Cycling is one of those activities that can become needlessly intimidating. And that’s part of the reason we don’t talk about it on Proper all that often – too much talk of internally routed hydraulic hoses, electronic shifting, and nipple chafing is enough to put most beginners off the sport for life.
Which is a shame, because at its core, riding a bicycle is one of the most enjoyable pursuits known to man. Flying down a gravel track on a twitchy old bike, successfully patching an inner tube, and riding to the pub with your mates are always going to be far superior to working on your cadence on an indoor trainer.
One cycling brand that shares our affection for the little moments, as well as the big ones, is Standert. Founded in 2012 by Max von Senger and his now-wife, the brand started as a small bike shop and café, functioning as a community hub for local riders. Over time, Max has guided Standert into a full-fledged bike brand, designing, engineering, and manufacturing his own frames while keeping a focus on simplicity, craftsmanship, and the joy of cycling.
Put simply, Standert is our type of cycling brand. So when the chance to chat with Max came up, we jumped at it. Over the course of 45 minutes, we covered everything from the origins of Standert and the role Berlin plays in their story to clothing, Max’s first bike, and his perfect Sunday ride…
Hi Max, how are you, where are you, and what exactly do you do?
Hi! Nice to meet you! I’m sitting in our Berlin office at the moment. I founded Standert in 2012 with my then girlfriend, now wife. It started out as a small bike shop, and over a lot of turbulent years, that shop and café has gradually evolved into a small bike brand.
We still run the bike shop here in Berlin as a kind of community hub, but we now also design, engineer, and manufacture our own frames under the Standert name.
When you started the shop & coffee shop, was it always your intention to start building frames, or did it just happen?
Not, really. At the time, I was studying product and industrial design at university in Berlin, and to earn some money, I was working as a bike messenger. At some point, I realised that as a designer, I wanted to focus on a product I was genuinely passionate about – and that product was bikes.
So, completely naïve, I started reading up on geometry and everything else, and eventually found a manufacturer who could produce a small batch of simple steel city frames. It all started to snowball from there, largely because I had this project going and was part of the messenger scene, surrounded by like-minded people.
Bike shops act as community hubs for messengers, and there was one famous shop everyone went to, but it was far from where I lived, so I thought: Why not create my own shop and sell my frames there? That was basically the foundation.
Around the same time, I visited London and went to a shop called Look Mum No Hands!—a bike café with a repair space that served as a community hangout. That really inspired me and added the café element to the idea.
But to answer your question: I didn’t originally set out to build a bicycle brand. I just wanted to create a bike shop and café – a place to hang out and somewhere to sell my frames. Over time, it simply evolved into what Standert is today.
Nice, so like a way to cover all bases under one roof. When did the name Standert get used for the first time? Does it mean anything?
Haha, there’s actually a bit of lore behind the name. The first time it came up was on a mountain biking trip in the Alps with some friends. I was telling them about this idea I had – to open a café and create one frame ‘to rule them all,’ which in hindsight was a pretty ambitious plan.
In that moment, I said, ‘It’s going to be called Standert,’ because the idea was for it to be something simple and essential – basically the new standard. That’s where the name first came from.
There was also a bit of an inside joke with the spelling. In Berlin slang, people would say ‘Standard’ as a way of answering something obvious, and the “ert” twist played into the german pronunciation of that.
Oh yeah? We have that in the UK as well, it’s kind of like if somebody asks ‘Are you going down the pub on Saturday?’ and you’d respond: ‘Yeah, standard’
Oh really, I never knew that. But yeah, that’s exactly the same way it is used here.
One of my big questions – and you’ve kind of already touched on it by mentioning ‘creating one frame to conquer everything’ – is how important is performance to Standert? Is it one of the key principles when you design a frame, or is there more to cycling than just going faster?
The original idea didn’t have performance threaded into it. Sure, we liked riding fast around the city, but we weren’t training for hours every day or anything like that.
Performance came into the picture pretty organically – starting with small messenger-style alleycat races, and then gradually moving into amateur racing. That’s when we shifted from making only fixed-gear city bikes to also building proper road bikes. These days, I think we strike a good balance: sometimes it’s about performance, and sometimes it isn’t.
We’ve had a race team since 2014. It began simply as a way for colleagues to go racing together, but it has grown into something much bigger, with racing at the UCI level now. At the same time, we still want to make sure cycling stays enjoyable, and it doesn’t just become constant hard training.
