Handsling Bikes offer something quite unusual in the gravel riding world – high-quality, customisable gravel bikes at a reasonable price. We chatted with company founder and owner Simon Whiten to get some insight into what makes them tick.

You can imagine the ‘creatives’ at some vastly expensive corporate branding company sitting around a boardroom table, desperately brainstorming ideas for company names. Somehow the name has to encapsulate everything you need to know about the company ethos, but also it has to doff its cap to the world of cycle racing and give a subtle hint that the company really understands cycling heritage. Not easy to do. But that’s why they charge such astronomical fees, isn’t it? In actual fact though, it wasn’t a name dreamt about by a marketing company. The name Handsling and the company that goes with it was initially created by its owner and founder, Simon Whiten. 

“The Handsling is a feature of some of track cycling's most spectacular events - the Madison and the Six Day races - where riders help their teammates back into the race by grabbing their hand and literally slinging them into the fray. This handsling provides a 'helping hand up to speed' for your team-mate in these events."

“I started working in cycling media in about 2005 and I worked for some of the bigger publishers." Simon told us recently when we chatted with him. "Then in about 2010, I started Handsling Media Limited. First of all, it was just me on my own and my job was selling sponsorships for cycling events like the London Nocturne and the Dragon Ride.”  So how did Handsling go from being a media and publishing company to being a bike brand producing high-quality carbon fibre bikes, was our obvious follow-up question.

“After a couple of years, I got together with an old editor mate of mine and we launched a couple of cycling websites and about the same time we decided to sponsor our own cycling team. We got sponsorship from a Taiwanese frame manufacturing company called Trigon, who at the time were the company that made Pinarello frames. They were making good quality frames and we had sponsorship for about three years, but when that sponsorship ran out, I ended up with a sort of five-man elite team, but with no frame sponsor. I tried to get sponsorship from other companies like Canyon and Specialized, but no one was interested in sponsoring us, basically because we were too old! So, I said right, I'm going to go and make my own frames!”

“To cut a long story short, I went out to Shenzhen in China and based on the advice of a pro-racer that I knew and another contact, I found a frame company that we started to work with. We worked with them for three or four years using open-mold frames and we included a couple of cyclocross frames in our orders with them. This was really before gravel riding had taken off. Then around 2017, I moved from London down to Hampshire, where we’re based now and because I had a bit of spare time, I designed my first frame. Initially, we were doing mold adaptations to open-mold frames, but then we got some extra investment in the business and I was able to start to do a lot more. It means that now we use unique, closed molds, so our frame designs are unique to us.”

Image courtesy of Handsling

Handsling started off building road and track frames, so we asked Simon what led the progression from doing that into building CX (and later, gravel) frames? “I raced a bit of CX back in the day, but it wasn't really my idea to build CX frames - it was more the customers who pushed it. We had some customers who had bought one of our road bikes or one of our track bikes and they'd say, ‘you should do a cross bike!’ So, we started to do some research, to try and find a really good CX frame that we could sell. At the time we were still using cantilever brakes in CX. Eventually, we found what was a really good frame - our customers really liked it and loads bought it.”

“One of our sponsored riders then won the Southeast CX championships with that initial frame design, but we wanted to develop it a bit more. We changed the way the carbon layup was done, we fitted a new head tube and bottom bracket cluster on it and the seat stays were ‘softened’ a bit to give it better traction. We fitted a brand-new fork on it as well. We basically made enough changes to that open-mold base to make it a unique bike for Handspring and it just proved to be really popular basically.”

That led our conversation neatly onto gravel riding. We asked Simon where the inspiration came from to develop Handsling's gravel bike?  “When I was racing on the road in the 1990s, myself and one particular team-mate who used to train together would go out and we would train for three or four hours, maybe three or four times a week. And it's quite boring. So, we'd often go off-road on our skinny 23mm road tyres just to break it up a bit. And have all the inevitable punctures of course! I always consider us kind of pioneers of gravel riding and that love of gravel riding hasn't stopped for either of us. That's half the fun of having a capable bike, isn’t it? You can ride whatever surface you want, whatever takes your fancy.”

Simon continued “When you ride the CEXevo you realise how versatile it is. Some of our customers have been putting 32mm road tyres on it and using it as a road bike. Other people have been racing it on 33mm CX tyres and then you’ve finally got people like me who ride it on 40 or 45mm gravel tyres and all saying, ‘Look, this is brilliant. I love this frame’.”

