71 — Valentin Vodev

VALENTIN VODEV

Industrial Design

VALENTIN VODEV

[Cover and Back cover]

VELLO ultralightweight TITANIUM frame (non-electric), 2022

CARS ARE NOT FOLDABLE

You’re just back from the Eurobike show, how was it?

Eurobike was very good. It’s getting bigger and bigger every year. And now it has moved to Frankfurt, which is great. You can find a hotel room for the event!

The cycling industry is still very independent isn’t it?

The bike market has not been disrupted by new players or big money. For example, no car manufacturers have decided to go into biking. But it turns out not to be so easy to get into the bike business if you’re a big company, because the biking world is completely different, it’s free spirited.

The structure of the retail side of things is very independent too. They don’t have big brand shops. It’s more local shops. They may be big or small, but they’re often smaller businesses. And because they’re largely free from brand-control, this gives more play for everyone.

THEY SAID, “IT’S A HOAX! THAT CANNOT BE!“

Why haven’t things gone down that mega-brand route?

Because the bike industry wasn’t so profitable. Maybe that’s the reason why it has remained independent.

Having said that, there’s still big money involved. Some companies have got really huge, building groups and buying each other out…

Does the diversity of bike brands make it hard for consumers to find the right ride?

At the beginning, we didn’t think too much about how we were going to distribute our bikes. We were more thinking, “We have a great product, let’s put it out there!“

In retrospect, I think we were lucky to have picked a good time and we were also fortunate enough to get quite a good share of our market. People know our brand now.

And then, because Austria is itself very small, we have to export. Of course, Germany is a bit like a home market, but it’s still a different country.

So for us, it’s natural to just say, “Okay, we have to export anyway, so let’s go to other countries.“

That’s not always very easy. For example, the UK market is very slow. But France turned out to be very, very quick. We are getting good traction there.

Did you always want to be a product designer?

Yeah, definitely. I always loved being creative, but in terms of making things.

When I was in high school, I wanted to do something with art, for sure. My parents are artists, so there was no other choice! I wasn’t accepted in the fine art college though, so I went to the applied arts.

I grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria. Then, when I was 19 I decided to move to Vienna. Before that, I tried acting. I got accepted into the National Academy of Theatre and Film Art, which is very, very difficult to get into. In fact, even now, I still have friends that are on the stage and in films.

VELLO

Speedster Titan, 2014

Why didn’t you stick with the acting?

I don’t know, it’s destiny I guess. You know, in life you have choices. You can go either left or right. But you can’t do both. I was lucky to have a choice. And I chose to go to Vienna and study Product Design at the University of Applied Art there. Then I went to London for three years, to the Royal College of Art.

After the Royal College, did you work for somebody else? Or did you set up on your own?

I had already set up my own company before I went to the Royal College.

So, after I graduated in Vienna, I worked a couple of years before heading to London. I did the masters in product design there. After that I did some work for people like Ron Arad and Sebastian Conran.

Then, in 2007, I decided to move back to Vienna because I wanted to do a startup. I wanted to have my own business and it seemed to me back then that Vienna was a very nice, quiet place. Somewhere you could start a business without too much money. They had some great funding on offer in Vienna at the time, that helped a lot. In fact, it was amazing.

Just before the global financial crisis. Sounds like a tricky time to found a startup up?

Actually no, that’s a good time to start because you don’t have anything to lose. The only way is up!

Of course, if you’re a big established company and you have a crisis, maybe that’s not so much fun. But as a start up you don’t have anything to lose.

What was the founding product of your startup?

What I have always done, even at the Royal College of Art, and before in Vienna, was mobility and micro-mobility products.

My degree show in Vienna was a baby carriage that is also a scooter. It was like a longboard style skateboard combined with a baby carriage.

That was in 2005. It was only a prototype, of course, but not long after, Quinny - the baby carriage brand - got inspired to produce a commercial version.

They never got in contact with me, but that’s fine. It was a great inspiration for them.

“Inspiration“ seems like a charitable term here?

