Bill Becker: Applying Automotive Insights to Bike Designs

Bill Becker did not have the ordinary engineer’s path leading to product design. Initially, Bill loved bikes, motocross, and modifying cars throughout his early life. The best career at the time he thought was to work on cars, and so he went through an Automotive Tech program in college and worked at various race car shops, including being a lead tuner and fabricator at DINAN Engineering. After accomplishing that, Becker was really looking for bigger challenges and desired to get into product design. At this same time, his cousin was graduating from mechanical engineering at Berkeley. Upon reading through the mechanical engineering curriculum, Becker discovered it was a perfect fit for him.

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Becker went through engineering school, graduating with honors, and moved into product design at a consulting firm in the Bay Area followed by being a senior product engineer developing suspension forks at RockShox for many years.

As far as accomplishments, Becker’s number one point of pride working at the company was coming up with the idea of establishing FOX mountain bike forks with a large range of fork uppertube sizes for the appropriate type of riding and suspension travel. Upon entry to Fox Factory, Becker was determined to develop 32mm for cross-country through All-Mountain, 36mm forks for Free-ride/Enduro and 40mm forks for Downhill bikes. Becker also desired and created the simple naming convention of 32, 36, and 40 for the forks instead of made-up product names. The platform names of 32 through 40 have survived the test of time of being fresh, easy to understand, and a point of pride in what type of riding you do. Coming as an experienced senior fork engineer from RockShox, the desire was high to “zag” while the rest of industry was “zigging.”

The second point of pride that Becker wanted to do was simplify the product offerings and have a modular design approach of “good, better, best” within the chassis and damper offerings. Maximizing common high-quality parts and developing sub-assemblies to give an increased number of features makes it easy to build, service, and upgrade. The modular design approach designs up front the fork damper with common parts and has three different features and performance.

The third point of pride was in coming up with unique inventive ideas to offer advancements in features and performance in the bike world. So far, Bill has thought of and earned 51 US patents, with many more currently in the works. By far, the most fun part of his day is the “out of the box” thinking and designing products from scratch.

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Talking with Becker, it’s clear he deeply appreciates the quality and performance standards at Fox Factory. He knows nothing makes it to production unless it’s the best, which is why he and so many others stay with the team as long as they do…The passion is truly palpable. This is the place where everyone wants to win, where everyone wants peak performance and where everyone wants to create quality that lasts. Bob Fox built the boundary-pushing foundation, and people like Bill Becker honor that heritage by forging endless new paths for tomorrow’s product designers to follow and eventually lead others down.

Editor's Note: This is the 50th anniversary of our founder, Bob Fox, developing FOX Air Shox. Be on the lookout for more stories highlighting the people behind the products who helped push potential further.