Singletrack/MTB
Gravel/All-road
Dirt-road Touring
Fat-bike
Rune Bicycles is a new UK-based bicycle brand with a focus on bikes built with style and integrity. We reached out to Rune founder Ashley Charles to learn more about the brand and what we can expect moving forward. Find more details here…
Words by Ashley Charles, photos by Tom Farrell
I’m a BMXer at heart and have been for nearly 30 years now. Some 20 of those 30 years have been heavily involved in the industry, from riding for companies, designing parts for those companies, and just generally being immersed in that world and the people who blazed trails in it. In 2015, I started my own parts brand called Relic BMX. This all started because, in my opinion, we had lost a lot of the aesthetics and style that bikes used to have. Most brands were pushing parts that would supposedly make you a better rider over something that worked and looked good. Just marketing gimmicks if you ask me. The main thing I have always loved most about a BMX bike is its simplicity, and there is a certain look of a bike from around the late 1990s to early 2000s era that I just love. With Relic, we created a line of parts that were up to date with the times of riding and were also very focused on how they looked aesthetically.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I was working at a bike shop in Austin, Texas. This was the first time I had ever worked at a regular bike shop, and being in a big bike-enthusiastic city, there was a lot going on. I’d always had an old road bike that I rode to rehabilitate my knees after multiple ACL surgeries, but outside of that, my interest in other types of bikes was minimal. Being in the shop and surrounded by a ton of bike nerds who all had multiple types of bikes, I started noticing certain bikes that I really liked the look of. It was mostly the gravel bikes that caught my eye and not the roadie kind of gravel bike, as I call them, but the ones that had character—the ones you could see were built piece by piece exactly how the person riding it wanted. BMX bikes have always been such a custom and personal thing; for instance, I could never ride someone else’s bike for a second, and I wouldn’t want to. This newfound interest led me to build my first custom non-BMX bike.
From this point on, the obsession grew pretty quickly. That first build didn’t last long, and after a couple months, I was already switching parts around and trying to get the bike to look and ride exactly how I wanted it to. Already at this early stage, I was thinking about how I would want a brand in this side of the bicycle world to look. I guess it’s just in my nature. as I love bike design. At this point, though, it was more of a pipe dream as I didn’t feel like I had the know-how or miles under my belt in this new world of bikes to be throwing my 10 cents in the pot.
Another couple of years down the line, my family and I moved back to the UK after living in the States for a decate. I was still getting more and more into riding gravel and still learning and obsessing over the bike and what it was I wanted to ride. Back in the UK, I’d found a rad little scene centered around The Woods Cyclery, which is owned by a couple of old BMXers and in the heart of the New Forest, which is gravel heaven. After struggling to find the bike I wanted in anything modern, I started buying old 90s mountain bikes and just decking them out with new parts. They were cheap, great for the type of riding I was doing, and most of all, they were a simple blank canvas to build as you wanted. As much as I loved these bikes, I would still constantly come back to the idea of building something new from the ground up. It seemed like there was room for it in the market, especially here in the UK and Europe, and I felt like I knew enough at this point to have a crack at it. So, after thinking about it for a long time and having the support of the scene around me, I decided to start Rune.
The idea with Rune Bicycles is to build something that has character. I am heavily focused on aesthetics and plan to bring all the same philosophies I have had in BMX the past 30 years into this side of the cycling world. Something DIY, creative, and that people can see has nothing but passion behind it. We are making lugged steel frames—nothing that hasn’t been done before—and plan to make creative content that makes you want to get out and ride your bike. A brand that is run with integrity and by people who live and breathe bikes and have the experience to back that up. Not some suit trying to reinvent the wheel who only rides bikes at the weekend. I love bikes and how they look and how they ride. I’ve experienced both sides firsthand from a riding aspect and an engineering aspect that many brands just don’t have, which is something unique that I’m excited to share with those who have the same passion.
Bikes are expected to be available in 2024. Head over to Instagram to follow along and sign up for their email list at RuneBicycles.com to stay in the loop. We’ll be sharing more details as they become available.
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