Not at all, it’s fine. It was a different design. I was glad really. They didn’t actually release their buggy till 2012 or 2013. So it took quite a while to get to market.

Back in 2005, at my degree show, I think half of the professors were excited and the other half just thought, “You’re crazy! That’s just not gonna work.“

That’s the thing. Sometimes when you’re innovative, you can be too early for the market.

What did you show at the Royal College?

My degree show at the Royal College was a tricycle that you can make into a bicycle.

I wanted to create the perfect mobility product for the city. I lived in London, so I did the research into how, and how far people travel, and so on. And I realised that the best option was to have a cargo bike that can be made small when you fold it, or at least flat, so that you can put it in small spaces.

And it needed to be electric, so you could carry a decent cargo. That’s the perfect mobility device for the city. This was the first bike that I designed. And afterwards I developed it further.

But when I began my startup, I couldn’t find a market for this particular bike. So I did more design work for other companies. One particularly interesting company was Lohner.

Pullchair a new kind of Pushchair, 2007

Lohner LEA

an electric scooter, the modern version of the L125-Roller, 2012

YOU NEED CERTAIN NAIVETÉ TO START A BUSINESS JUST BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE IN YOUR PRODUCT.

Lohner…that name sounds familiar

Lohner was this very traditional Austrian company. Originally they made carriages for the Austrian Emperor. They actually hired Ferdinand Porsche at the turn of the century to develop the first electric car, in 1901. This was before Porsche got famous and went to Germany.

Interestingly, they put the motor in the wheel, which is what you have nowadays too. And even the design was interesting. It’s not a sporty design, because it was 1901. But it doesn’t look like a horse carriage either.

That’s incredible, why are they not a household name today?

Well, after Austria lost the First World War they weren’t allowed to make any more heavy vehicles, so they started making scooters.

They were very famous in the ’50s, you saw them everywhere. You had Vespa, Lambretta, and Lohner.

Fast forward a few years and a descendant of the company’s founder decided to try and revive the company by making a new version of this scooter.

He tried to create an electric scooter that could go more than 200 kilometres on a single charge. And that could go above 125 km/h, so you could go on the highway.

And that’s the project you worked on?

Yes, from a design perspective the whole thing was very interesting. It had a lot of storage. The idea was to keep some of the key features of the original scooters.

Of course, there were differences in proportions, but it maintained the spirit of the original. In the end it turned out to be a bit like the old Mini/new Mini.

It was very successful from a design perspective, but he could not mass manufacture it. He had a couple of pieces produced, but he ran out of money. Turns out you need a LOT of cash for that business…

That’s a shame, it’s a cool looking scooter

You know, in business it’s not always enough to have the right product, you also need to be at the right time. That’s why I say we were lucky to make a successful business with Vello.

You can get all the prizes in the world for great design. But if you cannot sustain a business, it’s just a nice piece of history.

You need certain naiveté to start a business just because you believe in your product.

That naiveté could also be seen as passion though, right?

Of course, you have to have passion, because you know, this is a long term thing.

You have to live with your product for many years. Your passion needs to drive you from inside, because you will have ups and downs.

But then you have all the customers. They combine that product of yours with their experience, it becomes part of their life.

This is what I love about mobility products, they’re like companions, it’s like a buddy. This is how people perceive it.

People get really attached to their bikes, don’t they?

You have some relationship with this object. That’s about the design, the function and the art. All these things have to work together.

If you achieve that, you have a product which is not like a toothbrush - which is okay so long as it doesn’t hurt you. Instead, you have a real connection with the product, which can be amazing.

You could apply this same thought to many products, not just bikes. But I like bikes!

You’re getting people out into their environment too. Giving them a way to explore Oh absolutely. And this applies to people on vacation too. Our folding bike was born out of travel. Me, my partner and a friend of ours went to Cuba. I had done so many complicated bikes - tricycles, electrics and so on - that I was thinking, “maybe I should do something simple, like a small folding bike?“

I made three prototypes and we took them to Cuba, this was around 2010. I put them all in one big cardboard box, and shipped them out.

Other than the bikes, when we landed, we only had the five kilos of luggage that I limited us to. We unpacked the bikes and we were immediately completely independent. Exploring new cultures.

