My Story

Growing up, I never really fit on a bike. Not in the way most people just pick one off the wall and ride away. For me, every bike was a compromise — smaller frames, longer stems, shorter cranks — hours spent in bike shops and online forums trying to make something work that was never designed for me. I spent a lot of money chasing that fit, and honestly, I never quite got there.

The bike has been the constant the whole way through. I got into cycling in Year 8 — fourteen years old, signed up for the Great Vic Bike Ride — and I was hooked. Club racing followed, then fondos, and eventually the kind of rides you plan a whole year around. By 2009, at eighteen, I was working as a bike mechanic — servicing bikes, building custom machines and doing bike fits — and I’ve had my hands on riders’ bikes ever since.

In 2010 I rode the first ever 3 Peaks Challenge and very nearly died of hypothermia on the way to finishing it. In 2013 I crossed the line at the first Melbourne Ironman triathlon. Cycling has taken me around the world since: working as a race mechanic for the Charter Mason racing team, supporting more than ten tours with Wide Open Road, and wrenching for Lesa Ashford — the first and only woman to cycle solo around Australia. Solo, I have ridden Paris to Nice, Munich to Madrid, and Bangkok to Chiang Mai.

That frustration became curiosity. In 2011, I started designing my own frames and having them made to spec. For the first time, I had a bike that genuinely fit my body — not a bike I’d adjusted my body to ride. The difference was immediate and profound. No more hot spots, no more back pain, no more feeling like I was fighting the bike instead of riding it.

I was a little ahead of my time, too. In 2012 I built this: a drop-bar bike on 29″ mountain bike tyres with disc brakes — before SRAM or Shimano had released dedicated road disc groupsets, and around fourteen years before riders started fitting mountain bike tyres to gravel bikes. When a mate asked what on earth it was, I told him it was my latest creation — I think it’s gonna catch on.

In 2015 I finished my Prosthetics and Orthotics degree and moved to Scandinavia, working in Sweden and Norway for three years. While there, in 2018, I finished En Svensk Klassiker — the Swedish Classics: a 60km cross-country ski, a 300km bike ride, a 3km swim and a 30km cross-country run, all inside one year.

Prosthetics and Orthotics is a curious name for the degree — in most of the world it’s called orthopaedic engineering, which is a far better description of what it actually involves: physics and material science, force vectors and load paths, and the study of how the body moves and loads itself through open- and closed-chain movement. A prosthesis is technology engineered to fit one specific body precisely. So is a bike. Riding is a closed-chain system — feet fixed to the pedals, hands on the bars, the body loading the machine at every contact point — and the same engineering that fits a limb carries straight across to fitting a rider and building a frame around them. As a training ground for bike fitting and frame building, it’s hard to imagine anything better.

Scandinavia sharpened the other half of the toolkit. Norway was ahead of its time in 3D scanning and 3D printing — by 2018 I was using both daily in clinical work, scanning individual bodies and designing devices around them, years before most industries caught up. That head start in research and development flows directly into how every Heiden frame is made today.

Then came 2020. I was living in Victoria through the lockdowns, unable to work for long stretches at a time — and that forced pause became the start of this business. It began as Anthropometry, building custom commissioned titanium frames, and grew into Heiden Cycle Works.

But the more I looked around, the more I realised I wasn’t alone. You don’t have to be an outlier to be failed by standard sizing. Plenty of riders sit just outside the anthropometric range that the bike industry designs for — a little too tall, a little too short, longer arms, shorter legs, narrower shoulders. The industry produces bikes for an imaginary average person, and then sells them to everyone else.

And geometry is only part of it. Even when someone finds a frame that fits them reasonably well, it might not have the right wheel size for the way they ride, or the handling characteristics they’re after. A gravel rider who wants road-quick handling. A road rider who wants the option of wider tyres. The industry forces you to choose a category, when what you actually want is a bike built around you.

That’s what Heiden Cycle Works is about. One frame architecture, built to adapt — geometry dialled for your body, tyre clearance for the riding you want to do, handling tuned to the way you like to ride.