Inside Vetra Bikes: Building Bridges in Berlin

Additional studio photos by Bea Rodrigues

My first conversation with André Roboredo of Vetra Bikes occurred while staring into the fire crackling from an old oil drum. We weren’t talking about bikes, not at first anyway. Flames danced in his warm, dark eyes as we traveled to a small house in the mountains of Peru. In the middle of his bicycle tour through the Andes, he’d been taken in by a family whose grandmother was in the midst of gracefully departing the world. His story—and the gentle and earnest tone with which he told it—captivated and touched me. It’s not every day you go so deep so quickly. It animated memories of my own, including terrifyingly beautiful ones I’d shared with no one.

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One year on, we’re in his workshop in another part of Berlin. I’m watching him tack the single tubes of a customer’s future bicycle into a solid front triangle, and he’s talking me through each step like teaching is his vocation of choice. After tacking the joints, he puts it on the flat table by the bottom bracket, eager to figure out how the metal got the better of him this time. “Aha, look at that!” he says, pointing at a tiny gap. We see the frame pulled a millimeter to the left from the heat of his torch, so André bends it back a little.

Two distinct domains

While he plays with the metal, he talks freely about his philosophy of his work. As André sees it, he’s got his feet in two distinct domains. Obviously, there’s the framebuilding. It’s the nuts and bolts, the honorable craft. This concerns itself with the exact angles of the tubes, the quality of their connection, and how the bicycle rides. There’s the tension between heritage and innovation. You can totally lose yourself in the technicalities and the business.

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Then, outside the workshop, there’s the grand experience of riding in nature, perhaps with your friends. It’s about wandering with an open heart and communing in the present, finding the restoration and revelations, celebrating the solitude and exultations that come with the territory. And it’s about enjoying simple, lighthearted, lightfooted fun. When you’re flying through forests and over mountains and thought itself evaporates like dew in the morning sun, what does it matter whether your bicycle is welded or fillet brazed, how many gears it has, or which appearance it takes? And if we look at noteworthy expeditions throughout cycling’s long history, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that pretty much any bike will do.

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André knows in his heart that the technicalities of the bike ultimately don’t define the experience. He lives to ride. Yet here he is in the workshop, obsessing over design and brazing tubes that will become exotic custom bicycles. And judging by how rarely he gets out of the workshop, the business—in a perverse irony—seems to actively lead builders away from simply riding. Still, he chose this path and has his reasons and doubts and solutions. Welcome to the world of creative tensions that is Vetra Bicycles.

Dual upbringing

André’s mum was a fashion designer and his dad an electrical engineer. Aesthetics and logic shaped his upbringing, and he got handy with tools in the workshop from an early age. As a teenager, he skipped school to make dirt jumps with his friends, fusing BMX with trials into what eventually developed into street trials. It’s a tactile way of experiencing the environment. He spent a decade honing his skills of balance, air, and speed, eventually placing second at the Portuguese trials nationals and riding around the country to inspire younger kids. Before he was sponsored by Inspired Bicycles from Portugal and then MarinoBike from Peru, he did his own welding to fix the bikes he’d routinely trash.

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He chose film school over mechanics, though he slipped in a TIG welding course as an extracurricular. Since then, he’s moved around a lot, but wherever he finds himself in the world, he always embraces it by riding his bike. In 2016, he rattled across the Andes and other parts of South America on a classic touring bike with four Ortlieb panniers. In what is a typical story, he couldn’t bear returning to the dead corporate world after these life-affirming journeys. He drifted, picking up work in food delivery and 3D animation and illustration, which got him in touch with some of his closest collaborators today. Meanwhile, he never stopped thinking about bikes.

Tying it all together

Vetra Bicycles went from dream to reality as an ambitious pandemic project. In early 2020, after an abrupt return from an aborted bike tour in Colombia, he got stuck in limbo in Portugal, where he picked up airbrushing to pass the months until he could return to Berlin. The gears started turning in his mind. Back in Berlin, he started brazing in his bedroom throughout the lockdown waves with little more than a basic torch, a self-made frame jig, and a straight L-profile to check alignment. With a framebuilding course at Big Forest Frameworks in nearby Potsdam already under his belt, welding experience, and ingrained bike handling knowledge, he went to work, learning with all senses and mobilizing all resources, including cannibalizing his trusty touring bike that he took through the Andes.

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Just a few short years later, André moved into a bright workspace that he’s recently started splitting with Konstantin Drust of Drust Cycles (find Lucas’s interview with him at the bottom of this post). It’s half metalworking shop and half art studio, and it’s strewn with paint samples and physical references—pebbles, feathers, bones, plants, prints, you name it. The frame he’s working on today is held in a top-end Cobra Framebuilding jig. It’s a far cry from his bedroom brazing. An exhaust pipe drapes from the tall windows toward the room’s back wall, where he installed a painting booth with fume filters and temperature control. He’s getting really good at painting too. The striking gravel bikes and all-terrain bicycles he builds are inspired by and designed for travel and adventure.

