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It’s art bike day! This week’s installment comes to you from Factor Bikes. The company tasked one of its ambassadors, Duke Agyapong, to render a colorful, statement-making take on its all-around road bike, the OSTRO VAM.
Agyapong is a bike mechanic, writer, multi-discipline racer, and model for Rapha. They collaborated with Jay Gundzik, Creative Director for Factor and Black Inc, to dial in the design.
all photos c. Factor Bikes
“We chatted about Duke’s inspiration and influences in life and in art,” Gundzik said in a statement on the Factor Bikes website. “We landed on three very focused themes to capture in the design: diversity, poetry, and fashion.”
The designer combined elements of Agyapong’s poetry, the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, hand-painted typography, hand-drawn graphics, and “images in acrylic paint and ink on canvas.”
“It was two to three months of sharing ideas, back and forth. Then Jay went quiet for a few weeks and re-emerged with this,” said Agyapong. “It captures everything perfectly. He made it authentic.”
The details are noteworthy. Lines and images from Agyapong’s poem “BLK” speckle the frame, and he and Gundzik chose each color and texture with care and intention.
“Getting the right balance of color and story together was painstaking. I was blown away by how it came together,” noted Gundzik once the process was complete.
As for Agyapong, they hope the design will inspire other people to take up cycling.
The Duke x Factor OSTRO VAM is available in “very limited quantities,” — as the frame only or with the groupsets Factor offers for the stock OSTRO VAM.
Those groupsets include SRAM Red AXS eTap + Quarq PM, SRAM Force AXS eTap + Quarq PM, Shimano 8170 Ultegra, and Shimano 9270 Dura Ace. Here’s the geometry, straight from Factor Bikes.
You’ve got to give Factor your email to find out how much the limited edition ride costs, but the stock OSTRO VAM starts at an MSRP of $5,499.
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