Quality Bicycle Products
Largest distributor of bicyle parts
Quality Bicycle Products (QBP) is a large distributor of bicycle parts and accessories in the bicycle industry, based in the United States, with revenues of $150 million in 2008. In addition to wholesaling bicycles and components from other manufacturers, QBP owns and manufactures several brands of its own, including Salsa Cycles and Surly Bikes.
History
Founded by Steve Flagg and Mary Henrickson in 1981, QBP operated from a small office in St. Paul, MN. The company did $100,000 in sales during its first year. In the second year sales reached $250,000 and in 1983 the company received half a million dollars in sales. Early on, the company's main product was its mountain bikes, and QBP also specialised in importing hard-to-find mountain-bike parts from suppliers in Japan. In 1984, QBP hired its first employee and sold $1 million in parts. In 1996 QBP purchased a 67,000-square-foot (6,200 m2) warehouse on its current site in West Bloomington.
QBP purchased Salsa Cycles in 1997, a California-based mountain-bike manufacturer. The following year, the firm entered the emerging single-speed bike market with its in-house designed Singleton chain tensioner.
“Quality Bicycle Products” enters the record as largest distributor of bicyle parts. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Quality, Bicycle and Products can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7268722. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 1981, 1983 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Quality Bicycle Products” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.