Before we set out to design our own hardware, we extensively tested existing products in the market and came up with our wish list for what we want to see in our own bike. First off, of course, was the tablestakes, high performance: we needed to have a smooth magnetic resistance, sturdy flywheel, extremely comfortable handlebars, sports seat that didn’t want us to jump off in the first minute (and some bikes we tried certaintly had that!). Some of our favorite studio bikes are Stages SC3 and Schwinn Carbon Blue, and we wanted to emulate them in our product. Solving for high quality parts was easy in some cases like pedals and resistance belt, where after extensive testing we picked components from existing market-leading vendor. For others, like handlebar, we built a fully proprietary custom part, and the difference is palpable – a simple metal tube on other bikes does the job of course, but the feeling of textured resin-coated handlebar perfectly molded under your fingers… Really takes the class experience up a notch.

The second part was design. Let’s face it, most of us don’t put bikes in the middle of our living rooms. However wherever we find space for them – bedroom, garage, closet – we wanted a bike that would call to us like a beautiful sports car, through it looks whispering to us a promise of an amazing workout, that would us just more likely to ride it. With that in mind, wiring a few metal tubes together, like vast majority of bikes in the market, just wasn’t going to cut it. After more than a dozen design concepts we developed a custom shape completely unique to Stryde, which became the vision for what we actually needed to build. We might create a separate blog entry for all the manufacturing challenges we had to solve to build it – and there were in spades – but we tackled them all.

The third part is the interactive experience. Front and center are the classes from our amazing content partners – and we needed to include an immersive 21.5” screen to match. But we also wanted to give you a choice, because we felt that existing bikes in the market are lacking that choice. A choice to ride while watching some Netflix or Youtube if you’d like to, or browse the internet, or even (gasp!), watch some content from other fitness companies. Because ultimately it’s your bike – and you should ride it like you want to.