This article was produced in collaboration with Standert and featured in Rouleur issue 137.
The story of Berlin in the Cold War era is almost too familiar. There’s JFK’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech of 1963, then the years of cruel repression by the Stasi and then the unforgettable scenes in 1989 when the world watched East and West Berlin come together and collectively smash the Wall into millions of brightly painted concrete fragments. But what of Berlin in the 21st century? It is the next chapter that is still being written, of a reset Berlin that is once again becoming rather than being, a city that is younger, edgier, more creative and more exciting than its fellow European capitals. It is being written from many angles by often unexpected authors – and one of those is a bike brand called Standert.
In 2025 Standert is one of cycling’s – and perhaps Berlin’s – most intriguing success stories, uniquely combining an authentic street style that has its roots in fixed-gear messenger culture with competitive UCI road racing, via its Team Standert Brandenburg development setup. And perhaps most radical of all, Standert makes only metal bikes. There’s sometimes a Rapha comparison, this time, saving cycling not from garish, unflattering Lycra but from cookie-cutter carbon bikes that all look and ride the same.
The brand’s own Berlin story begins in 2012, when industrial design student and bike messenger Max von Senger and his partner Anna opened a bike shop/cycling cafe on Invalidenstrasse in the Mitte district of the former East Berlin. “After the wall came down, Berlin was this place of endless opportunity, entrepreneurship on a smaller scale everywhere,” remembers Von Senger. “Back then it was like, ‘We’ll open a club in this abandoned building,’ or ‘We’ll open a bike shop here in this central location.’”
Von Senger had been riding an old fixed-gear road frame that he’d bought from a flea market and converted. “I just loved the aesthetics of the steel tubing – and also as a university design project, I wanted to try to create my own frame. So when we opened the cafe we had this batch of really simple steel track frames. We were put in touch with a Dutch guy who had just set up his own shop. He was willing to just do 50 frames as a first batch – single-speed with brake drillings and track ends. We had the cafe/ shop, already had our own bikes with the name, so we needed a logo. Anna had an old friend from Berlin, Johannes Schroth, and she said, ‘He’s an amazing graphic designer; he can do the logo.’ So we did the logo together, he did the graphics and we opened the doors.”
The name Standert, Von Senger explains, “was somehow one of those words that has a time in the light and then it goes again. We always used to say standert, standert to everything. Are you going for a drink later? Standert. Like, ‘It’s standard, it goes without saying.’ I thought it was also a good name because we were going to create this new standard of what cycling should be like, and at the same time it shouldn’t be anything too special. I didn’t have a plan at that time to make it a bike company with all these different models, we were just going to have this one frame – that was the new standard.”
There was one more ingredient: the original flyer for the opening of the ‘Standert Super Store’ on July 21, 2012 has the name, the bicycle logo but also ‘Super Pops’. Von Senger explains: “Shortly before the shop I went to Brazil to visit one of my sisters who was doing an internship in Brasilia, the capital. Everywhere you get these extremely good ice pops, freshly made out of fresh fruit. I thought, ah, I’ll bring that back to Germany and revolutionise ice cream! Youthful hubris I guess. So we bought just this little popsicle machine. We did it for a while but it wasn’t feasible to keep it going…”
Even though the Super Pops didn’t hit the spot, the rest of the Standert shop was 100 per cent to the taste of the Berlin scene. There was weekly alleycat racing using S-Bahn stations out in the Berlin burbs as checkpoints and, says Von Senger, the big leather couch in the shop, on which riders would collapse and recover, became emblematic. The first aluminium Kreissäge RS race bike was launched in 2016 and Standert moved to a bigger, brand new shop in Friedrichstrasse, just south of Checkpoint Charlie, in 2019, while the offices, assembly area, workshop and warehouse have been in a 2,000-square-metre unit in the Moabit district since 2022. The company now has 35 employees, some of whom are sitting at the table in the kitchen area, looking on while Von Senger, in a send-up of a business presentation, is illustrating his history of Standert by pointing to flyers, postcards and notes from the company’s past that are now pinned to a cork-tiled section of wall for posterity. Also pinned randomly across the board are Standert’s company values. There are 11 of them because, says Von Senger, they’re fans of Spinal Tap. “Last year we did a workshop with the whole team at my mother’s farm in Brandenburg in the countryside. The growth in the company had been so rapid in the last three or four years that we felt like we were at the point where a lot of people get told there’s this Standert vibe but they don’t really know what we’re talking about. So we felt it was important to put it into words and down on paper even though there was a risk of killing a little bit of the magic.” As you’d expect, the values are genuine sounding but there’s a tongue-in-cheek feel about them. Especially when you get to number 10: geil bleiben [stay cool]. “It’s sort of an inside joke,” explains Von Senger. Geil is a slang word for cool that can also mean horny.
