Inside Gramm Tourpacking: Brevets, Bikepacking, and Handmade Bags in Berlin
Throughout a year of long rides and overnighters, Josh Meissner got to know Kristin Heil, founder of the now well-established Gramm Tourpacking, which is rooted in Berlin. Learn about the changes involved in going from solo entrepreneur to a four-woman team and find photos from the Gramm workshop and rides around Berlin in this inside look at the handmade bag maker here…
PUBLISHED Mar 16, 2023
I can’t think of many contexts outside of bike tours and brevets—traditional organized long-distance cycling events—where it’s perfectly normal to spend hours or days at a time with potentially complete strangers as you ride together through your highs and lows. You certainly won’t be strangers by the end of it.
Lucas had got me hooked on the randonneuring thing before he returned home to the USA, which put me in touch with the cycling family surrounding Kristin Heil and Florian Haeussler of Gramm Tourpacking (@gramm_tourpacking) and Fern Fahrräder (@fern_bicycles), respectively—probably the whackiest, most lovable bunch of folks I’ve ever met through bikes.
I learned to appreciate randonneuring as a quiet counterweight against the glorification of competition and individual achievement in modern cycling. The set time controls along a brevet’s course mean you can’t dawdle, but they aren’t races either, and for all but the freakiest outliers, sticking together in a group is how you get to the distant finish. Your riding mates may drive you mad after 38 hours in close proximity, but you can’t always choose your lot. The last to roll over the finish line gets the biggest applause. After warming up by riding the shorter events with the crew last spring, I was hesitant when it came to the intimidating 600-kilometer event, but Kristin would hear none of it and signed me up. We were going to ride it out together.
Over the course of our two-day ride, I discovered that Kristin overflows with resolve to achieve her goals without tunneling on them. Even speeding along on a mission, she excitedly pointed out the rare birdsong of the orioles that accompanied us along the German-Czech border. I could blame our frequent snacking for our troubles making the time controls, but to be honest, I lacked the consistent training she’d put in and underestimated the varied demands such a long ride put on the body. Riding into the rising sun was a special experience, but my joints never recovered from the bitter cold night at altitude. Kristin burned herself out pulling me across the scorching plains before we finally agreed to scratch and cool our feet in the Oder River. “I’m going to sign us up for all the events next year,” she informed me just a few days later.
Though we’re both mere beginners in the way of the randonneur, it seems to me the underlying ethos has long been part of Gramm’s DNA. Around them, there’s a tight-knit community of creative people and small makers and brands that support each other on the bike and off, and they adopted me even before I ever bought one of their bags that are handmade in Berlin-Lichtenberg.
Like in most of East Germany, the heavy industry that lifted Lichtenberg from a tiny farming village (at that point not yet part of Berlin) to production powerhouse over the course of the 19th century was summarily shuttered following the collapse of the GDR in 1990. It’s where you can catch the last vestiges of the old Berlin that attracted artists and artisans in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Space was cheap then for art studios and techno raves and whatever else built the legend. This was before the inner city would get swamped by record waves of tourists and outside investment that would transform the face of the city in the last 15 years—not always for the better. But sitting on the periphery, Lichtenberg has not yet been totally overrun by breakneck development. Amid the old brick and new concrete, precision craft is flowering at Gramm Tourpacking.
Visiting the Gramm workshop on the third floor of an old industrial building with tall windows offers a glimpse into a hands-on way of life that’s far off from my mostly digital one. They share the space with a bunch of framebuilders and mechanics and artists, and you always hear a grinding wheel spinning somewhere. An alloy of hot metal, grease, and soldering flux fills the air—it’s the smell of the place where physical goods are made. Stunning Fern custom bicycles stacked up in the hallway, new and old, are the visual proof. The ancient shop terrier Acid patters about. We walk past shelves filled with ornithology books, Volkswagen bus maintenance manuals, and boxes full of camping gear for all seasons, toward the chattering of industrial sewing machines running at full tilt.
At first glance, Gramm seems to be the perfect confluence of people, skills, and location. Founder Kristin Heil got started with sewing as a little girl, learning from her grandmother, who was a master tailor running her own operation. Kristin went on to study fashion design with a focus on industrial production, which would set her up perfectly for directing the four-woman shop she heads today. “I always had in the back of my mind this dream to found my own business,” Kristin says. She’s a doer, a straight sewer who seems to have a knack for bringing together fantastic people with big hearts.
But before getting there, she’d spend a decade bouncing between jobs in fashion and manufacturing, never quite finding her place. In the early 2000s, toiling as a junior fashion designer at the larger studios in Berlin would net you exactly zero bucks an hour, Kristin explained to my astonishment. “And can you believe it, I was thankful for the opportunity!” she admits with a rueful laugh. “I’m not sure what I lived off back then. Crackers and cheese, I guess. I’m glad the youth today have a better sense of what they’re worth,” she adds.
