Explore Premium Mountain Bike Wheels
The mountains above Bellingham hold their silence differently in autumn. Loose soil gives way beneath your tire, sending pebbles cascading down slopes that plunge toward the distant Pacific. Up here, the engineering beneath you matters in ways that marketing departments will never understand.
The wheels rolling beneath this particular rider weren’t mass-produced in Taiwan. They weren’t ordered during a flash sale, packaged in plastic, or assembled by the thousands. They were built by hand. One spoke, one decision, one intention at a time.
This is boutique distilled: the elevation of process over scale, precision over expedience, and a quiet rejection of everything disposable. It’s a counter-narrative told in aluminum and carbon fiber.
While titans of the industry flood catalogs with variations on sameness, a parallel ecosystem thrives in the spaces between. Boutique wheelmakers – small clusters of craftspeople who happen to ride – are creating objects that reflect mountain biking’s original ethos: deliberate, intuitive, built to engage rather than merely perform. This isn’t about specifications. It’s about sensation.
Consider the following six outfits, each reshaping the industry one revolution at a time.
1. Industry Nine — Asheville, North Carolina
Founder: Clint Spiegel
Wheelsets start around $1,300–$2,500 USD
You discover Industry Nine twice. First, when you see them – anodized spokes radiating from hubs like exclamation points. Then again, when you hear them – the unmistakable mechanical purr of the Hydra freehub, with its 690 points of engagement, announcing your presence on the trail like nothing else could.
Spiegel didn’t set out to start a wheel company. He was running a precision manufacturing business when the question surfaced: Why import performance wheels when we could make them here, better? The answer required reimagining the spoke as an engineering challenge rather than a commodity part.
Today, I9’s facility in Asheville hums with a seemingly impossible marriage of precision tooling and chromatic exuberance. Each spoke and nipple is machined in-house from 7075 aluminum, then anodized in colors that would make a coral reef envious.
But the heart of I9’s philosophy lives beyond aesthetics. They fund trail maintenance across Appalachia. Their packaging is fully recyclable. Their team rides the very trails their customers do – not as a marketing exercise, but as a kind of ongoing research project where data gets collected in dirt and sweat rather than surveys.
“The wheels we build,” says someone who has ridden them for years, “feel like they’re arguing with physics on your behalf.”
2. NOBL Wheels — Cumberland, British Columbia
Founder: Trevor Howard
Wheelsets range from $1,400–$2,400 CAD
Cumberland, British Columbia doesn’t pretend to be hospitable to equipment. The landscape is relentlessly technical – a network of trails where roots and rocks collaborate to dismantle anything built with compromise.
This is precisely the laboratory Howard needed. After destroying one too many mass-produced rims, he retreated to first principles: What would carbon fiber be capable of if designed specifically for this unforgiving environment?
NOBL’s answer emerges in their layup schedules – the architecture of how carbon sheets are arranged and bonded. Their rims flex vertically just enough to absorb impacts while maintaining lateral rigidity for precision when the trail demands immediate direction changes.
What separates NOBL isn’t just engineering, though. It’s context. Their wheels are conceived, tested, and manufactured within minutes of some of North America’s most demanding terrain. When revisions happen, they happen because reality – not a focus group – demanded them.
Their lifetime warranty isn’t marketing. It’s a statement of confidence from people who ride what they build, and build what they know will survive.
3. Hunt Bike Wheels — West Sussex, UK
Founders: Tom and Peter Marchment
Wheelsets start around £599–£1,299 GBP (~$750–$1,600 USD)
The landscape outside Hunt’s Sussex workshop is nothing like the jagged verticals of British Columbia or North Carolina’s rooty forests. It rolls and undulates in the gentle manner of the English countryside. This terrain teaches different lessons: sustainability of effort, efficiency of motion, the value of momentum preserved rather than explosively generated.
The Marchment brothers brought road racing sensibilities to mountain biking at exactly the right moment. As trail designs evolved toward flow rather than mere technical challenge, Hunt’s wheels – with their emphasis on rotational weight and acceleration – found a natural audience.
Hunt’s genius lies not in radical reinvention but in the democratization of excellence. By selling direct to consumers and eliminating distribution markups, they’ve made thoughtfully engineered wheels available to riders at a fair price.
Their recyclable carbon technology speaks to a mounting awareness throughout the industry: performance without responsibility is performance with an asterisk.
“You feel the difference,” riders often say, “not in the dramatic moments, but in the hundreds of small decisions your bike makes when you’re too tired to make them consciously.”
