10 Years Of Starling Cycles

Making it for 10 years as a steel mountain bike company ain’t easy, especially when all the marketing in the bike industry is seemingly pushing you down. What the lads at Starling Cycles have created is the very definition of legacy. They’ve innovated through simplicity, leading a paradigm shift in metal full suspension bikes and helping usher in a worldwide movement of workshed-built shred sleds. This year, Starling Cycles celebrates a decade of counter culture. Read on for a note from its founder Joe McEwan below along with some photos John shot in 2025 while visiting the shop in Bristol…

Joe, founder of Starling Cycles here,

This year marks a full decade of Starling Cycles. Ten years since I quit my job in aerospace and started building mountain bike frames full time in my shed at the bottom of my garden.

It started a bit before the ten year mark, somewhere around 2013. I had a busy aerospace job and two young kids, and I loved escaping to my garden shed in the evenings to unwind. I went on a frame building course, I began hoovering up all the equipment I could find, kitting out the shed and making frames for my kids. Pretty soon I was creating proper full suspension frames that I could ride, and then the same for my friends. I learned loads and was getting pretty comfortable making tough, reliable and simple bike frames.

Then one day, around 2016, my project working on A380s, came to an end. My boss sat me down and said “Joe, I reckon you’d much rather be building bike frames” and I knew straight away he was right. Goodbye cushy corporate job and stable salary, hello Starling Cycles. I set up the company and dived in headfirst.

Pretty quickly, the mountain bike media got wind of it and were really supportive. Steve Jones of Dirt Mag rode my Murmur prototype and said it was the fastest thing he’d ridden all year. It just grew and grew from there. In 2018, I moved out of the shed into a bigger workshop, hired staff, moved again, evolved the design of the frame, and then moved again and here we are.

“Here” looks like 1500+ frames in the wild, all over the world. We have new customers finding us every day and joining the family. We have heaps of gen 1 and 2 frames out there, still going strong. We have a small network of dealers, we’re growing in Germany, loads of Americans love our bikes. We have two amazing partners helping us to manufacture our frames, in Taiwan and Czechia. All whilst still managing to build frames at home in Bristol, despite the odds.

I’m not going to pretend it’s been, or is, easy. Building niche bikes out of niche materials in a niche way is bloody hard work. We’ve had Covid, we’ve seen the rise of the eBikes, we’ve seen endless cheap bikes flood the market and heaps of amazing businesses with beautiful bikes fail. All that with the usual day to day ups and downs of running a business. The pool of people enjoying the hard graft of a human-powered pedal bike seems to be getting smaller and smaller, let alone a simple, sustainable, long-lasting and slightly weird one!

But we’re here and doing it our way. We’re making simple, beautiful bikes that last for years and can be repaired, refurbished and repainted. I hope that’s played a part in why we’re still here and (hopefully) will be here for plenty more.

What does the future look like for Starling? I hope it holds plenty more simple, beautiful bikes. No motors, no fragile materials, no marketing bullshit. An alternative to over-complicated, throw away products. Plenty of fun and not taking ourselves too seriously. It’d be nice to grow a little, but not at the expense of doing things our way or getting up to our eyeballs in debt. Beyond that, you’ll have to watch this space. When I know, I’ll let you know.

All ideas welcome!

Thanks to everyone that’s made Starling possible for a decade. Our customers, our staff past and present, our suppliers, dealers and partners. And to everyone that’s ever left a comment saying our swingarms look too skinny and our bikes are crap.

We love you lot!

See more at Starling Cycles.

The post 10 Years of Starling Cycles appeared first on The Radavist.