The touring bike came as a natural evolution to the backpacking she was doing all throughout her twenties. In the post-trip clarity of a big tour that took her through Africa, Kristin sat down to make her dream of her own company real, effectively working two full-time jobs to get it off the ground. Partnering with Florian of Fern Fahrräder, they secured a manufacturing space that had been previously empty for 30 years. They installed windows, ran cables, and brought in the machines that would help them build their entrepreneurial existence, and that’s where you’ll still find them today.
Kristin officially went all-in on crafting custom bikepacking bags in 2015. The Berlin cycling scene was a creative hotbed at the time, and bikepacking as a subgenre wasn’t yet mainstream on this side of the Atlantic. She recalls having a nervous breakdown on the eve of her debut at the 2015 Fahrradschau, the cycling trade show hosted in Berlin that garnered international attention while it ran. She feared her work would get torn apart on the showfloor. And indeed the original Fern showbike equipped with her sleek bikepacking bags stunned visitors, who tugged and pulled at the unfamiliar archetypes. To her amazement, by the end of the first day, manager-types from big companies were trying to buy her out on the spot as they instantly realized how far behind the curve they were.
We’re spoiled by the vast array of bikepacking bags and lightweight racks for off-roading available to us today. Gramm and Fern were in the first wave of this renaissance on this side of the pond. Substantial money and promises would seem awfully tempting when they’re waved in your face right after getting started, but Kristin set me straight. “Berlin is not just where I live, it’s my creative home,” she explains. Uprooting for a job elsewhere, under another name, wasn’t an option.
So since the start, it’s been a wild ride for the company. They now count four people to their core team and have sent thousands of bags onto roads and trails in all corners of the world. It’s hardly all sunshine and roses, though. Many factors conspire in Germany that make it challenging to run a small manufacturing operation. Costs are high across the board. For instance, accounting for post-Covid logistics, taxes, and duties, a meter of X-Pac fabric ends up costing Gramm easily double of what it costs in the US. Berlin isn’t as cheap as it was even 10 years ago, so wages have had to rise accordingly.
Add to the fact that there’s not much money sloshing around the bike industry pond, and you start to understand that it takes a lot of paddling to stay afloat. It’s safe to say Kristin’s a workaholic, at least by necessity. She’s worked long hours just about every day in the last years, producing thousands of custom bags, to get to the point where she can stably employ herself and the three other women that form the core Gramm team today. She’s really happy where she is now, though. “I couldn’t imagine it any other way now. This is my dream job. I have to take care of everything, so every day is a new challenge—it’s great for your confidence,” she reflects. What I find most impressive is how despite how her hectic workload gets, she somehow finds the energy to be an incredibly kind and giving person—maybe it just goes hand-in-hand.
After years of pulling double-duty on her own, Kristin got support from Susanne, who brought with her not just a wealth of experience sewing bike bags, but also a deep empathy for their customers stemming from her own bike touring and commuting experiences. Today, basically every bag that leaves the shop has been sewed or inspected by her. Luisa cuts the technical fabrics to size between her other work building props and backdrops at the opera. Their most recent addition is Olena from Ukraine, who came to Germany when the war broke out last year. She’s been quick to master the custom frame bag, thereby freeing up Kristin from most production sewing.
Just across the hallway, Fern Fahrräder and Allygn Components are Gramm’s closest partners in crime, and their projects have gotten more and more ambitious over the years. If I had to identify their joint trademark, it would be the incredible level of bike-luggage-rider integration that’s reminiscent of the mid-century randonneuring bicycles handcrafted by the French constructeurs, who left no detail to chance. Having that shared canvas to play on means they’ve been able to home in on select designs to bring to a broader audience in series production. The Diamond Bag I reviewed in 2022 exemplifies this. It’s an innovative reinterpretation of the classic rando bag that mounts to almost any bike via the matching Allygn Diamond Rack, which was synthesized from Fern’s extensive experience in custom front racks. Beyond Fern, Kristin is on the phone with framebuilders and small brands nearly every day to coordinate bag setups and advise on frame features for best integration.
Looking at the bags coming out of the Gramm workshop, a common thread in the lineup is the reduced bulk that’s ideal for fast-and-light bikepacking or any all-day cycling adventure. It also means they’re a great fit for folks riding smaller frames, which includes many women. The made-to-order frame bags are fully custom, anyway. Tourers at heart, they’d probably steer you toward frontloading with small panniers if you need more volume, and I’d agree with that for most of Europe.
