KARLSTAD, Minn. — When Matt Brazier started doodling in class one day as an 11-year-old who was “bored in school,” it would have been hard to imagine that his sketch of a pickup truck with tracks would blaze the trail for one of the most successful companies in northwest Minnesota.

That would be Mattracks, the Karlstad-based company that specializes in manufacturing rubber track conversion systems for vehicles.

Name a vehicle, whether for work, play or somewhere in between, and Mattracks has probably made tracks for it. The company also makes non-driven tracks for trailers and similar implements. Founded by Matt’s dad, owner and CEO Glen Brazier, based on his son’s long-ago doodling, Mattracks this year marks its 30th anniversary.

As business stories go, they don’t get much more colorful than that.

“I used to play with a lot of Legos, and build things, and my dad was always building things,” Matt Brazier, now 43, said. “I drew a pickup with tracks, he saw it and away we went.

“The rest is history.”

Glen Brazier, who owned and operated National Transmission stores in Thief River Falls and Bemidji at the time, spent the next few years engineering and developing prototypes before gaining a patent. The first Mattracks — named, of course, after Matt — went on sale to the public in 1994. The company started in Thief River Falls, Matt Brazier said, before moving to a small shop in Greenbush, Minnesota, and relocating to Karlstad in 1995.

“My dad was a mechanic and fixed transmissions,” Brazier said. “He’s built gyrocopters, airplanes … you name it.”

The first Mattracks products targeted the recreation market, but the company today has expanded its product line to more commercial and even military applications, said Michelle Gjerde, Mattracks marketing manager. Mattracks is “constantly innovating new products” to stay ahead of the competition, Gjerde said.

“Some of our newest tracks are for tractors, skid steers, sprayers, we’ve got some new row crop tracks — so whatever innovations have been on the ag side,” she said. “But we do have some new tracks for ATVs and UTVs that are in prototype mode right now.”

Mattracks products can be installed on most vehicles in an hour, Gjerde said, compared with up to 15 man-hours to install some of the competitors’ products on large farm implements.

“Ours is designed to be as easy as changing a tire,” she said.

The sheer number of products also sets Mattracks apart, Brazier says.

“Most of the competitors have two models,” he said. “We have 178 different models. We build tracks for absolutely anything. Custom, you name it.”

Brazier’s doodling has taken him on quite a ride over the past three decades. After graduating from Greenbush High School in 1999, he attended a short course in Akron, Ohio, to learn how to mold and ply rubber before going to work in the family business.

That’s where the real learning occurred.

“What I learned in those years I don’t know if I would have ever learned in school,” Brazier said. “I had a great opportunity. I was 17-18 years old and went to California to trade shows. You learn a lot.”

Mattracks today employs about 50 people between the 150,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Karlstad and another facility a few hundred yards to the north where the rubber tracks are made, a process that was off-limits to a Herald reporter during a recent visit. A third building even farther north is used for maintenance, shipping, receiving and storage.

As the company’s Field Operations Coordinator, Matt Brazier has traveled the world to places such as China, the Middle East and Europe.

“I do lots of traveling,” he said. “We were just in Oman in August (2023) doing some stuff for the border patrol over there, so I wear many different hats.

“I would say 40% of our sales are overseas,” Brazier said. “Lots to South America – Brazil – Russia, Germany. We just shipped a bunch of stuff to Greenland and New Zealand. The only killer there is shipping costs.”

Mattracks also has a small sales force that works out of an office in Shanghai, Brazier says. Mattracks in 2004, along with a Chinese partner, built a new 300,000 square-foot factory in China to build Mattracks Powerboards — basically snowboards with tracks. In 2010, after the recession, Glen Brazier sold the factory to his partner but kept his best people and started an office in downtown Shanghai, from which Mattracks sells its product across China, other parts of Asia and the Middle East.

“We ship them tracks, they put them on their vehicles,” Matt Brazier said. “They can do that out of there versus me flying over there doing a show or something. They speak the language, they understand it.”

Mattracks products have also been featured on the big screen. The company designed the lower drive unit of the T-1 Robot featured in 2003’s “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” under contract with Stan Winston, a renowned special effects artist, makeup artist and film director. Winston, who died in 2008, is known for his work on such movies as “Aliens,” “Jurassic Park” and “Predator 2,” in addition to the “Terminator” series.

Five of the robot units were made for “Terminator 3,” and one is on display in the Mattracks museum in Karlstad, a work in progress featuring some of Glen Brazier’s inventions and products the company has made over the years, ranging from military vehicles to a 7-Up machine on tracks.

Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage from the TV series “Mythbusters” built two Mattracks-equipped 7-Up machines for a commercial that aired nationally during the Super Bowl and throughout the year in 2003.

The museum is open to the public by appointment.

“It excites me when I get to go into the museum and think back and remember what we did back then,” Matt Brazier said. “We’re just doing so many different, cool things.”

When “Terminator 3” came out, the company rented three limos and took all of its employees to see the movie in Grand Forks, Brazier says. They did the same thing when “Fast & Furious 8,” a 2017 film starring Vin Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, among others, was released. That film also included Mattracks products.

“With our business and what we do, things change so fast that I bet most people in town here don’t know that we’re making stuff for movies,” Brazier said. “And we do so much of it you can’t even enjoy what you’re doing.

“We have the coolest products there are to market,” he added. “We have so many different products that we can just go crazy with marketing. And a lot of our customers do that for us – they put all kinds of cool videos online.”

In that context, the company has developed “sort of a cult-like following,” said Gjerde, the marketing manager.

“We’ll see things on YouTube or something all the time,” Gjerde said. “The sky’s the limit on visualizing applications and hearing about things, so it’s never a dull day.”

All of the company’s marketing, advertising and graphic design is done in-house.

A major focus for the next few weeks is on

Kick’n Up Kountry,

a four-day music festival set for June 12-15 at Wagon Wheel Ridge, an events center situated on 360 acres just west of Karlstad on state Highway 11. This year’s lineup includes rock acts such as Firehouse, Lita Ford and Warrant, along with country artists such as the Kentucky Headhunters, Diamond Rio and Lady A.

Glen Brazier owns Wagon Wheel Ridge and Kick’n Up Country. In addition to the music festival, Wagon Wheel Ridge hosts an annual “Max’s Bash Biker Rally,” weddings and other special events.

“On top of everything we do at Mattracks, we have this, as well,” Matt Brazier said of Kick’n Up Country. “For the crew that we have, everybody’s got a lot of stuff going on.”

At this point, the company doesn’t have any special plans to mark Mattracks’ 30th anniversary, Brazier says. “A huge celebration” isn’t beyond the realm of possibility sometime down the road, he says.

“It’s kind of undecided, and we’re more focused on the business right now,” Brazier said. “And even if we had to wait a year, I mean, it doesn’t matter. We’ve got lots and lots of stuff in the works.”

• On the web:

www.mattracks.co