Travelling like that, people received us as locals rather than as tourists. And we could combine transportation too. This multimodal system that everyone is talking about nowadays, it was something that we basically discovered ourselves without having to research it.

We took our bikes on trains and even put them in the boots of those huge old American cars you see in Cuba. We went on the buses too. It was amazing.

YOUR PASSION NEEDS TO DRIVE YOU FROM INSIDE, BECAUSE YOU WILL HAVE UPS AND DOWNS.

TO DO THINGS PROPERLY TAKES TIME.

From original concept, to first person buying a new bike, what kind of timeframe are we talking about here?

A couple of years, minimum. To do things properly takes time. If a project is done very quickly, you can tell.

You are focussed on making city life better. We were always thinking of an urban solution. A way to move around the city without being limited. With bikes, you can go everywhere if they’re foldable. And now with the trains in Austria and Germany, you can take your bike without having to book a space. This is a big deal. We were travelling here in the winter with our new cargo bike. For a cargo bike it’s very, very compact. Our concept there was to build a cargo bike that can take 210 kilograms of weight, but still with the size of a normal bike. So we took that on the train too, and it was fantastic.

Did you say 210 kilos?

Yeah, that’s the total. So, bike, riders and luggage. But the bike is just 25 kilos. It’s the lightest cargo bike on the market at the moment. So you have 185 kilos to play with. You could have a second passenger of 90 kg, or two kids, or 100 kilos of luggage. Which is a lot of luggage!

Does it have a motor?

Yes, we’re using a very powerful Bosch motor with the 400 watts power and a lot of torque. Plus, you have two batteries. So you basically cannot run out of power. But the best thing is the ride quality.

I love to take a shortcut over the park, just for the hell of it. This bike takes all of that in its stride. Even bumping up the pavement is easy.

Sure, you can build a bike in six months. You buy a Chinese frame, put some components on it, make some graphics... But that’s not what we’re doing. The last project, it took like three or four years to develop.

And how about something like your radio?

Ah, yes, that was back when I was at the Royal College. The first year I did a lot of interesting projects. One of them was this laser system for the transmission of sound. The radio came out of that.

You built a laser?

One week each year I do a workshop at a very nice College here in Austria. It’s called, FH Joanneum - University of Applied Sciences. A friend of mine is a professor there.

I’m always telling the students that you have to be ’hands on’. If you want to build something, build it! Before you start doing 3D and all that stuff, do sketches, then you build a three dimensional object, from whatever materials you have to hand. The point is to experiment, to answer the question, is this gonna work?

That’s what I did with this laser. I bought cheap pound shop laser pointers, then I connected them with a 3.5 millimetre jack. It’s so simple, you just connect the jack to the plus and the minus of the laser.

Then I put the laser pointer in front of a small solar panel, and the solar panel you connect up to the speaker and it actually worked. Wow!

That is mad professor level ingenuity!

The funny thing is, I presented that to the professors and they didn’t believe it. They said, “It’s a hoax! That cannot be!“

Do you still play like that with bits and pieces from discount shops?

Unfortunately that’s not possible right now. Of course, at the studio, we buy stuff to make prototypes ourselves. Maybe not from the one Euro shop, but we’re buying stuff to just prove a concept

This is important because, when you’re ordering the frame from a manufacturer, you have maybe one or two minor corrections you can make. A millimetre here, a couple of degrees there. You cannot suddenly change the design completely. They just gonna just say, “OK, that’s a new project by the way.“

There are so many lovely details on your Vello Bike, the integrated lights for example.

That was a nice project where magnets were involved. We have used a lot of magnets on the bike.

The design is very clean, it’s very simple, but I think in the bike world there’s a lot of people who love their tools. This Allen key is the holy grail!

Do you have any new projects lined up?

At one time I was thinking maybe I would get bored if I wasn’t designing new stuff all the time.

But actually, the product evolves all the time, and we have a number of different product ranges. And then so much goes into designing the accessories - there’s a whole family of stuff now. So I definitely don’t have time to get bored!

