakley B1B grips. The same bike Chase rode the bike during the entire video is now traveling the world with Oakley, being displayed at different tradeshows and events along with the creative that we produced.