A huge influence of the style of Shutt in the rich heritage of cycling. Our office has become home to our cycling memorabilia which provides us with daily inspiration. A highlight of our display is our head badge collection which certainly attracts attention from those visitors lucky enough to see it. The neat rows of metal badges read like a history of British bike building, showing us the evolution of those builders who have survived into the present day, and those who have fallen into obscurity or no longer exist.
The desire for weight saving, improved aerodynamics and changing tastes in style have eliminated the presence of the humble head badge on the average modern bike. As someone who is a bit of traditionalist I’m sad to see the little metal artworks missing (it reminds me of the demise of album artwork with the rise of the MP3). That being said the Bespoked Show earlier this year showed us the the head badge is not dead, and certainly alive and well on hand built bikes.
Here are some more classic designs spotted at the L’Erocia Britannia in June, showing that even high quality decals can be attractive…
When looking for the finishing touch for our Limited Edition Heritage jersey we decided to create our own head badge design, I explored a number of options. My final design is based on all my favourite elements of head badge design – classical lines, scrolling ribbons & bicycle wheels. You can see my original sketch below. I scanned the drawing and then polished the design up on the computer. After this the design was sent away to an embroidery specialist who works out how the “pattern” of the design will be programmed into the embroidery machine. Amazingly this is then copied onto a floppy disc (remember those!) for use on the embroidery machines at our factory in Leicester. The finished design has in excess of 5,500 individual stitches.
