Open Two Days a Week: The Fixed-Gear Shop Run by Three Ad People and an Architect | 100 People With Ideas

Joe compares a bike to the bag you carry around with you — it shows the rider's ideas, personality, style, and attitude.

Last month, to promote its new C-series city cycling shoes, New Balance shot a short video ad with a bike shop called wtf*. A strangely named bike shop, and a strange collaboration.

wtf* is not a big company, just a small shop opened by four cycling enthusiasts — not one of them trained in engineering or machinery.

Three years ago, Jit, Kyan, Fareeda and Joe each saw the same film in a different place: Premium Rush, the story of Wilee, a bike messenger on a modified fixed-gear who races police cars and gangsters to deliver a mysterious package within 90 minutes. The plot was not the point. The bike in it was, and it became the starting point for the shop the four of them would open.

Jit, Fareeda and Joe are Malaysians working in advertising; Kyan is an architect from Australia. The four met at a party and became friends. After the film, all four went and built themselves a fixed-gear. What followed is the familiar sequence: they built bikes for friends as a favor, organized group rides, and then, egged on at a party, got it into their heads to open a custom fixed-gear shop. The oldest script there is, honestly.

In three years the brand has moved three times, finally settling its one and only shop inside Jiashan Market in Shanghai's Xuhui district. Two small rooms, hung and stacked with frames, tires and other parts, plus a bar selling drinks and light meals — if you hadn't come specifically to buy a bike, the place would read as a café.

Talking with Joe, one of the four co-founders, I heard the word "lifestyle" again and again. It is what they treat as wtf*'s core brand position — not a shop that simply sells bikes.

What they mean by "lifestyle" isn't only the lounge space and the food and drink inside the shop. It is mostly how they understand the bike itself, a piece of sports equipment currently popular with young people.

"We don't think a bike is only a piece of sports equipment. It's more a way of socializing." Joe compares a bike to the bag you carry around with you: it shows the rider's ideas, personality, style, and attitude. "When customers come into our shop, we never push a hard sell. We talk with them, work out their personality and their style, and then build them a bike that shows who they are." That is the wtf* way.

As a bike brand founded by ad people, wtf* has more resources and more ideas to work with when it comes to marketing. One result is a long list of cross-brand collaborations. The New Balance job at the top of this piece is one of the most recent; the shop is also in talks with Hennessy and Lane Crawford.

In three years of business there have been too many of these to count. wtf* has made a limited-edition bike with Mini Cooper, sponsored the Shanghai Pride Ride, worked with A&F and Puma, built custom bikes for the ad agency DDB, run flea markets, and even tried releasing an all-carbon wheelset and a bare-aluminum bike.

These all sound like well-known brands, and getting them to agree to work with a bike shop is where Joe, who handles marketing, has to use what he knows as an ad man.

The first collaborations went no further than a bike appearing in a brand's window display — and even that took connections. The first real cross-brand job came two years ago, an ad shoot for A&F. The head of the PR firm running A&F's campaign was someone Joe had worked with before, and the introduction came through him.

wtf* had no name recognition then, and A&F had doubts. But Joe knows advertising, so he brought the brand more than a bike — he brought marketing strategy — and the shop itself gave off a consistent attitude. The A&F deal came together. "There was even a test," Joe said, a Malaysian using the word for a school exam. "Understanding A&F well enough to build a fixed-gear that matched the brand's tone." He passed, naturally.

Most of the deals that followed came about the same way. At a bike party, Joe ran into the media agency that handles Mini Cooper; talk turned to an upcoming launch; Joe said wtf* could build a matching bike for the campaign; the agency thought that was a good idea...

Maybe because none of the four founders does this full time, they don't count short-term income and spending too closely, and care more about how interesting a partner is. Out of a love of fashion, they also try to time new releases to fashion week: last year's two-tone frame took its colors from a Harley-Davidson model year, and the previous season's release borrowed a Paul Smith palette.

wtf* no longer has to lose sleep over name recognition. Within the custom fixed-gear world it has a steady following. The Hennessy collaboration, due to start soon, came from the brand approaching Joe.

Still, Joe insists that an ad man's contacts and training are only part of it, and that the main reason the deals close is wtf* itself. "We never talk up a bike's specs. To us that's the minimum a bike has to meet. What we talk about is lifestyle — and there aren't many bike brands in China doing that." The attitude, Joe believes, makes everything else happen.

The name wtf* really stands for "World Towards Fixie." Of course, there is nothing wrong with reading it as Wednesday Thursday Friday, or Way Too Fun, Welcome to France, With True Friends, and so on. The asterisk itself means "fill in as you like" — which is how the shop works, building each customer a fixed-gear in their own style.

What we usually call a fixie is a bike with a fixed gear: the wheel and the pedals are locked together, so the pedals can never stay still while the bike coasts. It caught on first among New York bike messengers, then spread worldwide, becoming a street-culture symbol on the order of skateboarding. Every fixed-gear is built from 18 parts that can be mixed and matched, and wtf*'s job is to help you pick and assemble those 18.

Not all 18 are made in-house. "The frame is the main part of a bike and the most visible one, and the frame is the part we design and produce ourselves," Joe said.

He told me wtf* has been designing its own frames for only two years and mass-producing them for one. They have gone from a heavy round steel frame to the current diamond-shaped aluminum one, and tried a great deal with color. After going through a string of contract manufacturers, wtf* settled on a supplier that also builds frames for big brands like Giant but doesn't demand large order volumes — the standing difficulty, probably, for every small-batch custom brand. Beyond the frame, most parts are imported.

The saddle comes from Brooks in Britain, the lights from Topeak in the United States, and cranksets come in several options, made in mainland China, the United States, or Taiwan. "The fabric for this bike bag comes from the waterproof tarpaulin on the outside of trucks. Every piece is one of a kind. We just liked it, so we went and asked about working together." Joe said that deal went smoothly: the company sent someone from Switzerland to look at the shop, decided wtf* had an attitude of its own, and agreed quickly.

"Custom-built for the customer" is probably carried furthest in the 8-Series, launched at the start of this year and designed in direct response to feedback from women. "A lot of women told us the shape of a normal fixed-gear frame makes it awkward to get on and off, and that riding hunched over the whole time wears them out." Add the danger built into fixed-gear riding, and wtf* produced this model: it adds a freewheel, changes the top tube and the handlebars, and weighs less. Call it a fixed-gear if you like; it is closer to a hand-built women's city bike. A brake on the rear wheel, meanwhile, comes fitted to every bike wtf* sells.

I couldn't help asking whether that stops it being a fixed-gear at all. But Joe holds that wtf*'s purpose is "to meet every customer's custom request," not merely to be "a shop selling assembled fixed-gears." "If a customer doesn't want the brake, that's easy — take it off yourself." wtf* just won't take it off for you.

Running a shop part-time out of interest has its bad stretches too. "Almost nobody rides in winter. At the worst, we sell fewer than ten bikes a month." Joe was being careful with that figure, a little embarrassed, unwilling to give an exact number.

But the bar turns wtf* into a gathering place for cyclists even in winter. And with three of the founders in advertising, they don't just spot brand collaborations more easily (they are good at that work) — they have also talked a string of companies into holding their presentations in the wtf* shop.

"We want wtf* not to be forgotten even in winter. We want it to be a place you can drop into whether you have a reason to or not," Joe said.