Joe Breeze

Joe Breeze (born 1953) is a bicycle framebuilder, designer and advocate from Marin County, California. An early participant in the sport of mountain biking, Breeze, along with other pioneers including Gary Fisher, Charlie Kelly, and Tom Ritchey, is known for his central role in developing the mountain bike. Breeze is credited with designing and building the first all-new mountain bikes, which were called Breezers. He built the prototype, known as Breezer #1, in 1977 and completed nine more Series I Breezers by early 1978. Breezer #1 is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

Breeze, a road bike racer through the 1970s, was among the fastest downhill racers at Repack, mountain biking’s seminal race held west of Fairfax, California. He won 10 of the 24 Repack races, which took place between 1976 and 1984. Breeze is a charter member of the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame; he was inducted in 1988.

Breeze developed mountain bike and road-racing bike designs through the 1980s and most of the 1990s, then focused his efforts on advocacy for bicycle transportation. In the early 2000s he devoted his Breezer brand entirely to transportation, introducing in 2002 a line of bikes for everyday use, equipping them for local trips, errands in town and commuting.

In 2008, Breeze sold the Breezer brand to Advanced Sports International and since then has worked for the company as Breezer frame designer, designing transportation bikes, road bikes and mountain bikes under the Breezer name.

Breeze grew up in Mill Valley, California, at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco. He graduated from Tamalpais High School, which at the time had extensive technical training facilities. He studied architectural and engineering drafting there for four years. His father, Bill Breeze, was a machinist and owner of the Sports Car Center in Sausalito, California. An avid cyclist at a time when cycling was not a common activity for adults in the US, Bill Breeze sometimes commuted to work by bicycle, and he shared with his son an appreciation for efficient, lightweight vehicles and for the bicycle as king of such vehicles. The two often discussed the properties of metals and technical aspects of bicycle design. In 1974 Joe Breeze took a course in the art of bicycle framebuilding from Albert Eisentraut in Oakland, California, and began to build his own custom-tailored road racing frames, using his father’s machine shop at their home in Mill Valley. He also studied Machine and Metals Technology at College of Marin from 1974 to 1976.

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