Last November at SF Bike Expo, I met a designer by the name of Mark Christian Bolick. Mark is based here in the Bay Area, and makes custom upholstered bike saddles. Each bike saddle he makes is unique and different, custom ordered by his customers. We got to talking about Companion Bike Seat and how we had always envisioned offering multiple different color options for our bike seats. Turns out Mark really liked the idea as well, so we started looking into what it would take to reupholster a Companion Bike Seat! Based on the cost of his upholstery services, we quickly decided to make these out of high-quality leather, for the true connoisseur of bike seats.

I gave Mark a bike seat to play with late last year, as well as a couple extra bike seat cushions I had lying around, so that he could do some initial "prototyping" with some extra leather he had at his shop. This is a picture of the first custom leather bike seat cushion he made for me, including our Companion logo on the seat. It's a beautiful black leather cushion, incredibly soft. You can't really see it, but through the perforations that make up the logo, he included our colors behind the top layer of black leather.

We figure folks aren't going to want to have a Companion Bike Seat logo on the seat of their custom leather bike seats, so this is just an example of the quality craftsmanship that Mark brings to his work.

Each of our custom handmade leather bike seats will be made-to-order after they're purchased. We're offering them in a variety of different colors of leather for the custom seat, including, brown, black, white, red, and blue. You'll also be able to choose the color of the stitching used at the corners of the cushion, for a completely customized bike seat.

On Friday this week the specs for our backrests were finalized and sent over to our factory. We're awaiting final cost estimates on these designs and will hopefully start prototyping within the next week or two!

To the right is a rendering of the backrest cushion, showing the detail in the stitching. We'll be using the same waterproof vinyl that we use with our bike seats.

Below is the complete assembly specs for the backrest, with all of the components, both assembled and an exploded view. Initially, our backrests will only be available in black (same with our bike seats), though over time, we hope to offer multiple different colors for the frame color and for the cushion.

I met a gentleman at Interbike this year who was interested in our bike seat more for the load-bearing capacity than the ability to provide an extra seat for a passenger. He stored the batteries for his ebike in a Topeak bag on an MTX bike rack; the problem was the weight of the batteries would bend the rack after only two or three rides, so he was going through bike racks almost once per month! I knew that our bike seat frame was more than strong enough to support the load of the batteries, but I needed to make some modifications to make it work for him as a cargo rack.

First, I needed to remove the seat cushion and the stash-box from the top of the bike seat frame. Once those were removed, I used a rivet tool to affix the lock directly to the frame (since it feeds through the stash-box for our bike seats). 

All in all it was a really fun project. I got to take apart our bike seats and become intimately familiar with the assembly of the bike seats (which I probably should have done years ago).

And the best part is, we have the makings of a new product line for Companion Bike Seats now: the Companion Cargo Rack! Being that our frames were load-tested at over 4,000 lbs, this is the beefiest bike rack on the market! Stay tuned for more on when we release our new cargo racks!

Artist renderings of our new bike seat backrest, installed onto a bike seat.

Got to admit, it's looking pretty good. We're still working out some of the details, largely associated with manufacturing, and we should begin prototyping before the end of the year!

After building a model of the initial backrest design into SolidWorks, we realized that the backrest frame needed some modifications in order to provide reasonable support without putting undue stress onto the frame.

We added an additional support bar, and now the backrest provides twice the amount of back-support as the first design. Next steps are to put together specs and assembly instructions for manufacturing and start talking to our factory about prototyping!