This article was originally published on 11 May 2021.
Of course there's a table football in the lounge. And an old kitchen buffet with shared flat charm. And a drum kit. So much start-up cliché is a must. But compared to other start-ups Fazua A decisive advantage: the three storeys of the new building and the adjoining old building do not contain any extravagant castles in the air, but real hardware. Tens of thousands of drives per year, with a strong upward trend. The start-up décor was probably simply left over because Fazua and the e-bike in general took off far too quickly to make a fuss about the interior design.
There are now 100 employees who manufacture and further develop a single, central product in the south of Munich: the "Evation" drive from Fazua. What idea could be so good - and why didn't the Boschs, Broses and Shimanos come up with it? Johannes Biechele, known as Hannes for short and as audibly Bavarian as the company name Fazua ("Go for it!"), only has to scratch his head briefly to explain the product, as he is used to it: "Our niche is 'e-bike, but in Geil'. When we started out, an e-bike was a step-through bike with a heavy motor. But that was never our thing. For me, a bike has to look cool! And we build for sporty people. It's a decision that the customer makes right at the beginning: do I need a powerful Bosch motor that pushes me from A to B, or do I want to ride more dynamically?"
Fazua: E-bike motor to go
So Fazua developed its down tube battery at a time when others were still stowing the power storage unit as a prominent block somewhere on the bike. But the technically decisive trick is the completely removable drive unit consisting of battery and motor. Both together weigh less than some pedelec batteries alone. Where other e-bikes have a mid-motor, Fazua only has a gearbox in the frame that is twice the size of a fist and weighs around 1.3 kilos. Apart from the necessary frame details for battery and motor mounting, a Fazua bike including battery and motor only weighs a good 4.5 kilos more than a similar bike without motor. Nevertheless, the drive supports the rider with normal pedelec power - just not for as long and with less peak power. Beyond 25 kilometres per hour, a freewheel disengages the motor. If you pedal faster, you won't feel any resistance. The freewheel, the low weight and the sleek look position Fazua in the market. As a result, many road bike manufacturers are among the 40 bike brands that install the drive.
The changing company locations show how quickly the concept took off: In the tinkering phase, it was the flat of one of the founders, followed by a room in a commercial courtyard, a few more rooms in a Munich business park - and finally, in 2018, the move to a three-storey industrial building in the Munich area, where Airbus previously worked on rockets. As this also became too small in the foreseeable future, Fazua added a brand new building of almost the same size a year later. Something like that costs millions. And unlike a large company with plenty of money to play with, none of the original five founders had this in their pockets. For the first patents, such as for the drive unit that can be completely removed from the bottom, Hannes' girlfriend advanced money from her private coffers. But for Fabian Reuter, the commercial strategist of the two, this was foreseeably too slow a route to market:
Patents are no longer the gold standard if you want to survive. If only because there are usually ways of getting round them. It is much more important to be the first to have the right product for a target group. And then you need a certain size to occupy the niche right away and build the brand! - Fabian Reuter
Advance praise and venture capital
So the two set out to use their good idea and powers of persuasion to collect investor money and occupy the "sporty drive" niche as quickly as possible. This was no easy task at a time when the e-bike had only just emerged, but the odd investor euro had already evaporated in the industry. Hannes Biechele: "Somehow we must have got our idea across well. The gentlemen with the money look you seriously in the eye and check whether you are someone they trust. And we were obviously the right people for the job. In any case, there is a lot of advance praise in such an investment..." Individual business angels, venture capital funds and public subsidies had soon thrown so much into the pot that Fazua was able to take off - with the founders as salaried partners and a product that is still evolving.
Around a third of the employees are responsible for this. In the basement, where massive concrete floors and walls once had to withstand armour production, breaking test equipment with large weight plates now crashes onto axle stubs, CNC milling cells whir over prototypes of new control elements, new battery cells charge themselves in the sand bed, protected from explosions. Three floors above, engineers solder tiny parts onto circuit boards to improve the motor electronics. Fazua even has a biomechanic working on creating a perceived symbiosis of man and machine, and there are test bikes in the stairwell, which some employees use to test the drive on their way to work.
Almost more astonishing than the development department at the company headquarters is the fact that Fazua also manufactures its drives in the high-wage zone south of Munich. A few cast parts come from China, while the vast majority of components are supplied by Central European companies. People stand at long workbenches with various chutes and boxes, keeping a safe distance from each other due to the coronavirus, and screw, solder, press or glue small parts together to form drive units. Munich's suburbs, a cost disadvantage? No, says Fabian Reuter: "The location is good for us! There was room to grow here, people are doing well here. What we do here in assembly is only part of the added value, so it doesn't really matter that wages are higher. It's more important for us to have a personal relationship with our suppliers and employees than to have things assembled somewhere else in the world."
The last few metres of the company tour lead into a hall that is perhaps five metres high. The ground floor of the new building, which was occupied last year, houses the high-bay warehouse. This is where components arrive and Evation drives are dispatched to the bicycle companies. There is still space on the shelves, and there is still some room to reach the capacity limit of 100,000 drives per year, but the plans to add another floor to the company headquarters are already in place. It looks like things are going straight ahead for the founders. Provocative question: wouldn't this be the perfect time to sell the shop to a competitor and then enjoy a palm beach and hammock for life? Hannes Biechele seems somewhat irritated: "Sell? Quite the opposite! This is our baby, we're not abandoning it!"
