October Club Meeting: Ben Serotta on the role of form, function, fit and fabrication!

Ben Serotta

Ben Serotta has been designing and building bicycles for more than forty years and is most known for his bespoke competition bicycles which had found their way under Olympic athletes as early as 1976. Indeed, Serotta bicycles bore witness to America’s rise as a modern cycling power and have been raced to victory in National, European and World Championship titles in road, time-trial, track, mountain and triathlon events.  

Ever driven to raise performance standards, Serotta has worked directly with hundreds of elite athletes and in the process developed his individual-centric approach to the human/machine interface.  With a dual process of a radically changed approach to bicycle fitting methodology coupled with personalized engineering and manufacturing techniques, Serotta’s process represented and over-all a paradigm shift in how the bicycle industry approached matching a bike with a cyclist.  

 Across the decades, Serotta has gained design and manufacturing experience with all five major materials utilized in cycling- steel, aluminum, titanium, composites and plastics as well as the manufacturing methods used from traditional use of gas torches and hand files to advanced welding techniques, molding, CNC processing and 3D/additive manufacturing.

 By 1998, Serotta launched a hands-on teaching program for bicycle fitting, which later became known as SICI (Serotta International Cycling Institute) whose programs have provided the foundational practices upon which more than a dozen other ‘fit schools’ are patterned. 

Today, Serotta’s current business, Serotta Design Studio, oversees two ‘house’ road bike product lines- Duetti and aModoMio as well as providing design and manufacturing services to companies on a broad range of products from one-off custom, to mass production of stock bikes and public use bike share systems, including electric assist cargo bicycle