Since being founded in 1988, the Kona Bicycle Organization have constantly attempted their hardest, and with mostly amazing success, to remain amongst the coolest bike brands on the earth. Nearly Kona bikes have style and use incredibly innovative technology with every new model whilst using eye catching designs and colours, however they have also always stood a unique strategy for naming their bikes, either using names associated to things or locations that mean something to the companies owners Dan Gerhard and Jacob Heilbron (who had the Kona “Jake The Snake” and Kona “Major Jake” cyclocross bikes named after him) or along with a large number of tongue in cheek, which in some instances is mainly responsible for Kona a reasonable bit of controversy.
The name Kona itself stems from Heilbron and Gerhards love of Hawaii, specially the tourist town of Kailia-Kona in Western Hawaii. Surprisingly enough Kona wasn’t even their authentic selection of name, the most popular name was “Cascade” but this must be changed after having a trademark dispute.
The Kona founders continued to signify their obsession with Hawaii by naming a few of their biggest mountain bike models using Hawaiian references, the Hei Hei in particular meaning “Race” in Hawaiian, and Hahannah being the Hawaiian term for “Hot”. Volcanoes also seem to be within the forefront in the minds with the Kona designers with such mountain bikes as the Fire Mountain hardtail, or perhaps the brilliant Lava Dome, keeping in mind the Kona Kilau, which got its name from your Hawaiian Volcano that is essentially the most active volcano on the planet.
Kona over the years seemed to be keen to show feeling of humour when naming a few of their bike models, with names such as Stinky, which has turn into a legendary name on the planet of freeride mountain bikes, but this time and again most people have accused Kona of crossing the line using their controversial bike model titles.
In September 94', Kona introduced their first twin suspension mountain bikes, the Sex 1 along with the Sex 2, the reasons behind these labels supposedly being that “Sex” was short for “Suspension EXperience”. The Kona Sex 1 and 2 were dropped ultimately after Kona been given a flurry of complaints. Kona ultimately had the last laugh when outlining that other Kona cycles with darker and fairly violent titles, for example the Stab and Shred, obtained no issues with the community, proving that violence was much more satisfactory than sex.
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