Bikepacking is maturing, and big brands are moving in to capitalize, but it’s anything but settled at the leading edge. Rider demands and events are evolving, and advanced new materials become available all the time. Kristin was excited to be one of the first in Europe to get her hands on a few precious rolls of the incredibly abrasion-resistant Ultra fabrics by Challenge Sailcloth. It uses the same fibers as Dyneema, but it’s woven, not laminated, and it’s so tough that it can’t be cut with regular scissors (I tried). The shiny look won’t be for everyone, and it costs a pretty penny, but on a functional level, it’s the perfect material for ultralight bikepacking bags, she tells me.
Real-world testing is vital even when you’ve got the basic craft nailed. Gramm counts strong bikepackers such as our friends Stefan Haehnel and Bengt Stiller among their informal yet rigorous test crew who’ve put the gear through the harshest imaginable shake-downs in Morocco, Kyrgyzstan, and beyond. Kristin takes quality very seriously. One of the few times I’ve seen her troubled is when she got news of a failing bag. “We’re a small shop. If a customer is unhappy with one of our custom bags, we’ll make it right, of course.” That might involve repair or replacement, even if it means losing money.
Tailoring individual bags in the colors of the rainbow was Gramm’s bread and butter until recently, but ultimately, offering full-custom everything is not a business model that scales well past the solo-entrepreneur stage. Simply adding more skilled people and machines to keep up with demand isn’t feasible because the organizational overhead quickly balloons. All the communication necessary to keep information and material flowing becomes a huge task on its own, and it can be overwhelming if nothing else changes. So, they are now transitioning to a more standardized line-up of bags in rotating colors produced in Berlin and Portugal while keeping their order books open for fully custom frame bags.
Making the leap to a sustainable small business employing multiple people is tricky and requires taking a hard look at how you work and what you offer. Most small makers that offer a custom experience at the outset find they need to scale it back in favor of stock products as they grow. At the extreme end, Ortlieb offers just a single frame bag size in one material. You start to realize small is not just beautiful but also essential for serving niche demand like high-end bikepacking bags. It seems Kristin’s quite content with her company’s gentle trajectory and the role they get to fill in the bikepacking space. “We like growing slow and steady, no big jumps,” she explains.
It’s easy to question small outfits’ comparatively high prices, but these are the real costs of manufacturing. The fact that cheaper mass-market products for bikepacking now exist is owed in no small part to the cottage industry makers who helped the segment flourish in the first place. The difference between small outfits and capitalizing corporations is not always evident to all customers, though.
Since it’s difficult to look ahead when you’ve got your head down sewing bags while also taking care of all the other daily business, Kristin’s been working hard to at least put herself out of the hands-on needle work over the past year. It’s an exciting time for Gramm because this means she should have more time for strategic tasks like prototyping new designs, rethinking processes, and generally steering the ship into exciting new waters.
Her conscious decision not to attach her name to her company in the German tradition —Ortlieb, Schmidt, Rohloff, and many framebuilders—smoothes the path to handing off certain mundane tasks so they might focus on the work that only they can do, such as niche product development, design consulting, and collaborations with other small brands. “I never wanted to be a solo operation,” she explains. That applies as much to her immediate team as the partners she chooses to work with. They’re starting to redistribute some of the sewing of stock Diamond Bags to a trusted partner in Portugal. It doesn’t save costs at their small scale, but it does increase their production capacity and thereby the availability of their products. Kristin assures me that the contract work is top-notch and conducted under ethical conditions, or else she wouldn’t have gone forward with this approach.
Last year, the company transitioned to a four-day workweek. “Everything runs just a little bit slower, and that’s really good for all of us.” Truthfully, Kristin is still there on Fridays, but she now sometimes gets an occasional weekend off. “I was sick of not having a life outside of work. What’s the point of it all if I can’t ride my bike?” And if she’s not riding her bike, she’s birdwatching in the wetlands, foraging in the forest, or turning over rocks in a quarry looking for fossils. “Anything, as long as it’s outside” seems to be her mantra and inspiration.
In early 2023, the Gramm and Fern brevet crew is already buzzing with a low excitement. It’s a Paris-Brest-Paris year, the 1,200-kilometer super brevet held every four years in France. Unfortunately, I’ve got other touring plans that mean I’ll miss the qualifying brevets. Kristin’s disappointed we won’t be taking it on together, and I am too. But after getting a sense of her infectious determination and the energy and sleepless nights she’s poured into her business year after year, I have no doubt she’ll pull through and come out at the other end smiling, as she always seems to do.
Head over to Gramm-Tourpacking.com to learn more and shop custom and readymade bikepacking bags and more.
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