Interview: Bigfish folding bike CEO Sandi Cesko

Thank you for your interest in the Big Fish. Well, actually, I found the first information about Big Fish in a newspaper, a small article about the inventor. Then it was intriguing enough, I called him, we met, and I was really very fascinated by the concept of the bike, by the simplicity, and he had at that time his first prototype, and I was impressed also by the quality of biking, especially by its ergonomics. So, but it took us about seven years to develop what you see today here, Big Fish, because as they say, the devil is in the details, and our objective is to make it simple and accessible, to be very simple for folding and assembling, and we want to make it really accessible to everyone in these terms and in terms of the price.

Well, actually, three things that this bike I hope will accomplish that other folding bikes didn't. One is that the ergonomics of this bike are exactly the same as the normal city bike, let's say. So the position, handlebars, the seat, the distance between two axes, everything is completely the same, exactly 100% the same. The second thing is really simplicity of folding and assembling the bike, so every kid can do it, or let's say any grandmother can do it, and I tested this, believe me, in my own family. And the third thing that was let's say my objective to achieve, and we are getting very close to this objective, is to bring this bike with the price down to be comparable with equivalent quality of the city bike. So that will be in the price range, let's say maybe 10, 20% only, not two, three times more, but only 20, 30% more expensive than a normal bike with similar quality and similar components or the same components. It's our objective to make it accessible to everyone.

So we don't say that this is a typical folding bike, because folding bikes are often associated with being complicated to fold and unfold and being expensive. These are the two things, and not a lot of them can really come close to the ergonomics of a normal bike. Okay, so we want to make here a small revolution and to really make a bike available now to everyone, because a bike is a fantastic product for commuting, but this problem of what to do when you stop using it.

Well, we have some limited experience now with some customers, but I can talk about my family and some of my friends who bought it and I got some feedback. So my kids love it because it's something unique, something special, something that also they can do. So I was surprised when my daughter, when she was 7 or 8, she was really biking, and our biking was more popular than her bike. I was very surprised when I saw my mother, after more than 10, 20 years not being on a bike, and she said, I said, what are you doing on the bike? And she said to me, look, I'm not afraid of this bike because it has more wheels, you know, I feel more comfortable on this bike than other bikes. When we talk with existing users of folding bikes, they're excited about really the quality and simplicity of assembling and also by the volume that this bike takes. It's a very limited and very comfortable volume that it takes, so that you can easily put two bikes in the trunk of actually any car.

We want it to be accessible by price, accessible to everyone. By the way, you can assemble it, so that everybody can enjoy a normal biking experience. So this is our dream, this is our ambition, and we hope that we'll make a lot of people back to the bikes because we provide here a solution. It's a compact solution that can magically turn a normal bike into a compact product when you don't need it, and that price won't be a barrier to purchase this new solution.

Yes, absolutely. So we will have also different designs, because what is patented here is a concept of how you assemble it and some elements of the joints, the systems, and now we can develop many different shapes and designs of this bike, some more complicated, some less complicated. We'll make it out of steel, out of aluminum, out of the lightest materials available, so in different price ranges. But our main objective is to be affordable in a price range where you cannot find any normal folding bike today.

Yeah, it can bring back some more excitement to the people, especially in the cities, and some excitement, and can make it possible for them to use the bike and to be a little bit different than others. And what we're seeing also with this bike and this shape, a lot of my friends told me that they stop, they ask, they grab some attention. So maybe we'll get somewhere in this direction, not like iPhone, but somewhere into this direction, would be nice.

Well, as usual, the most complicated is in many industries this last-mile problem. So we believe that the bike can be actually becoming a key element of every transportation system, of metros, of buses, of cars in the city, and that we can create a lot of comfort for people that can reach a much bigger distance from their parking slot, from their bus or train station, and to create a huge comfort for them. So we see that with this, we give a possibility really to everyone who is looking for an alternative, who is looking for less frustrations reaching their office, their home, whatever, with our new solution.

Thank you for having me.