A father, a toddler and a stripped-down frame.

Strider started with a single homemade bike. The company’s own history page says that in 2007 founder Ryan McFarland wanted to share his love of riding with his young son, Bode, and stripped down and modified a 12-inch bike until it was light enough, and low enough, for the boy to put both feet on the ground. The same page says Strider was established in Rapid City, South Dakota, as a garage start-up, and that the early bikes were built from raw materials, some of them salvaged from department-store bikes, with no pedals, chains or brakes.

A September 2025 profile in Dirt Bike Magazine, “Family Balance: The Strider Phenom”, fills in the workshop detail. It says McFarland sketched his son’s dimensions on the living-room floor and took the pedals off to concentrate on balance, which also saved weight and let the seat sit lower. The magazine says strangers offered to buy the prototype when the family took it to the Thunder Valley National motocross event, and that this convinced him to turn it into a business. A 2014 report by Dakota News Now likewise describes the company as having begun as a weekend project in a Rapid City garage.

The business was a family affair. A 2019 article published by Sioux Falls Business on behalf of the Prairie Family Business Association says Strider Sports International was formed in 2007 by Ryan McFarland, his father Joe McFarland and a friend, Gene Woodle. It says McFarland had earlier run a bicycle suspension business in the 1990s, that he worked on Strider part time in its opening year while Woodle and his father helped, and that the company hired a full-time employee in 2009.

From a basement window to a race series.

The company has grown the product outward from that single small bike. Its history page dates a dealer network to 2008, naming Kent Jacobs in Iowa as its opening dealer, and says Japan hosted a Strider Cup race in 2009–10 before an official United States Strider Cup was held in Sarasota, Florida, in 2011, the year the company also developed snow skis for its bikes. The 2019 Sioux Falls Business article says Japan was where the company began its overseas expansion, and that it sells in the United States directly rather than through franchisees.

Later products stretch the idea in both directions. Strider says it released a Rocking Base in 2016, which lets the bike stand as a rocker, and the Strider 14x in 2017, a bike that converts from balance mode to pedal mode with a separately sold pedal kit. In 2022, the company says, it launched the Strider 20x for older children and young adults with special needs, and in 2024 it opened an online Bike Builder for custom parts and colours. Dakota News Now reported in 2014 that the range had already widened to include designs for older riders and people with physical limitations.

Production has moved since the hand-built days. The 2019 article says the earliest dozen or so bikes were built by hand and that production then moved to China. It also recalls an early shipment arriving through the basement window of the building the company was using, and Joe McFarland asking what they would do with an order of little bikes far larger than anything they had handled.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make balance bikes, pedal bikes and kick scooters for children. Brands in this field sit at different points in the trade, from small companies still run by the people who started them to names that changed hands as they grew, and a single brand may be sold through specialist bike shops, toy retailers and its own website at once.

A children’s bike or scooter brand is usually recognised less by one model than by a name, a frame shape and a set of colours, while the company behind it may design in one country, build in another and sell almost everywhere. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its frames and scooters are actually designed and made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still in Rapid City, with a school programme alongside.

The company has stayed where it began. Dirt Bike Magazine described McFarland in 2025 as founder and chief executive of Strider Sports International, Inc., headquartered in Rapid City, and said the building has an “Inventor’s Corner” showing the origins of the product, including the prototype. Dakota News Now placed the company’s manufacturing and distribution building on Rapid City’s south side in 2014, and the 2019 article describes a two-storey headquarters in the city. Strider’s history page adds that it opened a Strider retail store in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2021.

Alongside the bikes sits a nonprofit arm. The 2019 article says the Strider Education Foundation was formed in 2017 to supply bikes and a learn-to-ride curriculum to schools and community groups, and Dirt Bike Magazine says its All Kids Bike programme, launched in 2018, brings riding lessons into kindergarten physical-education classes. The company’s history page also says that in 2014 it set up the Strider Rider Fund to support organisations that encourage riding.

The founder has also chosen to keep the brand narrow. Dirt Bike Magazine reported in 2025 that McFarland had considered a line of electrically powered bikes but decided to concentrate on Strider alone, explaining that the company’s job was to bring new riders into the sport rather than to serve people who already ride. The same profile says the Strider Education Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

For a design guide, Strider shows how a product can be its own logo: a bike defined by what was taken away, sold under a short, active name and carried by a race series and a school programme rather than by decoration. Compare the Austrian children’s bike maker in our woom brand guidelines and the Chicago wagon company in our Radio Flyer brand guidelines. For this guide we use trail green, prairie gold and garage black with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Strider’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.