Scarab Cycles | Artisan custom steel manufacturing

Context & positioning

Scarab Cycles is an artisan custom steel bicycle workshop located in El Retiro, in the mountains near Medellín. The company was born from Santiago Toro’s final-year engineering project. A cycling enthusiast, he had studied bicycle frame geometries and began building his first frames in his garage. The brand draws heavily from Colombian cycling culture and the demanding Andean roads. Each bicycle is designed in direct collaboration with the customer to achieve a geometry perfectly suited to their use and a design they love. The workshop produces only a few bikes per week, each fully customized. Scarab positions itself in a very high-end, performance-oriented segment.

Production flow

Client collaboration (geometry, components, design) → Frame design → Steel tube selection and cutting → Welding on jig → Custom painting → Assembly → Photo shoot → Delivery

Workshop organization

Production is entirely handmade in a relatively small workshop, with one bike per workstation. The workshop includes R&D offices, a tube cutting area, welding jigs for frame building, a paint shop and a photo shooting room used for marketing. Each tube is stored in specific boxes associated with a frame plan made in design software. Some bikes use hybrid steel/carbon structures, notably with a carbon seat tube. Paintings are sometimes done by artists from local tribes, giving the bikes a strong cultural dimension: the graphics tell the story of the country or specific regions.

Production management analysis

The production model is entirely artisan and made-to-order. The team consists of a small group of craftsmen and designers who prioritize a slow and very precise manufacturing process. Customers choose their components directly with the workshop. Colombia offers an ideal environment for developing high-performance bicycles thanks to mountain roads, high altitude and varied terrain, allowing bikes to be tested in very demanding conditions.

Strengths

• Total customization: geometry, components, paint, all in direct collaboration with the client
• Unique artistic dimension: paintings by local artists, each bike tells a story
• Exceptional testing conditions (altitude, Andean mountain roads)
• Complete traceability: one bike, one plan, dedicated tubes
• Hybrid steel/carbon structures: material innovation on an artisan model

Areas for improvement

• Very low throughput: a few bikes per week, scaling impossible without changing the model
• Strong individual know-how = key person dependency
• No structured visual management observed (no kanban, no tracking board)

Key takeaway

Scarab illustrates a manufacturing model where the bicycle becomes almost a work of art telling a story. The artistic and cultural dimension can be a powerful competitive advantage in the high-end segment, but it relies on a model that is difficult to industrialize. It is the opposite of the Origine model: where Origine industrializes customization, Scarab artisanizes it. This is notably made possible by a relatively low labor cost.