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After the tacking, we’re on to the main act of the brazing. André melts a single layer of brass over the tacked joints, first covering the top and bottom of where the tubes meet to stabilize everything in the vertical plane, then covering the sides. After the frame has stopped glowing, he pops it back in the bottom bracket fixture to check out where it falls. Then he violates a common framebuilding adage and flips the frame in the fixture. “The heat slightly banana-fies the bottom bracket. You’ll never see the same results from both sides,” he notes. And then he tries another method and bolts the frame into another fixture by the head tube to check if the seat tube is in plane. Depending on your measurement baseline and process sequence, you get different results.

When it comes to bike frames, problems can compound in a million ways. Framebuilding is then as much about producing quality frames as about continually discovering the process and understanding the characteristics of the material and the tools the builder has at their disposal. “I hate chasing my own tail, but I have to do it sometimes,” André says. Understanding your process is key to—eventually—free up capacity for creativity. As André explains, it’s hard to speak your creative language when you’re stuck on flat-mount bosses and endless email chains.

Here’s where being around another framebuilder is really valuable. Between André and Konstantin, there’s a free flow of knowledge and tools. And sometimes it’s just good to get grounded in the fact that everybody screws up once in a while.

We get lost in the weeds of geometry talk. He imprinted on riding BMX and trials, pushing extreme bike morphologies to the hard edge of the envelope, where a bike’s characteristics are accentuated and sensed unthinkingly. His body twists and turns, and he’s got his arms out holding invisible handlebars as he explains the interplay of frame angles and tube lengths; for him it’s a bodily understanding. Gravel bikes and ATBs are positively pedestrian in comparison, so it’s mostly a matter of dialing it down.

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Then he leads us back out. In the end, geometry is just notable points in space, creative constraints, the limits of his canvas. He thinks about it a lot, but there’s always more going on. “In the bigger picture, it shouldn’t restrict you from going out there and having fun,” he asserts. When it comes to connecting with people and the way you look at the environment, the bike doesn’t really matter. The next thing I know, we’re soaring in the Andes as he relates an episode from his travels as if it happened yesterday.

Inspiration

Vetra channels themes and motifs from nature, often geological elements and weather events, and the bikes have names like Rhynolite and Melt. Clouds and ground textures swirl around the tubes, and fossils and environmental symbologies surprise when you get up close. Striking paint, dynamic graphics, and wild typography all play a part of the whole. On his last customer’s frame, they took the proposed brilliant emerald green coat to a slightly muted shade of a lake creature. André sees the bike as a bridge that is inspired by and should fit back into the places and landscapes where it will be ridden.

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I guess you’d be hard-pressed to find a framebuilder who doesn’t draw inspiration from riding, but for Andŕe, it’s his life force. Mementos from trips to Colombia, Peru, and Morocco line the shelves of the workshop. It’s tougher now to make time for such generative trips with his tools tethering him to the workshop. “It’s a bummer that I’m not so free as I used to be,” he says. He gets creative finding dirt detours and curbs to jump off on his commutes through Berlin and escapes the city as part of a tight crew consisting of his partner Rachel (@chicanebike) and their close friends—all experienced graphic artists, illustrators, designers, and bag makers. For the crew’s recent Morocco trip, André built himself the experimental Stuntpacker, and his description provides insight into how he thinks about the bikes he builds:

“The viper has two fangs and two distinct temperaments. In essence, it’s half BMX ATB, half bikepacking enduro. It’s usually seen eating rough, long trails, hopping over tree logs cutting its path, or climbing the occasional ping-pong table at the city park.”

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Process focus

To design the bridge, André takes the customer’s references and then plays creative ping-pong with his long-time friend and graphic designer Christophe Synak (@el_papi_kriko). Thus, each design is a deep collaboration with the customer, Christophe, the materials, nature, his own experiences, collective memory going back to time immemorial, and the present moment. Notably, André doesn’t use the tired term “collaboration” once in our conversation. It’s simply the rich air he breathes. Even while I was writing the piece, he’d be sending me videos, music, and animations that he keeps coming back to as inspiration.

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His work, of course, is also heavily inspired by the past, but there’s no nostalgia. He flips through a reference book of historical bicycle designs and points at an illustration of a minimal rear rack from 1957. “Oh, look who it is!” he exclaims with a grin. It looks a lot like one of his recent fabrications. Everything has already been done before; it’s a matter of recombining and reformulating in the present in an effort to reimagine the future.

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Getting into the heart of his process, he references another eerie episode from his travels in the Andes, where he found himself in a transitional state where information cues came in from every interaction, social and natural, and his mind stayed in this space of not knowing, unsettling, of passage, looking for understanding but not reaching it. “I feel that state, as in rediscovering life, really went into the process of creating bikes for people and the shapeshifting factor of graphical elements of Vetra,” he explains.

