Ralf Holleis

My father handed me a welding torch when I was nine.

He worked with metal and he never made a big thing of it. He showed me how it works, then he let me burn my own holes into it.

So I cut up my BMX. Then I welded it back together in a shape nobody sold in a shop. It rode badly. I did it again. And again.

Cut. Weld. Ride. Change it. Nobody called that engineering back then. It was just the best afternoon a kid could have. My father never pushed me towards design. He just left the workshop door open.

Graffiti was my school.

I found it as a teenager. Long before any design degree, long before frames and CAD files, I learned everything that matters on walls.

How a letter carries weight. How proportion works. Where a line needs tension and where it needs to breathe. How to make something feel right before you can explain why it feels right.

Designing a product is the same thing. Same eye. Same patience. Same obsession with proportion. Same amount of love poured into something most people will walk past without ever knowing how many hours went into that one curve.

Only the surface changes. Concrete, steel, titanium, a piece of maple with four wheels underneath.

Bikes, birds, cans. Walls, frames, decks. This is the culture I live in and it has never been separate from the work. It is the work.

Graffiti is freedom too. A city without stickers and tags looks dead to me.

I learned the craft properly. Then I went back to the barn.

Industrial design in Munich, then Doshi Levien in London, where I learned that form is a language and not decoration.

Today I also work as a Design Director, leading industrial design for products that ship at mass-production scale. At that scale a mistake is not an aesthetic problem. It is a responsibility. That is where I learned to take tolerances, testing and tooling as seriously as the sketch.

Design leadership gave me systems. The workshop keeps me honest.

Everyone told me you cannot 3D-print a bicycle.

2011. So I printed the joints instead. Stainless steel lugs, grown layer by layer, bonded to carbon tubes. The VRZ became the first documented functional bicycle frame joined with 3D-printed metal lugs. 1,100 grams, built years before printed lugs became an industry movement.

Core77 called it 3D-printed bike porn. I called it Tuesday in the workshop.

In 2015 a mail arrived from Australia. The founders of Bastion Cycles wrote that the VRZ had shown them the path was real. That mail still means more to me than most trophies.

That pile on the floor is fifteen years of printed parts. I never kept any of it to myself. Builders who wanted to try printed lugs got answers instead of silence. I drew data for them, shared my suppliers, talked them through materials. A lot of today’s printed-lug bikes started as one of those conversations.

Somewhere along the way that turned into a second profession. I became one of the people the industry calls when a bicycle frame or a part is supposed to come out of a printer. Element22, Headmade Materials, BASF and many others came looking for collaboration. Metal binder jetting, cold metal fusion, sintered titanium. I design it, I test it, I ride it, and I tell them where it breaks.

Then I built a chicken.

In 2011 I started HUHN cycles in a barn workshop in the Fichtelgebirge. The name? Chickens carry one of nature’s best stabilisation systems. The body moves through chaos, the head stays calm. They live in the dirt and still look elegant. That felt about right.

Fifteen years of steel followed. Full suspension frames with flex pivots. Titanium lugs, pressed and sintered. A 36-inch bike for a rider who is 2.06 m tall and had never had a bike that fit him.

And the part I actually love: riding them. Long climbs in the Fichtelgebirge, wet roots, golden hour, home in the dark with dirt on my face.

“Of all the steel bikes I’ve ridden, the HUHN Chabo stands out. Top-tier suspension, confident geometry, reasonable weight, and that unmistakable Made in Germany quality.”

Max Fuchs, head of testing, BIKE Magazine

Awards.

A trophy never made a bike ride better. But it means somebody looked closely.

Books.

Exhibitions.

What drives me.

I ride for the freedom and for the golden hour. Nobody ever remembers your average speed.

I believe the best engineering does not always start on a computer. Sometimes it starts by watching how an animal moves, or by riding until an idea makes sense.

I believe products should be repairable, understandable and worth keeping. And I believe you can take the work dead seriously without taking yourself seriously at all.

Steel, soul, and a stubborn love for building things.