Before they even figured out how to reinvent a bicycle spoke, engineers Charlie Spanjers, Brad Guertin, and Kyle Olson just knew they wanted to start a bike company. They didn't have a product, only a sense that something in cycling could be reimagined.
The spoke, humble and unchanged for more than a century, became their unlikely focus. It was a simple concept that had never really been challenged. But curiosity got the better of them.
“We weren't even close to a viable idea,” laughs Spanjers. “At the time, Dyneema was still a new material, and people were using it for really long slacklines. That's how we came up with the idea for a new type of spoke. It was basically putting a mini slackline into a wheel.”
It was March 2015 when that spark hit. Within weeks, they were prototyping in Spanjers' apartment. The first wheel lasted all of twelve seconds before failing, but it proved the concept. A few design pivots and Berd spokes were born.
It sounds deceptively simple now, but what Berd pulled off shouldn't have been possible. Dyneema is designed not to bond. It's so slick that adhesives, coatings, and even heat treatments fail to stick. An accidental discovery didn't just make Dyneema spokes possible; it changed what materials could even be considered for wheelbuilding.
By 2017, the Minnesota startup was shipping wheels that felt unlike anything else: ultralight, eerily quiet, and surprisingly smooth on rough ground. Riders didn't just notice less chatter; they felt fresher at the end of long rides. Today, Berd's Dyneema-based fibre spokes are built into complete wheelsets that span gravel, road, and MTB. The team's latest creation, TRUDI, is a compact, computer-guided truing system designed to allow wheel builders to hand-true faster and better than ever before.
In this interview, we dig into how Berd's revolutionary spoke came to be. Let's go.
How did you turn a slackline hobby into a viable spoke?
We had this idea to use Dyneema because it's so strong for its weight. We had ways to make it work initially, but at first, we didn't have a good way to connect the fibre to the metal rod. We had a lot of other ideas of tying knots and various things that didn't work. The breakthrough was an accident. Kyle had described something to me, and it sounded like a great idea. When I came back to Kyle and showed him it worked, he's like, “That's not what I told you to do.”
I had just misinterpreted what he had said, and that's how we came up with the finger-trap connection that ended up being the core part of our patent for our spokes and what makes them work.
The result is a fibre spoke that weighs less than half of steel, resists fatigue, and dampens vibration far better than metal. It's a simple idea with profound effects. The harder you pull, the stronger the bond.
And the name, Berd, what does it mean?
The name Berd comes from the words bike and nerd, which I know I think is super cool. We have some cool new graphics based on the name because we haven't really told that story until more recently, but it makes so much sense now to help people connect to Berd.
Why do riders notice such a difference?
It's true, they're less than half the weight of steel spokes, so you save weight, easier to climb, easier to accelerate, those sorts of things. But that isn't even the big thing. You just can't have the same feeling on the bike with any other type of spoke. The vibration damping and the smooth ride that you get with Berd spokes is what people really buy our spokes for and more and more people are starting to realize that.
Where does it matter most?
One of the good examples is when Tom Pidcock and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot started riding our spokes for the first time about a year and a half ago, at the beginning of the 2024 season. They both went on to win the Olympics on our spokes, but even after the first time they rode them on their mountain bikes, they said, "We're never going to ride metal spokes on a mountain bike again.” It's because of that vibration damping, the smooth ride, which is not only comfortable, but it's also faster.
Are they better on every bike?
Gravel and mountain biking, for sure. On rough terrain, that damping really shows. The road is already smooth. While we do have lots of people who love our spokes on the road, too, it's just not as big of a benefit on the road. Aerodynamics is the other trade-off. Our spokes are round, like a standard 2 mm steel spoke, so for pure high-speed road racing, a bladed steel spoke is still more aero.
Are there trade-offs?
They're not indestructible. The two big enemies of our spokes are fire and scissors. They can't be exposed to really high heat, so you don't want to leave them behind your exhaust pipe on your car, but that is the same warning placed on carbon rims.