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And indeed, the organic shapes and patterns shift like a chameleon, changing with every frame, sometimes even on the same frame. Sometimes it feels pointy like shards of obsidian, sometimes fluid like trout. Scattered throughout the workshop, I found over a dozen variations of the Vetra wordmark alone—the consistency is in the constant evolution.

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In liminal space

I can’t say Vetra graphics always resonate with me—I might not grasp at times all those particular references, experiences, and sensibilities—but I sense their raw energy and cohesiveness. The search for its source takes a turn from engineering and craft and further into the wondrous land of speculative design and myth. I’m pretty new here, but André’s intimately familiar with the features and flows of the terrain. He skips up a trail I don’t see, waves from the top of the peak, then balances across a gravity-defying stone bridge to the next, beckoning me further. The notebook I brought with me remains blank as I struggle just to keep up with him.

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He explains how he’s made himself at home in the liminal space, that state of not knowing he felt in the Andes. “The longer you can stay in the state of uncertainty, the better. In that state of uncertainty, you’re sensitive, vulnerable, and can move freely. Once you’ve decided, the space collapses. The trick is keeping it open as long as possible.” It’s getting going, getting lost, turning around, chasing your own tail, sitting confused, look at this, making another move, is this right, this is right—maybe, yes, for now. It’s a process, a liberation.

By lingering in limbo, not jumping to early conclusions, he harnesses all the energy and creative impulses that come from everywhere, predictably at random, and brings them all to bear on the current project. What comes out into the world is a thing as wild and dynamic as life itself, a force of nature.

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This is all a bit abstract, perhaps. We come back down to earth. About the goal of his process, André concludes: “Overall, it should be a bike that you can relate to, that fits you and the places it will be ridden. When you see it on a corner, I want you to be like, ‘Damn, I wanna ride that.’”

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Explorative perfection

André’s practice represents an alternative view of perfection. It’s gentler and more explorative than the solo technical narrative. In his world, creative output cannot be directly controlled. The rational parts, sure—how long the tubes should be, where they meet, how straight everything is, and all that. But the design and especially the paint is him applying his intention to the object and evaluating what comes out, moment to moment. Trying to rework the final result is antithetical to his approach. That doesn’t mean he’s happy with good enough. Instead, it’s the process—vision, intention, and the honed craft skills to bring them to life—that makes it good. It’s also an aspirational approach to life in general.

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Presentation and business

Presentation and communication—how you communicate about what you’re doing—matters a lot. Online and in person, he builds a base of understanding and connection, and thus clients trust his unique experience and process. “I’m really lucky to have great clients who understand what I’m doing and appreciate it,” André says. Incidentally, I count a number of bikes for local artists and DJs among his recent projects.

The problem, from the business perspective, is that his process is an iterative, non-linear one fraught with side-quests that burn nerves, time, and money. And as a professional framebuilder—he chuckles when I call him that—he can’t ignore such realities. The economics of custom framebuilding are marginal at best. Cheap mass-produced frames skew customer price expectations, while Vetra completes are priced according to the highly detailed design work that goes into them. And yet he can’t get out of the workshop. “I just can’t build bikes fast enough! They take time,” he explains. What’s the point of it all if you can’t even get out to ride your bike?

So full custom work is a sure path to burning out and probably going belly up as a business. Brazing the metal frame is relatively speedy, but it’s the communication and iterations over iterations to generate the concept and design that can’t be easily accelerated. Konstantin, on the other side of the room, like many custom frame builders, shares the struggles. That’s why the two of them are now joining forces with their new joint brand, Akinn, the rising star on the Berlin framebuilding sky. Together, the dynamic duo plans to manufacture batches of customized bicycles, starting with the Subsun gravel bike, with ATBs/MTBs to come. More on this very soon.

For the love of pushing framebuilding boundaries and the joy of collaborating on functional art, Vetra (and Drust) will continue. And coming back to the two domains, André wants Vetra to eventually be more than just bicycles. He dreams of creating zines, videos, organizing trips, and doing anything else that transmits the wild and sensitive approach to life he’s absorbed. Vetra can be the bridge.

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Just ride your bike

If none of this talk of inspiration and process resonates, that’s fine and normal. André’s continually working on developing his language, and what might touch some might not touch others—the subjectivity of art is part of the fun. His work is still eminently functional: “If I fail at translating intention and meaning, and the message doesn’t arrive, who cares? It’s still a bike. Bikes are sweet, they take you places!”

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Leaving the workshop, I felt like I’d been on a small bike tour within four walls. Speaking with André warped time and space, and together we went through innumerable distinct episodes, explored new terrain, got stuck with mechanicals, and broadened our perspectives. I’m exhausted in a good way. Riding home through Berlin, I don’t want to sit down and spec out a custom bike, I just want to keep going and ride out into nature.

Further Reading

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