So yes, performance matters to us – but it’s not the ultimate goal of everything we do.
How has Berlin affected Standert, in terms of design? Do you think if you were to have founded Standert while living in the countryside it would look much different to how it is now?
Yeah, it would definitely look different – I’m quite sure of that.
Berlin has had a huge influence on the types of bikes we make. When I first got into cycling, I considered myself a mountain biker because I grew up in southern Germany. But Standert was founded while I was living in Berlin, which is completely flat, so we never started making mountain bikes.
In the beginning we designed bikes for a very small circle of Berliners, and those bikes were naturally built for flat terrain. That’s probably the most obvious way Berlin has shaped Standert.
Beyond that, I think a bit of Berlin’s roughness – and maybe some general German-ness – finds its way into our design choices. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where, but it’s definitely there.
Obviously, you guys produce apparel as well as bikes, is clothing something you’ve always been interested in as well as cycling?
That’s a funny question. When I was at university, I was surrounded by fashion designers, but I’d be lying if I said I ever had an interest in fashion design myself. Still, it was fascinating to get a firsthand look into that world.
Someone asked me not long ago whether I consider myself a fashionable person, and I said, ‘Not really.’ But apparel at Standert is simply another way for us to be creative. We’re not trying to turn Standert into a fashion brand, but we’re very interested in exploring apparel as a creative outlet and seeing how far the brand can go.
What do you wear when you’re not cycling, and what do you wear when you are cycling?
I think my style off the bike comes from a mix of my conservative upbringing, hip-hop and skate culture that influenced my youth, and a bit of outdoor gear thrown in. A pretty standard outfit for me would be a hoodie, a Barbour jacket, and some Salomon runners.
On the bike, I wear a lot of MAAP – they’re a brand we collaborate with closely, and their designs really resonate with my taste. I also regularly wear an Australian brand called Attacker Cycling, which makes some really bold, unconventional designs. I think the laid-back Australian approach to cycling gear really speaks to me.
Flipping back to some slightly more serious questions – Standert are well known for manufacturing in Europe, how important is that to the company?
Yeah, it’s been a really integral part of our work. We’ve been collaborating with Italian manufacturers for almost 11 years now, and during COVID times, we fully realised how valuable that partnership is – not only for the flexibility it gives us, but also for reducing our dependence on the global supply chain.
Obviously sustainability plays a role. For example, the steel tubing for our bikes is made in Italy. We used to ship it all the way to Taiwan to be welded into frames and then ship those frames back to us. Now we produce them in the Czech Republic instead, which is a big improvement.
I wouldn’t say that manufacturing in Asia is bad from a quality standpoint – Taiwan has been producing high-quality frames for 30 years. But there are other factors, like flexibility and being able to maintain a personal relationship with the people who build our bikes. As a small company, we can’t just send someone to Asia every month.
So for us, manufacturing closer to home definitely makes turnaround times quicker.
Yeah, it must be nice to be able to see things first-hand without flying halfway around the world.
Exactly. It helps us to build a personal connection to the manufacturer. They’re doing work with their hands for us, and that human connection matters.
Yeah, I guess you don’t want them building frames with hatred. You mentioned COVID earlier. How did that affect the company?
The last years since COVID have been a rollercoaster for the entire bike industry – and for us. We were completely overrun by the sudden surge in demand, and we weren’t ready. The company grew very fast – too fast, in hindsight. We had to catch up on everything: the bigger team, the supply chain, all of it.
People say, ‘COVID must have been amazing for you,’ and yes, everything we had sold out instantly. But we weren’t set up for the incredibly long planning horizons that suddenly appeared. Lead times exploded from months to almost years. It became extremely difficult to get more stock.
So we were basically sold out the entire time. That sounds great, but it also meant we couldn’t fully benefit from the surge. And afterwards came a huge crash. The industry was massively overstocked, discount battles everywhere – we couldn’t join those because we don’t have the financial cushion to sell at negative margins.
Then, on top of that, Germany went into an economic recession for years. So yeah, we’ve been challenged. But we’ve fought through it.
If you’ve weathered this, you should be in good stead for whatever comes next. You’ve mentioned community a few times, how important is community to Standert, and what do you do to cultivate it?
