Alumnibloggen: Rolo bikes

Since participating in the Venture Cup regional final in 2012, a great deal has happened in our business. We have started to garner international recognition for our design and engineering, and we are well on our way towards achieving our first objective of establishing ourselves as the reference point for our segment of the industry.

A quick background. We set out in a first stage to design, engineer, manufacture and sell the highest performing road racing bicycle frame in the world. We set very ambitious goals for ourselves that we knew would be very hard to achieve (it was to be the lightest, stiffest and among the most comfortable regardless of weight), but we knew that they were nonetheless achievable. After much hard work, sleepless nights, dead-ends and mistakes, we were finally able to achieve the targets.

At the time we participated in the Venture Cup, we had completed the first round of prototype testing. A second round followed in late 2012, and in early 2013, we decided that we had learned enough to move towards production. Calling upon all that we had learned, and taking into account some changes in the market, we designed and engineered the production version of the frame. We also recognized that we would need to identify a company capable of manufacturing for production, as we had been working with what is effectively a prototyping facility in Linkoping until then.

In early 2014, we finalized the design for all four initial production bicycle frames, made the tools and moved production to a small, highly specialized carbon fabricator in Germany. In June 2014, we started making deliveries and have been selling ever since.

We have been featured in a number of articles in the cycling press in Germany, France and the UK, and in November 2014 we were awarded Svensk Form’s Design S award for best industrial design.

At this stage, we are now launching our efforts to raise the capital we need to expand our sales and marketing efforts, having now successfully demonstrated that our product is demonstrably superior to all others in the world.

Even though we did not win in the Venture Cup competition, going through the process not only helped us refine and sharpen our presentation, but it also gave us invaluable feedback about the merits of our idea and how we were choosing to go about making it a reality.