Balance Bike

A pedal-free balance bike for young children, designed from scratch for STG.

The opportunity wasn't technical, it was a niche: a 100% motorcycle-styled balance bike, aimed at parents who are motorcycle enthusiasts themselves and want their kid's first bike to actually look and feel like one — same visual language, same details, not a generic toy shape.

The one genuinely novel piece of engineering was the steering system. Instead of a conventional handlebar-steered front wheel, I designed a pivot-based lean mechanism: the rider steers by leaning the bike itself, closer to how a motorcycle actually turns, rather than by turning a handlebar. It's the detail that makes the concept more than a paint job — it changes how the bike is actually ridden.

The one real constraint: wheels had to be standard, off-the-shelf components rather than something custom-manufactured for the product. That meant the lean mechanism had to be engineered to work around a fixed, non-negotiable part rather than being designed freely from a blank sheet — a smaller-scale version of the same kind of constraint I was solving for at Torky, just for a completely different product and user.