03/10/2018 AORA FRAME UPDATE

We know many of you are anxiously waiting for our Aora XC hardtail to become available, and we are flattered by this interest. Unfortunately the updated we are giving today is not that it’s going to be available soon, but, in contrary, that we are going to experience further delays in having this frame ready for production. But, as we always said, we want to be 100% transparent with our processes and decisions so we are sharing the full story and unbiased truth, hoping those of you who have been patiently waiting for this bike will hold on a little longer.

The first delay came from, well, a happy problem: growth. The demand on our frames currently in production (Ever, Burn and Dash) required us to focus all our resources on the manufacturing of frames that had already been ordered and needed to be built up and shipped across the globe. As you know, every frame we produce is entirely handcrafted in our Barcelona facility, and the production of a frame takes anywhere between 150 and 200 hours – plus a lot more time to prepare and clean up the molds before and after each frame is laid up. If there is one thing we are never going to cut, that is quality and attention to details, so even with the increased pressure we kept our processes steady and took time at every step to ensure every frame came out just perfect. However since our small team of carbon experts was fully absorbed by the production bikes, this meant the prototype frames needed to finish development of the Aora had to be de-prioritized.

An additional hurdle was that due to a change in our unique one piece frame design for the Aora (with no bonded parts like all other hardtails on the market), we are still improving the new carbon layup to pass our required testing. Currently the status is that we are making a change into the Catia Composite Design and Manufacturing Software to better control the layup of the Aora frames. Just to give you some perspective this is the software that we are using at Cero to design the layups for some carbon parts of the upcoming Porsche 992 Turbo. Using this software versus the typical hand-made process that is common in the bicycle industry makes the Aora layup more complicated and time consuming to design, but with more precise control to better optimise it for our requirements in terms of strength and weight reduction. We should have initial versions ready in a couple of weeks – so expect an update by mid-October

What we can promise, is that we’ll use the opportunity to show you in detail how we handle these kind of issues, hoping this will give you more motivation and confidence to choose one of our frames. Thanks for sticking with us.