We finish our coffee and head into the warehouse, where all Standert frames arrive from their manufacturers painted and ready for assembly to be built up and shipped to their customers. It’s an unremarkable warehouse with boxes on shelves and so on, except there are bikes from Standert’s short but packed history hung on the walls, including one of the three prototypes before the first batch of 50 which was Von Senger’s own daily ride, and a silver lo-pro pursuit bike with an aggressively sloping top tube and fearsomely tight clearances. “This is an old GDR track bike from the collection of [Standert head of product] Maxe Faschina’s uncle,” says Von Senger. “He has a huge collection of Textima bikes and this one was raced in 1987 in Vienna at the Track World Championships.”
In one of the meeting rooms lies the storied leather couch from the original shop, complete with vintage post-alley-cat stains. The Standert staff spontaneously pile onto it while René the photographer shoots.
Then we meet Johannes Schroth, the designer of the logo and of the Standert Lucky Cat – key figures behind the scenes both he and the feline mascot which appears on each Standert frame in a different guise, brandishing a circular saw or chainsaw as the model requires. Schroth has only officially joined Standert this year, 13 years after creating the original artwork to help them launch. “Finally, you’re home in the harbour,” laughs Von Senger. Schroth is a musician who grew up with the Berlin skate and hiphop scene and until joining Standert was designing DJ equipment, synths and drum machines. He is smiling, gentle and articulate, a Gen Xer who is almost old enough to be described as twinkly but not quite yet. “On paper I am the creative director,” he says, “but like everyone else I’m doing other things too.” Schroth created the soundtrack for Standert’s recent Italian Job video in which they visit Dedacciai, the makers of the Kreissäge RS. “I connect my previous life – I made all the music on the equipment I designed in my previous job. But I am the least sporty guy here… next year I will look decent in Spandex I hope.” Von Senger objects to this: “There’s no body shaming going on here,” and they laugh easily. Schroth continues: “It’s cool to be with this entire team. There is the idea of looking back into heritage and looking forward in technology. It’s a kind of recipe that is not calculated – it is authentic expression.”
We begin to move out of the office areas and from the specific to the general. You started out in Berlin subculture, now you have a racing team and there’s nothing more conservative than UCI racing. Where is Standert now, in 2025? Are you still subculture? “I think subculture would not say that we’re subculture,” says Faschina. “It’s not for us to decide.” Von Senger sees it as conservative cycling imitating Standert: “Sometimes I feel it’s the opposite way round. Mainstream cycling has changed – it’s not us who changed. Mainstream cycling took our approach.”
Faschina adds: “If I look at marketing or social media content production in mainstream cycling, they take a lot from brands like us and from our scene where we started. There are already people copying, not copying the brand, but copying the branding. But it’s okay. It shows you that cycling has turned into something cool now. Why should we complain to have changed it, to have been a small part of the change? I always hated the gatekeepers who were like, ‘Oh yeah, we are cool but nobody else can be cool.’”
I’m also keen to find out more about sustainability. Standert’s trademark metal frames are of course easily recyclable – why do they not make more of that? Von Senger explains: “When we started we made metal bikes because of my personal affection for the look and feel of them. To be entirely honest I didn’t spend a single moment thinking about how steel is more sustainable than carbon. But still it is. It doesn’t end up in landfill; it is recyclable. But there’s a crack in this logic since we have carbon forks and wheels and we use the material… But every little helps. At least the product that we make can have that additional feature of being recyclable and being made of recycled material. When we started with the Kreissäge, I thought I had this great idea phoning Dedacciai and saying guys, should we start a project together looking into recycled aluminium for bike tubing? Stefano says, ‘Yeah, we can, but about 90 per cent of all aluminium is recycled anyway.’”
He reveals that Standert is currently working on a project with a company in California to create bicycle tubing out of 100 per cent post consumer recycled aluminium. “Basically Coke cans,” he says. “They’re still in the process of developing the material but I think we can build a prototype bike this year. So it is important to us, it’s part of the metal story but I don’t want to be more Catholic than the Pope about it. We’ll play it big if we get this prototype done.” Faschina adds: “But it’s natural for us anyway. We have one company car from 2011 – it’s a beat-up VW bus with stickers on it from the original cafe. The interior in the office is recycled from our old shop – the couch, all the old Fensterbänke [window displays]. We consume very little for a company.”
