I Love My Bicycle
In the early 1990s, Steve Crandall starts a BMX company out of a backpack, selling t-shirts to riders who felt shut out by the sport's corporate brands. He names it Fat Bald Men, FBM for short, and the film tracks its next fifteen years through interviews with Crandall and the riders who rode for him, including Dave Mirra and Mat Hoffman. The story is less about product than about identity: BMX in this period splits between companies chasing mainstream sponsorship money and a DIY scene that wants nothing to do with it, and FBM plants itself firmly in the second camp. Crandall and his friends describe the near-failures along the way, the stretches where the company survives on loyalty rather than revenue, and the slow shift from bedroom operation to a brand riders actually trust. The film treats BMX manufacturing as a small business case study as much as a sports story, using FBM's fifteen years as a stand-in for what it takes to build something in an industry with almost no room for outsiders.