With Wildhood, we have found the perfect partner in Brother Cycles to build on our story. In 2021, this led to our first co-lab, Brother In The Wild Eifel, and hopefully to a lasting collaboration in the future. Therefore, we would like to give Will and Brother Cycles a forum to tell their story.

The obvious question, why Brother Cycles?

Well, my brother and I run the business together.  We were originally restoring vintage road bikes and converting them into fixed gear bikes in London, already 12 years ago.  We were getting our frames from Ebay and other marketplaces and we were selling them to friends and people who got to know us through them.  But then suddenly, over the course of a year, prices for those frames went up from real cheap to expensive.  That was the moment we decided to build our own track frame.  Our original plan was to sell those frames unbranded (because that was what everybody wanted back then), but we put so much effort in developing the frame that when we wanted to sell it, we were feeling like “we have to leave our signature”. It felt bad putting all this work in something which had no name on it and then we decided to just call it Brother.

You come from a fixed-gear background, did you guys race?

We never raced ourselves, but we were part of the London fixed gear scene when we started. There were a few shops like Tokyo Fixed Gear which had these amazing communities, and we were mostly manufacturing frames that were sold by them or in the South of the UK to people forming part of this scene.  We had a couple of friends that raced alley cats and did that using our frames, but we were never into the racing side ourselves.  For us it was like a means of transport and getting from one side of the city to the other on our daily commute.  In the weekends we would go for longer rides on our fixed gear bikes, to Brighton or Cambridge, with loaded backpacks.  So fixed gear is where we started from and even now our interest still lies on the more niche sides of cycling.

How did the evolution from track, fixed-gear cycling into adventure cycling happen?

Like as with most of our products our bikes kind of evolved with our own personal interest. As we and the fixed gear community started cycling further and further out, our interest shifted.  We were looking for some bikes that could be fast on the road but could also be taken off-road. First, we looked at cyclocross bikes that were able to take racks for panniers.  At the same moment I was planning a bike tour in Italy and I didn’t want to buy a frame but wanted to ride one of our own.  So that’s when we started to think about the Kepler.  That name was inspired by a friend of ours who called his touring bike “The Keppler” (named after Johannes Keppler, an astronomer who was exploring outer space).  So, I took the bike around Italy and out to Scotland. We worked on the geometry for a year. Back then the Keppler was also still a canti-bike. When it was released in 2015, in a pink-green fade, the bike hit it off with our community and we sold more than we initially expected.

So, at the end of the day, it comes down to this.  If my brother or me happen to like a type of bike, chances are high somebody else within our community will like it too and if we design something we want to ride ourselves, we will probably get the design right.  If you’re designing something you think other people want, there’s a chance you will have to 2nd guess.  So, we make sure we stick to this philosophy of designing products we want to own ourselves.

You mentioned community a couple of times, why is that idea central to your approach?

Community means everything to us.  In the early days, when Instagram didn’t exist, and we just had our website, everything was more or less word to mouth, going to alley cats, crit races or just hanging around or doing shop-rides.  Even now with “Brother in The Wild”, the community is still the heart of everything.  When you’re running a small business, you can be really in tune with your customers and your bike shops and that’s what we want to keep on doing as we grow as a company.

Can you tell us a bit more about Brother in The Wild?

In a way it’s a similar story as the way our bikes have been designed.  One day I ended up in the New Forest when I was testing one of our first prototype Big Bro’s.  As I was cruising through this magnificent pine forest on deserted gravel roads, I was asking myself the question why does nobody in London know about this place?  So, we came up with this simple idea to hire a field of a farmer and put something online. It was really simple, sign up, come over and we’ll have some routes ready for you.  We had 120 people signed up in 24 hours and everybody showed up with crates of beers and bbq’s.  So that was the start of it and as we got good feedback, we continued doing it and eventually shifted to a more professional setting. What happened then was that shops in France and Germany asked us if we wanted to do events in Bordeaux, Berlin and Munich. 

You guys just celebrated 10 years of Brother Cycles?  What's next for Brother Cycles?

We are at a point now where, as a company, we should start rethinking some things for the next years as we ourselves are getting older, having children and the business is in quite a healthy place.  Speaking personally, I can’t imagine not working on Brother Cycles. The plan is certainly not to sell the company, but what we’d like to do is probably keep it lean as we are right now and only develop a limited amount of well-tuned products in our line-up, increase our availability in certain places and develop a global Brother community.  We also want to develop certain products we don’t have in our catalogue, like a more trail-oriented mountain bike.    If we have that one, we will have the Stroma as road bike and the new one would be as mountainbike as we want to go.  It would be nice to continue what we do as my brother and I both love our job.  What we also want to do once the whole pandemic is over and production of bike parts is back on track is offer complete bike builds again.

Did Brexit challenge your business model and how did you anticipate on that?

We were quite well prepared for it, my brother James was preparing for it a couple of months before Brexit actually happened.  At the moment we have actually been able to ship products into Europe without serious problems and without charging our customers too much extra for it.  What we want to do eventually is ship half our stock into Europe and distribute our frames directly to our European customer, that way we skip the double import taxes and ship to the rest of the world out of the UK.  It has been confusing and time consuming, but it has forced us to make decisions we would otherwise have to make sooner or later too as mainland Europe is such a big market for us.

As a cyclist, what has been your most memorable experience so far?

 My most memorable bike experience, attempting to ride the Tour Divide, was at the time quite a negative one, although looking back at it, it was one of the best things I have ever done.  I was pretty new to adventure cycling and bikepacking and I had absolutely no experience with long distance rides.  I made it 800 miles into the track, covered the Canadian section and Montana and then my knee exploded.  The riding in Canada was amazing and properly off the beaten track. You’re carrying food for 3 days, filtering water, bivying in the woods, carrying your bike over rivers without having any shoes on.  It was a really wild experience, and I was so sad to have to pull out because of my knee.  It took me months to get over the letdown, but now I look back at it as something amazing and I probably go back someday to do another attempt when life permits.  What has been so good about the last 3 years were all the international Brother in The Wild events, where I’d fly into a town and get on these wonderful rides, meet all the cyclists and appreciate all the particularities of those places. Munich for example is such a wonderful, beautiful and wholesome place where everything is incredibly well organized, then you go to Berlin and everything gets crazy, people are getting smashed, getting naked and jumping in every lake they come across and it is all equally fun.

If you had the choice to only just ride 1 of your bikes, which one would you pick?

It would be the Meteh. It is such a versatile bike, and it is what I ride all the time here in the UK. I do ride my Big Bro a lot because I have it set up as a nice, comfy cruiser, but on the Meteh I can just ride about everything especially with my two wheelsets a 700c-40mm and a 650b 2.1.  You can ride anything between easy country lanes to quite technical single tracks. I can put racks and panniers and go touring or put nothing on it and go for long day-rides.  We make all our bikes to be as versatile as possible, but especially the Meteh will get a lot of things done.  People send us all these pictures from crazy Meteh builds. Tom from The Woods Cyclery even put a 2.5 tire at the front and a 2.3 at the back, some people have been putting these crazy wide bars on them.  But there would be certainly days where I  would dream of taking my Big Bro out on a ride.

Words: Philippe Michiels

Photography: courtesy of Brother Cycles