Plus, I don’t see this project as ’biking only’. We’re interested in the more general concept of mobility. At the level of society, this is evolving very fast. So it’s a very interesting place to be.

THIS IS WHAT I LOVE ABOUT MOBILITY PRODUCTS, THEY’RE LIKE COMPANIONS, IT’S LIKE A BUDDY.

Ci Desk

Multi-functional home office on wheels, 2003

Kick it! Soft flexible Lamp, 2008

Radio Valerie

A radio without switches or buttons, 2006

What is ’driving’ this change?

I think it’s the need to be mobile. It doesn’t matter if it’s a horse, donkey, bike, car or train. In history, you see the different evolutions and different means of transportation.

But for the city, we find out now that actually, the car doesn’t work. Nowadays people don’t enjoy getting around the city in a car. And things are moving more and more in that direction.

In the city, cars are slowly but surely gonna be replaced. It’s a revival of the bike.

Change can be good!

Mobility is not just about bikes, cars, and motorcycles. If you look on the back of your driving licence, you have maybe 10 vehicles listed.

But that’s not the end of it. I think the diversity of moving objects, that’s gonna be the next thing. You’ve got bikes, or scooters or scooter-bikes, and skateboards. There’s a whole variety of small micro mobility objects.

You’ll end up with your car staying parked 99% of the time. Parking is already expensive, and it’s getting more expensive all the time.

Cars cost even when they’re not moving…

We have a flagship store here in Vienna. And we applied for a parking space in the front of the shop.

Turns out you have two options when you do this. You can have a commercial parking space, or you can apply to make the area a social benefit. A kind of city oasis - a space everybody can use, with a bench or maybe some trees or flowers. It’s very interesting.

The city oasis is subsidised, so you pay 100 Euros to the city, and you basically take two or three car spaces in the front of the shop. That’s what we chose to do. For the commercial car parking spaces it would cost 144,000 Euro per year!

Are your bikes manufactured locally?

We see ourselves as the producers. We are ’hands on’ and I like that. But we don’t produce everything. We don’t have the thousands of people you would need to produce everything from the screws on up.

So we partner with a lot of people, with a lot of companies who develop stuff for us. And we try to make as much as possible independently and locally.

For example we are assembling in Austria. And we are trying to produce the frame in Europe too.

This is challenging, but very, very interesting, because we are pushing into fields that have been almost completely dead for the last 30-40 years. We’re trying to revive them.

I cannot say any details now, because it’s still ongoing, but we are talking to some very interesting companies with a lot of tradition. And the price seems to be very similar to a production in Asia or somewhere, so that will be amazing.

That would be another positive change

That is how we started out, by the way.

We thought we would do everything in Vienna. But it was just impossible.

So then we tried to make everything within a 1000 kilometre radius of Vienna. That didn’t work either… until Corona came along.

During the pandemic, there was a big push from local companies thinking about local production. Previously these companies just hadn’t been interested in producing bicycles.

But now, things are different.

Design Friends would like to thank all their members and partners for their support.

Support Design Friends, become a member. More information on www.designfriends.lu

COLOPHON

PUBLISHER Design Friends

COORDINATION Heike Fries

LAYOUT Vera Heliodoro

INTERVIEW Mark Penfold

PRINT Imprimerie Schlimé

PRINT RUN 250 (Limited edition)

ISBN 978-99987-939-8-9

PRICE 5 €

DESIGN FRIENDS Association sans but lucratif (Luxembourg)

BOARDMEMBERS

Anabel Witry (President)

Guido Kröger (Treasurer)

Heike Fries (Secretary)

Claudia Eustergerling, Reza Kianpour, Dana Popescu, Hyder Razvi (Members)

COUNSELORS

Charline Guille-Burger, Silvano Vidale

WWW.VALENTINVODEV.COM

WWW.VELLO.BIKE

Design Friends is financially supported by

This catalogue is published for the lecture of Valentin Vodev “Cars are not foldable“ at Mudam Luxembourg on 11th of October, 2023 organised by Design Friends

Service Partners Partners

In collaboration with