Community is such a buzzword now – every brand wants one. But our community isn’t huge; it’s just really tight and really consistent.
We’ve been running our weekly ride for almost 13 years. It started as us just riding around the city, then it became small training rides, and now it’s a mega fast, high-intensity ride every Thursday. We didn’t create ‘community’ as a strategy – we simply participated in it and helped build it over time. The whole scene in Berlin has grown a lot, and we’ve always been part of it.
We also work with ambassadors – people who have become friends of the brand over time – who represent Standert in their local scenes. For example, in Cape Town, we have a program called Community Connect, where we provide a few bikes to local riders who might not be able to afford their own. A local guy came to us with the idea, and he builds and maintains the bikes. So that’s how we try to bring Standert to other places – naturally, through people who already contribute to their local communities.
If you had to give someone who has never cycled before the most fun experience possible, what Standert bike would you put them on, and where?
I wouldn’t put a total beginner on a super-fast road bike on an alpine pass and send them bombing downhill, although that’s probably the most fun you can have on a bike, but maybe not as a beginner.
I’d take someone on a bike-packing trip. Our Erdgeschoss – a stainless-steel adventure bike – would be ideal. Load it with a tent, sleeping bag, and supplies, and just head out.
As to where – last year I spent an amazing week in Scotland riding and wild camping. Wild camping is allowed everywhere there so it’s perfect for bikepacking.
Did you manage to avoid the midges?
Haha, we were attacked badly by midges on the first morning, it was like a horror movie, but once we got moving, the wind kept them away. We rode from Edinburgh to the Isle of Skye and had seven days of sunshine, which is probably not typical for Scotland. But a trip like that will make almost anyone fall in love with cycling.
When did you first fall in love with cycling? Have you been riding a bike since you came out of the womb?
I’ve always ridden a bike, but I really fell in love with it around age 14 when I lived in the Black Forest. I tried a friend’s mountain bike and was instantly hooked. For years, I spent holidays crossing the Alps on a mountain bike. Then, when I moved back to Berlin later, I discovered road cycling.
Are there brands – cycling or otherwise – that inspire Standert’s approach to design?
Yeah. A common thread in the design I like is what I guess you could call retrofuturism. Recently I saw a Hyundai concept car that was like an old limousine but electric, and had like a Blade Runner vibe, and that was cool. I also love the design of Teenage Engineering products.
German design also influences us – a bit like the early Apple/iPod aesthetic, which was itself influenced by German industrial design. I wouldn’t say they’d call it retrofuturistic, but it aligns with what I like.
Do you remember the first notable bicycle you ever had?
Yes. In Germany, when you’re about eight, there’s a Catholic initiation ceremony, and I got given a mountain bike from a brand called Ghost as a present. It was a huge deal. Then it got stolen a couple of weeks later. I was devastated.
What’s your ideal Sunday ride?
A long ride – maybe 120 kilometres – with a nice coffee stop, maybe a swim in a lake if it’s summer, then home for a huge meal and crashing on the couch. Except now I’ve got kids, the ‘crashing on the couch’ part doesn’t really happen anymore.
Would Standert be interested in doing more clothing collaborations, maybe even outside of cycling?
Absolutely. We actually have a few collaborations in the pipeline with non-cycling brands – artists, designers, a skate brand. The idea is to co-create small capsule collections and maybe a limited-edition bike for each.
My dream collaboration would probably be with Adidas. They’re one of my favourite brands and we share the German background.
But to be honest, I’d love to do more design work outside of bicycles in general.
Any Berlin recommendations? Bike shops, coffee shops, restaurants?
My sister’s bookshop – it’s a bookshop and café, called She Said. And my favourite restaurant that I’ve been going to for years and years with my friends is called Les Valseuses, a down-to-earth French place with amazing quality – steak frites, moules frites, that kind of thing.
And finally, any plans you can hint at for 2026 and beyond?
On the non-bike side, we want to expand a bit. On the bike side, we’re working toward releasing an exciting next-generation aluminium bike in 2027. We’re experimenting with additive manufacturing, bonding, and new materials.
So yeah, keep a look out for that.
Sweet, I think we’ve just about covered everything. Thanks for giving such great answers, Max.
Honestly, I never know what I’ve said in these interviews – I just hope some of it made sense haha.
Find out what Standert are doing here.
