A
s with all these things, you never get started without inspiration. One of the first bicycles I ever built was an old navy blue Peugeot frame. I went totally overboard, matching the wheels to the orange streaks on the frame. Even with its questionable colour combinations, I really loved that guy. Other bicycles were built up and passed on in the subsequent years, but I held on to that one until the business started. The geometry of our Kennedy City Bicycle frames in very similar to that of the Peugeot, while drawing on the highlighted lugs of bicycles like the Holdsworth and the laid-back but lightweight style of a Linus beach cruiser. The idea was born. After jotting down some rough (totally inaccurate) numbers, I headed to Eurobike to meet suppliers who might be able to do what I wanted done. When it turned out they could, I returned to London and started viewing properties for what I initially assumed would be our retail outlet. Branding ideas were doodled on scraps of paper and samples started to arrive at our basement flat on the Kingsland Road. We started to narrow down our colours using heavily biased voting systems until we reached an initial 3.
INITIAL FRAME COLOURS
HOLDSWORTH LUGS
FIRST SAMPLES
We went for a workshop in the end rather than a shopfront and parts started to arrive. We began to recognise that online sales (and therefore delivery) were going to be a big part of the business so we started testing out bike-boxes. Cardboard is expensive in big quantities.
32 | CYCLR FIRST SAMPLES