We moved on next to discussing how Handsling’s design process worked. Simon told us “I'm sort of the lead on designing and producing new frames. I have a very good relationship with my engineer, who is based in Shenzhen, China. It's a bit of a difficult process at times and things take a bit longer than it probably should, so our aim long-term is to have an engineer here in the UK, who will then liaise with the factory. At the minute I send 2D sketches of what I want over to our engineer in China. He’ll then turn them into 3D drawings on a CAD system and do all the structural analysis of the frame and work on the aerodynamics of the design. Our engineer has worked with some of the biggest bike companies in the world, so he really knows what he’s doing."

“The only issue is that he’s not a racing cyclist. He’s a brilliant engineer and he has amazing knowledge of what carbon fibre can do and how you lay it up to achieve certain properties, but he’s not a cycling enthusiast. What I bring basically is that I’m an enthusiast. I know what racing cyclists want and have good ideas of what I want a frame to achieve basically. You've got to have the engineering background, but you also want the spark to make it creatively interesting, because you hope that will then appeal to your audience.”

Our conversation moved next on the slightly contentious topic of how a bike looks. “ In my view, a bike has got to look good. We spend a lot of time making sure that they work well as a unit. So the looks of it and the ergonomics of it all come together.  We're trying to get the aesthetic right, so that it looks like a good fast bike even when it's stood still. It's sort of carried over from our track frames into our new aero gravel frame which we've got coming out - the gravel frames have got to look the part. We spend a lot of time working on the details too, like those hidden mounts that I was telling you about. It’s really important to us that a frame looks right and functions properly.”

One of the USPs of buying a bike from Handsling is the fact that customers can tailor almost every part of their finished bike. “Every bike is built to order and every component is customisable" is how they put it on their website. We asked Simon why Handsling have chosen to go down this route when it would be much more cost-efficient to have fixed specification builds? 

“I thought what would happen if I was going to spend £6000 on a bike? It's a lot of money to invest nowadays, even if you do it on interest-free credit or something like that. And so I just thought what sort of experience would I want to go through? Basically, what would I want? And the first thing I'd want is I'd want maximum choice. I want to have the exact colour (including a custom-painted option), I want to specify the exact groupset, saddle, tyres and so on. It's all about customer choice. Basically, that customer gets their specific dream bike.”

Simon gave us an overview of how their customisation and delivery process works "We go the extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction, so we offer a personalised and accessible service. A good example of this is that our gravel bikes come set up tubeless straight from the box, but tubes are available on request. Each bike/frame is individually hand-packed and we reuse materials wherever possible to reduce waste. There is one assigned bike builder contactable throughout the build for each customer's build so 99% of the time riders are very familiar with our product (saddle, seatpost, wheels etc) and what they need to do once the bike is delivered to them. Before the bike is sent out, the customer is informed of the delivery and if they have any questions they can contact us and the bike builder directly for support. After delivery, the customer receives an email with further information such as the torque settings. Online support is also available"

As well as choosing the details for their build, customers can use Handsling’s online bike fit tool to ensure their finished bike fits them as well as possible. “We have a simple online bike fitting tool, where we take measurements supplied by the customer to help make sure the finished bike fits them properly” Simon told us. “Some of our local customers have come in and done this face-to-face, but most people do it online, using the measurements from an existing bike that they own. We use these measurements to recommend adjustments during the ordering process. Every bike is then custom-assembled by our own Cytech-qualified technicians.”

To finish off our interview, we asked what was in development next from Handsling for gravel riders? “At the minute gravel bike sales are around 15/20% of the business, but we see the two key bikes for the business going forward would be our A1R0evo road bike and a new gravel bike, which will be an aero-gravel bike” Simon told us. He continued “We’ve had customers already ask for it and it seems to be the way that market is going. We also sponsor a pro team in the US (which is predominantly a track and road team) but there are a couple of guys on the team who do these massively long gravel races. They asked us if we could make the new gravel frame more aero.”

"They asked us if we could make the new gravel frame more aero.”

“The aim for the new aero gravel frame is that it will have clearance for 50mm tyres, it will have a round section seatpost so that it can take a dropper post for anyone who wants to fit one and will be able to take any groupset. We’re also working on a way of having discreet mounting points on the frame and fork. That way, if you don't want to see the mounts, then you won’t. If you want to put bags on it and go bikepacking, it still works there as well. It’s a work in progress basically, but that's the aim.”

It looks like the future of gravel bikes at Handsling will be aero, adaptable and customisable - perhaps the ideal all-round bike? We will be keeping in touch with the team at Handsling and will publish any future announcements from them on the Gravel Union website.

You can find out more about Handsling here.