Two small crews. One bike light company.
Outbound Lighting is about ten people split between Skokie, Illinois and Bellingham, Washington. No private equity, no parent company. We design the lights, we build them, we answer the phone when they break. This page is who we are and how we got here, including the parts that went badly.
Skokie, Illinois
Where the lights get built & shipped
Every light we sell gets assembled, tested, and boxed in a shop on the north side of Chicago. Tooling is built here, the CNC mill lives here, and so does the torture rig that destroys prototypes on purpose. Order before the cutoff on a business day and it usually ships that day, because the person packing it is thirty feet from the person who built it.
- Production: Andy runs the floor, Patryk builds, Tess ships and keeps making the line better
- Operations: Lauren handles suppliers, payments, HR, and everything nobody else wants to
- Engineering: Matt, mechanical and optical, plus whatever is in pieces on his desk
- Shop dog: Penny, three legs, well compensated
Bellingham, Washington
Where the lights get designed & ridden
Product development, industrial design, sales, and customer service run out of Bellingham, which is not an accident. It rains, it is dark by four in winter, and there is more trail within twenty minutes than most of us can ride in a year. Prototypes get built on the 3D printers here and then get handed to the most ham-fisted riders we know, on purpose, so they find the problems before you do.
- Product: Tom leads, Joey does mechanical design, Eli does industrial and graphic design
- Sales and marketing: Alec, who also owns the dealer relationships
- Customer service: Jason, down the road in Olympia, who will get you back on the trail fast
- Why here: Bellingham is the mecca of MTB in the USA. So why not put the most passionate people working in a place they can exercise that passion?
The two names on the paperwork
Who you are actually buying from
Matt Conte
Founder/Owner, mechanical and optical engineer
Before Outbound, Matt worked on the F-15 at Boeing, designed roller coasters, and designed automotive lighting at Diode Dynamics. He still buys busted headlight assemblies on eBay and takes them apart to see what the Toyota engineers figured out. His desk is a graveyard of half-disassembled gadgets, and every one of them ends up in a design note.
He races rally cars with Outbound Motorsports, which is how he learned where light needs to go at 100 mph through the woods at night. He will be the first to tell you he cares more about rally than mountain biking, and that this does not stop him from caring about your light.
Tom "Danger" Place
Co-owner, product manager, customer service
Eight years in LED R&D at Cree, with multiple chip design patents, before deciding he would rather build a bike light company than climb a ladder. Founder of the First Braptist Dirt Church in Pisgah. Stress-tested our lights in the Phoenix desert for years and now does it in the PNW rain from his backyard in Bellingham.
A good friend once said “if you don't know Tom, it's just a matter of time.” He is a socially dependent engineer who obsesses over data by day and hunts down party pace group rides by night. If you have met us at an event, you probably talked to Tom, or are looking for Tom.
“You have to give a product to your dumbest, most ham-fisted friends and hope they find all the problems so your customers won't.”
What we hold ourselves to
Core Values.
Don't Be A Dick.
Our warranty and our house rule. Be kind, be honest about what happened, and we fix it. Dog ate it, bike went off a cliff, still covered.
Be Innovative. Figure it out.
Nobody here waits for a supplier, a consultant, or a bigger budget. If it does not exist, we build the tool, the jig, or the robot that makes it exist.
Be a good human.
To customers, to dealers, to each other, and to the person on the other end of a warranty ticket at 9pm before a race weekend.
Everything is important.
The mount, the button feel, the cable clip, the box. Every detail gets thought out and fought over before it ships, because you will notice.
Engineers first, riders second.
We ride. But the light you get is the result of simulation, measurement, and argument, not vibes. Riding chops matter less than whether the product is right.
That's us.
If you want to see how the lights hold up, the reviews are unfiltered. If you want to talk to a human, you will get one of the people on this page or someone sitting near them.