BCBusiness

July/August 2022 - The Top 100

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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ON THE RADAR ( the informer ) H alf a dozen years ago, former pro downhill mountain biker Dustin Adams had a proposal for his wife, Sherri. He wanted to mort- gage the family house and stake their future on a new business designing, manufacturing and assembling high-end carbon fibre bicycle wheels. There was a long pause, to put it mildly. "Pretty much every person, including my wife, told me I was crazy and that it would never work," Adams says from the Kamloops headquarters of We Are One Composites, the company he launched in 2017. Rather than discourage him, Adams says, pessimism from others only strengthened his resolve. In his own way, he was about to disrupt how Cana- da's outdoor gear sector thinks about manufacturing. It's not that carbon fibre was new to the biking world. Also known as composite, it's made from synthetic polymers and has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel. But most North American companies design their wheel frames domesti- cally, then offshore the manu- facturing to factories in China and Taiwan that produce for many brands. When Adams quit competi- tive biking in 2004, he was the top-ranked North American downhiller in the world. But he felt it was time to get serious about life. Starting a countertop business, Quattro Stone and Tile, in Kamloops, he always kept a foot in the bike world. Adams became a minor shareholder in Nobl Wheels, a composite wheel brand then based in the Lower Mainland, in 2014. While visiting Nobl's manufacturer in China two years later, he started to ponder the challenges of quality control when dealing with offshore factories. Wheels moulded in China often needed additional sanding and grinding after they'd been shipped to get them up to showroom quality. One of a Kind When Dustin Adams set out to make carbon fibre bike wheels and frames in Kamloops, people scoffed and banks gave him the gears. His booming business has proved them wrong by Andrew Findlay M A N U FAC T U R I NG MOVING CAMP Kevin Pennock, executive director of the Kootenay Outdoor Recreation Enterprise ( KORE), believes that what Dustin Adams has done with carbon fibre composite wheels and bikes shows what's possible in B.C. His organization is making the case for a Kootenay- based manufacturing facility to build products from Dyneema, a synthetic fabric increasingly favoured by backpack and tent makers because of its lightweight strength. Why? Because the current convoluted supply chain has a big carbon footprint, adds costs in the form of duties and taxes, and has proven unreliable in a COVID world. By the time a Dyneema tent or backpack ends up in the hands of a Canadian consumer, the material has crossed the ocean several times and travelled more than 12,500 kilometres, according to a recent study commissioned by KORE and paid for by the Eco- nomic Trust of the Southern Interior ( ETSI-BC). LISA NOVAK PHOTOGRAPHY JULY/AUGUST 2022 BCBUSINESS 17 WHEEL SHIFT Dustin Adams found his calling with We Are One Composites

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