And finally, earlier Von Senger had told me about how the first openly transgender cyclist to circumnavigate the globe – Robbie Danger – did it on a Standert Burgermeister. Is the brand actively promoting inclusivity? “It’s an organic part of what we are,” says Von Senger. “It’s who we are. It’s not like, let’s have a strategy meeting about how to push inclusivity in cycling because it’s a hot topic. We didn’t know about Robbie Danger until they were under way. They wrote an email because they had crashed the bike and the fork had broken. They just bought the bike online. We would have sponsored them if we’d known. But then they were in Berlin, we’d had this communication about the fork and they came to see us at the Hub. Faschina continues: “Everything has to be authentic. Ten years ago when we started the Feierabend Runde we wanted to push women’s riding. We had kind of an ambassador who was also supposed to be a ride leader and it didn’t really work out. We tried, but then we realised it had to grow naturally. It doesn’t work if dudes tell them, or tell anybody, oh you need to do this. But now at the rides on Wednesday there are so many women and you see it exploding in Berlin. I think we created visibility with the women’s team we had, but it only started working from within, once people from inside the company, women employees, led the rides, then it took off.”
If this young company is the new standard bearer for a stylish, sustainable, inclusive type of cycling that also goes racing, then I’m going to join JFK in declaring: Ich bin ein Berliner.
The way we roll: The Standert feierabend runde
The Feierabend Runde is a Thursday evening group ride that starts from the Standert Hub on Friedrichstrasse just down from Checkpoint Charlie. There’s an extended 100-kilometre version, of which there are six in midsummer, a sort of informal race series with points awarded for everything from participation to winning intermediate sprints to being the most combative rider. It is the direct descendant of the original alleycat races that Max von Senger organised (in the loosest sense of the word) back in the early days of the Standert cafe. But now, you don’t steer a brakeless fixie to a designated S-Bahn station and back. You need to hold your place in an elite bunch that might contain local pros including Team Standert Brandenburg riders and is reckoned by head of product Maxe Faschina to be the fastest group ride in northern Germany. It might sound daunting, but it’s all done with Standert’s humorous, cartoonish style. It’s just zany, high-speed fun and is all about friendship and cooperation in the end – even if you get dropped.
I’m going to ride the new Standert Kreissäge RS, the latest scandium aluminium race bike, built with SRAM Red as used by Team Standert Brandenburg. The first production batch had only arrived from Italy the day before, so I’m riding a prototype in Faschina’s size 54, a size smaller than I’d normally ride. There’s a lot of seat-post out and it looks very aggressive. Fast standing still is an understatement.
As we head north out of the capital, the group of 30 or so stays together, repeatedly sprinting away from traffic lights to screech to a halt at the next red. With a grüne Welle failing to materialise, we’re swerving onto pavements, bunny hopping over tramlines and seeming to break every rule in the Highway Code. The Kreissäge feels agile, nimble, as if it was built for this. “Did you enjoy the messenger vibe on the way out?” Faschina asks me later. Seeing my guilty expression, he explains that what looks like a path within a path on the pavement used to be a bike lane in former East Berlin. Even though now they are not wide enough to be official bike lanes in modern Berlin and there’s no signage, drivers still expect cyclists to use them and pedestrians are not surprised or outraged when they do.
One final red light at the city limit splits the group. Faschina is in the front half and I’m in the rear half that stops, despite his urgent advice in my ear as he passed me in the paceline about five minutes before: “No gaps, racing mentality now.”
As my group clears the city and heads into the countryside I’m aware of gorgeous golden evening sunlight flickering on the edges of the dense forest either side of the road, but mostly I’m following the wheel in front as closely as possible, trying to slow down my pedalling and recover in time for my turn in the wind. The front group waits at a roundabout. As we meet them, we breathlessly congratulate each other for working together so neatly. But then, when we all set off together again, it’s back to sprinting in top gear just to stay on. “Sometimes we can average 48kph,” explains Faschina afterwards. “It’s faster than a road race because there are no tactics – everybody is going as fast as they can.”
At around 50 kilometres the last man in the line comes through and I can’t get onto his wheel. The peloton crawls away from me until it’s a tiny, multicoloured speck in the distance. I start scrolling through my Garmin, wonder where the nearest shop is, check how much charge I have on my phone… then I look up and see Faschina and Joel Potter, Standert’s Australian commercial growth manager, coming back down the road towards me. Faschina gives me a wheel all the way back to Berlin. He’s more compact than the archetypal German powerhouse like 2000s pros Michael Rich and Uwe Peschel, but there’s no shortage of watts and he’s just back from training in Mallorca with Tudor pro Hannes Wilksch. “I have Mallorca legs!” he calls back gleefully as I plead with him to ease up a bit. “Do you need a gel?”
It’s twilight as we enter Berlin again and we’ve picked up Tom Burton, Standert’s brand activation manager, on his silver Triebwerk. We flash past the floodlit cathedral and the neoclassical museums taking photos of each other until we meet the wide boulevard that is Unter den Linden, which leads directly to the Brandenburg Gate. Before we get there we draft the traffic round to the left and spin down Friedrichstrasse back to the Standert Hub for pizza. Obviously I haven’t won anything and there’s no lanterne rouge prize, but to have done a Feierabend Runde with Standert is reward enough. “Some people train just for this,” says Faschina. I believe him.
