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ABOUT AMAZED BY RETRO
AMAZED BY RETRO is a platform to sell amazing retro bicycle parts and bicycles. Both in a webshop as well as on ebay. The brainchild of Marco Giarrana, the idea behind ABR was, that on the bikes our partner organisation receives as donations from many donors within their networt (private people, bikeshops, bike companies, race teams...), there are quite a few valuable, and often retro parts. By selling them individually, our partner would make way more money which in turn it could use (and needs!) to finance their integrative training for unemployed people to find a way back into regular jobs. What really made us go for it, was the outlook to work day in, day out with these much beloved bicycle parts, while working for a positive, socially worthwile purpose. It really is a win-win situation. Actually a win-win-win situation, because every retro fan who finds what he/she is looking for, will leave the room happy as well .)
As far as the people who run the website and logistics, it's a sidejob for everyone. But the goal is to grow ABR and expand the cooperation to other organizations which do similiar work as our current partner, and maybe create 1-2, actually paid, dream jobs for some cycling & retro enthusiasts.
AMAZED PEOPLE
THE AMAZED PEOPLE BEHIND AMAZED BY RETRO
MARCO GIARRANA
Born in 1983, Marco is half Swiss and half Sicilian (down south in Italy). The bicycle virus first struck him when his neighbor bought a new GT LTS Thermoplast, 1996, in a brand new, fully custom bikes only, bike shop. Since then he was hooked on mountainbiking and cycling in general. Many years at said bike shop, he learned the trade from the ground up. Later he turned machinist (to make his own bike stuff) and went to study product design (to even more make his own bike stuff).
Absolute dream retro bike:
GT STS Lobo with the pro only first gen Rock Shox Boxxers, a classic AC/Hope/KORE/Mavic and Shimano XTR build. Or maybe with the legendary Rock Shox disc brakes?
FRANZ XAVER ZIERER
In 1989, god kissed the world twice: He kissed away the wall of Berlin, and in Bavaria, Franz-Xaver saw the light of day. Just a few years in, FXZ discovered peak mankind invention - the bicycle. After a few vacaction jobs, he was certain his future had to be around bikes. Off he went to do almost every job in the bike business. Today, Franz is most burning for road cycling and cycle veterans. In real life, he is engineering e-bikes, speciality bike parts and restoring velocipeds as well as penny-farthings.
Absolute dream retro bike:
Lugged Wheeler steel frame with Shimano 105 2x9 groupset (all you need to cross the alps). Or: Drais' hobby horse - but that one ain't no bicycle...
THE AMAZING COMPANIES
BEHIND AMAZED BY RETRO
AMAZING COMPANIES
OUR PARTNER ORGANIZATION
For the whole ABR project they would like to operate in the background, that's why we have no specific information on them here. They are a social non-profit organization located in a major Swiss city, and a very multidisciplinary affair. When saying multidisciplinary, we really mean multidisciplinary: Offering apprenticeships in many professions, operating a beautiful café, a second hand clothing store (equally as beautiful), obviously a bike shop, a gardening service as well as a facility service branch and a general product refurbishing project, they really are that big, but good company, doing economy right.
Its focus is to help people who've been through rough times in their life. To help them getting back into a job, through training in one of their operations.
Th organizations bike shop being a big, established institution in its hometown, gets bikes from donations of customers, race teams, bike companies, other shops or from leftovers of service jobs. It's these bikes and parts that mostly create the offer found on AMAZED BY RETRO. Half of the money created through the sales largely goes to support the work our partner organization does: Teaching people in bike mechanics, getting old bikes back on the road/trail (they run a dedicated bicycle refurbishing project in the bike shop) and the proliferation of good cycling vibes. What's not to like? We love that groove!
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Note:
Being a non-profit organization, our partner relies on donations, sponsoring, public financial support plus eventual profits out of their own operations. That's where ABR comes into play, it allows them to sell the retro finds in the bicycle parts that they handle, rather than processing them into *normal* refurbished bikes, and thus taking them off the vintage/retro market we love so much!
Being a non-profit organization, our partner relies on donations, sponsoring, public financial support plus eventual profits out of their own operations. That's where ABR comes into play, it allows them to sell the retro finds in the bicycle parts that they handle, rather than processing them into *normal* refurbished bikes, and thus taking them off the vintage/retro market we love so much!
STUDIO FROM SCRATCH
In 2014 product designers Marco Giarrana, Patrik Hasler and Roger Herzog got together to found Zurich based STUDIO FROM SCRATCH. This original bunch of people combined their product design skills with their knowledge of aviation, machining, carpentry, IT and bicycles. In 2015 Stefanie Zweifel joined the team, bringing experience in ceramic, object and interior design into the mix.
From there, FROM SCRATCH morphed into a company active in a variety of fields. From classic product design service (mostly in the bicycle/sports field), to the construction of small to large mockups, to creating a small line of furniture/objects under its own brand, to offering rapid prototyping/machining services to setting up the fair & circular, niche bike parts brand FAIR bicycle.
AMAZED BY RETRO being the latest branch of SFS, was born through the passion for retro bicycles of Marco Giarrana, one of the founders, and his friend Franz Xaver Zierer, who is equally in love with the weird and wonderful world of bikes/parts. When the two got together with DRAHTESEL, the result was AMAZED BY RETRO.
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Note:
The term «from scratch» stems from athletic competitions back in the days. Where stronger athletes would give others an adavantage by starting «from scratch», which literally meant from a scratch in the gravel road (tarmac was not invented yet) while the others were allowed to start with a bit of a head start.
The term «from scratch» stems from athletic competitions back in the days. Where stronger athletes would give others an adavantage by starting «from scratch», which literally meant from a scratch in the gravel road (tarmac was not invented yet) while the others were allowed to start with a bit of a head start.
The team behind «scratch» found this to be a very fitting term and pattern to their approach to work: do it all from the very beginning, to understand the whole thing. Check out FROM SCRATCH here.
FAIR bicycle
This little bicycle components company was born out of the beliefs of a designer and an engineer who have worked in the bicycle industry for a looong time. Marco Giarrana and Valentin Wendel. The two realized that there is not much fair nor ecologically conscious about it. The bicycle industry rather relies on cheap labour in the far east and these countries' weak environmental laws. And it is built on the ecological nonsense of the globalized production and the dirty air and sea transportation that come with it. Once these products are then at the end of their life, they are mostly not repairable, nor cradle-to-cradle conform. FAIR bicycle is partly a quest to make high end, niche but needed cycling products, and partly an excercise to demonstrate that it IS possible to make bike stuff the fair and eco way. Check out the fair trade and circular section of the FAIR bicycle website to see how they do it, and how they prove it.
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Note:
FAIR bicycle is not directly linked with AMAZED BY RETRO, nor is it economically connected to it. But since both companies are run under the STUDIO FROM SCRATCH umbrella, and some employees may work at both these brands as well as them being connected by a similar Leitmotiv, we thought we mention each of them here.
FAIR bicycle is not directly linked with AMAZED BY RETRO, nor is it economically connected to it. But since both companies are run under the STUDIO FROM SCRATCH umbrella, and some employees may work at both these brands as well as them being connected by a similar Leitmotiv, we thought we mention each of them here.
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