A good pair of scissors will cut right through our spokes. Similarly, if your derailleur isn't set up properly and you overshift your chain into your spokes, you'll cut your spokes that way. Obviously, if you shoot your derailleur hanger into your spokes while you're going 30 miles an hour, you're going to break your spokes, but that would break metal spokes, too.
You've moved into making full wheelsets. Why?
Because we could design the entire system around our spokes. We are designing wheels and hubs ourselves, and then we work with partners, like We Are One Composites in Canada, for our carbon rims. We produce all of the spokes here in Minnesota, and then we assemble all of our wheels here, as well. This gives us full control over the entire process.
How much does it cost to go with Berd Spokes?
There are a few ways to look at the cost of Berd wheels, depending on how deep you want to go. A complete Berd wheelset starts at $2,095 USD, which puts it firmly in the premium category alongside other high-end carbon options.
If you already have a wheelset you love, Berd also offers a “rebuild” program starting at $592 USD. You ship your current wheels to our headquarters, we re-lace them with Berd spokes, and send them back ready to roll. On average, this will drop 100-200g per wheel. The dramatic change to rotational weight will help the bike climb and accelerate faster.
For anyone who prefers to build their own wheels, individual Berd spokes sell for $9 USD each, which works out to roughly $216 for a 24-spoke wheel or $252 for a 28-spoke wheel.
Can the spokes work with any wheel?
Mostly. Berd spokes work best on hubs with a hook flange, which includes their own proprietary Talon Hubs and the Onyx Hook Flange Vesper hubs. However, the spokes work with all standard J-bend and straight-pull hubs as well, including Industry Nine, DT Swiss, and others.
Partner brands, like NOBL Wheels, Light Bicycle and others, offer a wider variety of hubs, but they often will require slight modifications to remove the sharp corners left by the machining process on standard J-bend hubs.
Are they hard to install or repair on the road?
Not at all. We've got a really nice little service kit that you can take with the spokes. When people go bikepacking with our spokes, or when you're in situations where you want to be able to fix a spoke when you're out in the middle of nowhere, you just bring a few spare spokes and a compact toolset. It's actually quite easy to replace one.
So what exactly is TRUDI?
What's cool about TRUDI is that it's actually still emphasizing the quality of hand-built wheels. It's just this amazing tool that takes all the information about the wheel and calculates exactly how many turns to do on each spoke so that the wheel can be trued in one pass. The magic of it is that it's not a fully automated machine, like a Holland Machine.
Is it just for Berd spokes?
That's the huge thing about TRUDI. It works with everything; it is a universal tool. Since we launched it in March, we've sold every single machine we've built. We've delivered about 75 machines so far, and we've got a lot more that we'll be delivering later this year.
We originally built TRUDI as a tool to help build Berd wheels better, then our customers said, “We need this too.” That's when we realized we'd made a tool for the entire industry.
The fact of the matter is that most wheels out there are not built with our spokes. They're with metal spokes, so we made it universal to work with steel spokes, alloy rims, carbon rims, everything.
Does it replace experienced builders?
Not at all. Fully automated machines can't hit the tolerances that a good builder can, which is why hand-built carbon wheels have always been truly the best way to do it.
With TRUDI, we've combined what the computer is super good at, which is taking all that information and then calculating what to do, with the craftsmanship of a specialized wheelbuilder. It just increases their output roughly threefold while improving consistency, so builders get precise tension data, traceable reports, and less fatigue, not to mention no more endless wrench-twisting.
Thanks, Charlie.
In a sport where true breakthroughs are rare and most “new” gear is a shade lighter or stiffer than last year's, Berd feels like an outlier. In less than a decade, three engineers from Minnesota have redrawn the boundaries of what a bicycle wheel can be and built the tools to make it repeatable.
Berd's story is a reminder that meaningful innovation often hides in the smallest components, until someone reimagines them entirely. A lighter spoke. A smarter truing tool. The kind of quietly brilliant engineering that makes every ride a little smoother.
I'll dial in my setup with a set of Berd Sparrow Carbon Gravel Wheels to see if that calm, damped feel really holds up on gravel rides. Stay tuned for that build and, later, a full long-term review once the miles pile up.
