The Union Archives – BMX UNION

The Union 2015 Winter Session – Riding Video

For 2015, we decided to change up the way we do our annual event at Over The Top Skatepark at Bluff Valley Campground in Zumbro Falls, Minnesota. Instead of our traditional contest which was always pretty rad, we decided to throw a big session instead. The goal was to bring together a ton of riders for a full day of riding and hook them up with free product from our sponsors! Needless to say, we had a great turn out and everyone had a damn good time! Here’s a video from the riding that went down. We have a second video from Footdown, the Vert Wall Challenge, Arm Wrestling, The Sprinter Battle and the product toss that you can check out below!

Filmed and edited by Kurt Hohberger

We would like to give a HUGE shout out to all of the sponsors and everyone that turned out to make this one happen!

Supporters:
The Shadow Conspiracy
Subrosa
Kink
Fly Bikes
Etnies
Volume Bikes
Demolition Parts
Mutiny Bikes
Wethepeople
Freed Bikes
Mutant Bikes
Stolen Bike Co.
QBMX
S&M Bikes
Fit Bike Co.
Dan’s Comp
Profile Racing
Nowear

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The Union “Wheel” Logo Shirt Out Now

Click to see it BIG

It has been a little while since we’ve done a new shirt, so we decided to get a fresh new design going and we’re really psyched on how it came out! The new Wheel logo shirt features a small The Union logo on the front with the new Wheel logo design on the back. The shirts are printed on soft 100% cotton Canvas brand shirts and come in sizes of small, medium, large and extra large! We’ve done a very limited run for this first go to feel things out, but could be doing some other colors in the near future if people are into them.

The shirts are available for $17.99 in our WEBSTORE right now!
All orders come with The Union stickers and a few other brands stickers we have laying around in the office! We ship worldwide as well!

You can also pick this shirt up on DAN’S COMP!

Check out more photos after the jump.

Click to see it BIG

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BMX Economics: Cutback Rumor Mill

Edit: This graphic, which was a quick 5 minute photoshop job, has been a large focus for a lot of criticism lately… Sadly, more than the words. This graph is not accurate at all, and was simply just a form of showing that there are more and more knock off BMX brands popping up every day producing more and more products causing there to be more supply than demand. I don’t have numbers to verify, and I sure as shit know I wouldn’t deny it being inaccurate but there are no numbers to verify, just constant complaints about there being too many brands now days… It was just something to go with the text. Apologies to anyone who was offended by this. I’ll put a picture of my room mates dogs red rocket or something that has no relevance if something like this comes up again.

Well… I woke up this morning and came across a few interesting news pieces that have definitely re-opened up a lot of interesting questions in my mind that I brought up in the original BMX ECONOMICS piece I wrote up back in July. What are these interesting news pieces? Over the past three or so days, rumors that Diamondback, MirraCo (Let’s face it… Trek) and Redline would be making some big cuts in the next few weeks when 2014 rolls over. Let’s talk about it…

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Updated Layout for The Union

Over the past few weeks I’ve been compiling a list of things we wanted to change with the site to make it run more efficiently and make it for you guys to get around the site to see all the latest and greatest. Thanks to Hamilton Boyce we were able to take those ideas and suggestions and do a little face lift to The Union. Tonight we released the new version of the site which for the most part doesn’t look much different than it did before, but there’s actually a lot of changes.

First off, when you came to the site there’s a good chance you noticed the new front page. We were a big fan of the slider on Can You Dig It so we utilized that so now you can see the five latest Original features we produce. Below is is our new MUST SEE section. For those of you who check the Daily Section on the regular, you know how fast videos can be pushed off to page two or three by the end of the day. Now you can find the best of the best videos mixed with our original features and the content the supporters of The Union are producing as well. That way you aren’t missing the important things if you step away from your computer for a day or two.

You can still find the original interviews, bike checks, photogalleries, Insights and more in the Features section and you can find all of the latest BMX videos, news, products and more over in the Daily Section like you could before as well! One thing you will notice different about those sections is that we’ve added some page numbers to the top of the page. That way it’s easier for you to get to the slightly older content you might have missed or want to check out again.

Next up, we’ve gone through and revamped our photogalleries to make them load faster and allow you to page through each of the photos much easier! Check out this Photogallery by Matt Bosco we dropped the other day to see how it works. There’s page numbers up top and below each photo along with arrows on the sides so you can page forward or backward as well!

Finally, we figured with the majority of videos being in HD these days, we needed to make it so our video player utilized that. All of our Original videos will now be available in wide screen by simply clicking into the posts from the front page or the Features or Videos sections. Take a look at what we mean by checking out this video featuring Paul Barnum from a little while back! Looks good, doesn’t it?

Other than that, we’ve just cleaned up the back end and made some tweaks to make the whole site load a little faster and have less errors or issues. We’re really stoked on how things came out, but we also know there might be some tweaks that still need to be made, so if you come across anything, feel free to let us know in the comments or just shoot Kurt an email!

We hope you’re as stoked on the changes as we are! Shout out to everyone who checks out the site on the regular! We couldn’t do it without your support!

30K Giveaway

Our Facebook page is about 1000 “Likes” away from 30,000. We figured it would be a good time to do a little giveaway to help get over that 30K mark. We’re giving away one of our new World Wide Web tank tops, a The Union X Quintin Co. snapback and a bunch of stickers to one lucky fan! Find out what you have to do to get entered RIGHT HERE!

Product: The Union – World Wide Web Tanktop – Out Now

With the warmer weather, I started thinking about how I wanted to do something fresh for the Web Store. I’ve wanted to do a tank top for quite a while and decided it would be a good time to get it done. So here we have it, the new World Wide Web tank. Comfortable, simple and clean. These tanks are made with Tultex pre-shrunk 100% ringspun cotton and and printed by the guys down in Casselberry at GGSBS.

They’re currently available in small, medium, large and Extra Large with white being the only color option.

You can pick one up for $12 RIGHT HERE. All orders come with free The Union stickers and some extras from different brands we have.

We also have a few of our limited edition The Union X Quintin Co. snapbacks still available, so you can pick the tanktop, hat and stickers up for $20 HERE. That’s a hell of a deal!

So what the hell are you waiting for? Go pick yourself one up now!

20K Giveaway!

Introducing The Merged, Free-Coaster, Can You Dig It and Flat-Matters

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Well, today is the day we are able to let the world know what we have been working on these past few months. Some of you may have caught on to the subtle hints we have been giving on Twitter and Facebook the past few weeks or even the links we dropped up top last night.
Shortly after partnering with Bikeguide, gears started turning and just before Interbike back in September, we started working with Dave Paterson from The Merged and Bunky Dunn from Free-Coaster on how we could all work together to promote all of the different content we have been producing. Anyone who is familiar with both of those sites know both guys are very good at what they do and have earned the respect from the industry through their talents.
Between The Union, Bikeguide, The Merged and Free-Coaster we are all able to bring you a different look at freestyle BMX, but we still felt like something was missing from this. That’s when Jon Saunders from Can You Dig It and Effraim Catlow from Flat-Matters came into the picture. These guys are both very well respected in the trails and flatland world and we saw them as a perfect fit for whatever it is we are creating right now.

Starting today, we’ll all be working together to bring you the best of the best in freestyle BMX from the videos and photos to the news, products and people who are helping to keep this sport moving forward.

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