Leap the frog is always ready to sprint, climb, and jump. He represents the fastest and most elegant shifting technology in the world
Make the Leap Day (Feb 29) is a quasi-holiday celebrated once every four years and is assigned to clear up any calendar issues as we here on Earth rotate around the sun. That rotation, a solar year, roughly takes 365.25 days, so one extra day every four years is necessary.
Okay, enough with the astronomy lesson, what’s really important is that “Make the Leap” is a catch phrase we adopted here at SRAM over seven years ago as part of new road group introduction and subsequent marketing campaign. While the phrase is a call to action, it also defines a key road technology, here‘s how the story goes…
Back in 2005, when SRAM was getting ready to enter the road componentry market with our two complete gruppos (Force and Rival), SRAM Product Managers code-named the entire project,“Project Leapfrog.” The name was derived from the technology inside SRAM’s DoubleTap (one lever, two shifts) shifters. The unique action inside the levers has two pawls leapfrogging each other in a brilliantly confusing fashion, making the single shift lever up and down shift possible. The idea is genius and the mechanism is awesome, at least we here at SRAM think so.
At the same time the SRAM Rival and Force were introduced, the marketing team chose “Leap” the frog as its road representative after several brainstorming sessions. Leap is the name of the two and sometimes three-dimensional red frog that you have seen as part of SRAM’s road marketing for the past seven years.
We want to pay tribute to Leap, Leap Year, and thank all of you that have Made the Leap over the past seven years. We also hope that you will continue to celebrate with new SRAM RED, just introduced in February! You can read about all the new technologies here on www.theroaddiaries.com.
Here are the two versions of Leap the frog that you typically see in our marketing, the willyoumaketheleap link takes you to SRAM's road homepage