WOW Entrepreneurs: Lauf Forks

Not long after an idea first formed over a couple of brewskis on a cold December night in 2010, the Reykjavík based bike company Lauf Forks has sprung from springs to fully assembled, off-road ready bikes that tackle gravel paths with technology born from a fortuitous marriage of opportunity and circumstance. They include the single most sought out feature of hardcore cyclists the world over, a built in bottle-opener. Continuing with the above beer metaphor, the bikes are built small batch for a discerning clientele that savor high-end performance as much as they do a very hoppy IPA from an obscure microbrewery in small town Oregon.

The (hop) seeds for Lauf Forks, first sown in the heavy composite fields of the leading prosthetic limb manufacturer ÖSSUR, were where Columbia University engineering graduate, Lauf’s CEO and co-founder (together with Guðberg Björnsson) Benedikt Skúlason tended a crop of artificial legs. Amid the daily experience of the very building blocks of would-be suspension, success sparked an entrepreneurial flame in Skúlason that soon flared into furious engineering feats, marrying the right mind to the proper materials with a wedding band made from a suitable hobby.

THE LAY OF THE TRACK

Lauf Forks operates in an emerging market segment wedged between street bikes and mountain bikes, known as gravel biking which bridges the gap that started to form as mountain biking grew into an ever more extreme beast that furiously pedaled farther and farther uphill from its asphalt bound origins.

Benedikt Skúlason and Guðberg Björnsson at the office.

Among the wants and needs specific to this niche are an obsession with low equipment weight and a suspension system that does not absorb the frequent and heavy shocks inherent to mountain bike riding. Instead it effectively filters out the near constant vibrations associated with speeding down a gravel track. Within that segment, the Lauf Forks suspension system occupies a narrow niche of aftermarket custom add-ons. Its expansion, by definition, is completely restricted by the growth of its parent segment and attaining a dominant market share will therefore only guarantee a large slice of a tiny little pie.

Hence, lasting company growth will only be achieved by pivoting to full-scale bike manufacturing and, in the case of Lauf Forks, exploiting an expertise in the core competencies of the segment to bring customized solutions to a broader audience by incorporating the high-end into the consumer-ready and using its brand driver—its namesake fork—to power sales of high-margin best-selling gravel bikes.

THE ROAD MORE TRAVELLED

The crossroads into that wider market segment were ultimately reached in the fall of 2017 with the release of the True Grit, an end-all-be-all gravel marvel and proverbial head-scratch inducer to Johnny Layman while perusing the spec sheet.

“Starting in the US, the gravel bike segment is becoming the largest segment in the bicycle industry and we happen to have the best and most efficient suspensions design for such bikes in the market today. With the True Grit, we now also have the best reviewed made-for-gravel bike out there,” CEO Skúlason says, elaborating on the role of Lauf within their newfound market.

THE FINAL VERDICT

Moreover, the accolades do indeed overflow. We at the WOW magazine obviously hold ourselves to the same journalistic standards as The Washington Post and The New York Times, and this reporter thus endeavored to fact check these bold claims with all the broad and far-reaching powers of Google at his command. What he found was a dark and deep rabbit hole riddled with thick jargon of nerd-boggling obscurity. He emerged none the wiser about the specific properties of the bike, but was left with the distinct impression that it was, in fact, pretty damn great.

RACING TOWARDS THE BOTTOM-LINE

In business, there is seldom a finish line, but always a bottom-line. The True Grit and its complementary lines of Lauf bicycles is thus not an end goal in a race, but a checkpoint on a journey that adds value to that bottom-line. With a projected year-over-year sales growth of consumer-ready bikes for 2019 that exceeds 100%, the bottom-line is starting to look very healthy indeed. Although Mr. Skúlason claims to have no designs on going mainstream with mass manufacturing of “just another bike” any time soon, the Lauf leaf seems to have caught a steady updraft that should carry the company towards lasting success for as long there is a market for passionate innovation. Should that demand ever run dry, the only function of handlebars is to pivot.