4. Chris King Precision Components — Portland, Oregon
Founder: Chris King
Hubsets start at $500–$700; complete builds often $1,800+ USD
Precision has a sound. If you’ve ever spun a Chris King hub, you know it – a mechanical whisper that suggests frictionless motion, a sound so distinct it’s become a kind of auditory trademark.
King’s entire philosophy is contained in that sound. Since 1976, when he first started machining headsets in his California garage, he’s approached each component as if designing it for eternity. His sealed bearings – hand-adjusted and serviceable indefinitely – became the foundation for wheelsets that outlast the bikes they’re mounted to.
A visit to the Portland facility reveals a manufacturing process as precise as the products it yields. Solar panels power machines that produce zero waste water. The stainless steel used in bearings is made in America. Every hub is tested individually before leaving the building.
King doesn’t chase trends or release annual models with marginal “improvements.” The hub you buy today is the culmination of forty-five years of incremental refinement – a timeline possible only because the company remains privately held and uninterested in the shortcuts that quarterly reporting often demands.
The premium you pay for King components isn’t for marketing or endorsements. It’s for the simple, radical notion that tools should work perfectly, for a very long time.
5. Tenet Components / Coven Wheels — Bellingham, Washington
Coven AL wheelsets start at $699 USD
The trail networks above Bellingham have become a pilgrimage site for riders seeking the technical and vertiginous. This is ground zero for a certain progressive strain of riding – where consequences are real and equipment failure is not an acceptable parameter.
Tyler Deschaine, a professional rider known for putting equipment through trials most companies would consider cruel and unusual, created Tenet to address a single frustration: complexity in service of vanity rather than function.
The Coven AL wheelset exemplifies this ethos. The asymmetric rim design – with offset spoke holes that balance tension across the wheel – isn’t new engineering. But Tenet’s application of it, with 6069-T6 aluminum alloy and strategic reinforcement, represents a rethinking of durability as the primary virtue.
What you notice first about Tenet is what’s missing: hyperbole. Their materials are described factually. Their warranties are written in plain language. The decorative elements – laser-etched graphics and custom decals – are understated to the point of whisper.
The result is equipment that recedes from consciousness during use, allowing the ride itself to occupy the foreground. This psychological transparency may be Tenet’s greatest innovation – wheels that disappear beneath you, leaving only the essential conversation between rider and trail.
6. We Are One Composites — Kamloops, British Columbia
Founder: Dustin Adams
Wheelsets range from $1,500–$2,200 CAD
Kamloops presents a particular challenge to bicycle components. Its combination of high-speed flow trails and technical rock gardens creates a testing environment few wheels survive intact. For Dustin Adams, a former World Cup downhill racer, this wasn’t just an inconvenience – it was an opportunity to rethink carbon manufacturing from first principles.
We Are One produces carbon rims without relying on the Asian manufacturing that dominates the industry. Every step, from laying up carbon sheets to final finishing, happens under one roof in British Columbia. This vertical integration allows for a level of quality control that outsourced production simply cannot match.
The results speak through the testing data. Their Convergence and Union rims demonstrate impact resistance that borders on the implausible, allowing riders to run lower tire pressures for improved traction without risking pinch flats or rim strikes.
But perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of We Are One’s operation is their approach to waste. Carbon fiber production traditionally generates significant scrap material that ends up in landfills. Adams and his team developed processes to reuse every fragment, creating a closed-loop system that challenges the industry’s assumptions about what’s possible in composite manufacturing.
“The difference,” according to those who’ve ridden these wheels extensively, “isn’t just in durability. It’s in the feedback loop between terrain and rider – how the wheel transmits exactly the information you need and filters out what you don’t.”
The Spin That Matters
To choose boutique wheels is to make a statement that transcends mechanics. It’s a rejection of built-in obsolescence, a vote for the tangible over the theoretical, an alignment with the values of craft rather than mere consumption.
These six companies represent something larger than their combined market share would suggest. They embody a counterargument to the notion that progress requires constant replacement rather than thoughtful improvement. Each approaches the humble bicycle wheel as both engineering challenge and cultural artifact – a tool that should work exceptionally well while imparting some essence of its creation process to the experience of using it.
The premium these wheels command isn’t arbitrary. It’s the cost of human attention, of domestic manufacturing, of materials selected for longevity rather than quarterly profit margins. It’s the price of being able to speak directly with the person who built your wheels when something needs adjustment.
For the rider who perceives their equipment as an extension of values rather than simply a means of conveyance, boutique wheels aren’t an indulgence.
They’re a necessity disguised as a luxury – the material embodiment of a philosophy that says how we move through the world matters just as much as how quickly we get there.
If you have a favorite custom or boutique wheel brand you’d like to shout out, please comment below. We’ll see if we can cover them in a follow-up article…
