Ivor Allsop and his family have sought to make everyday tasks easier. Like the rest of the company's products, Softride Access Racks and QuietRide towing accessories were developed out of necessity.

Ivor's brainchild arose with the realization that his five-foot wife, Betty, would never be able to lift her bike atop the family Suburban. Like he had been doing for nearly 25-years, Ivor sought to make this burdensome process easier by creating a hitch mounted bike rack.

In one afternoon Ivor and his two sons, Jim and Mike, sat down and brainstormed what was the first hitch-mounted bike rack. The men quickly went to work patenting their ingenious parallelogram design that allows individuals to lower their rack parallel to the ground. The parallelogram functionality is unsurpassed because it does not "dump" bikes onto the ground when the user lowers the rack. This allows the user to easily access the rear of their vehicle without having to remove their bikes from the rack.