Tunk Times #7
Summer holidays have been had and the team is back in the office(s). A three week bike tour, where one’s attention is (almost) completely on other things than work is quite the refresher!
In the last few weeks after the preorder launch, we have gotten a surprising amount of coverage as Finland’s largest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat did an article on Tunk, and briefly afterwards bikepacking.com also did an intro piece on our frameset. You can read them at HS (link) and at bikepacking(.com) (link). The company’s existence seems a lot more real and less precarious now. Just seeing our name in print (well, online) makes it all feel much more tangible.
The preorders have had a pretty good start, and the largest size, 65, is even sold out! We only ordered a very small amount of the extreme ends of the size scale, thinking there are not as many customers. Seems we were wrong... Though we havent sold a single 53 yet.
What is also a bit surprising is that our customers are so international. We thought we would mainly sell in Finland the first few months, but actually about 90% of orders so far are from outside Finland and mostly outside EU even. The feedback has been very positive and we feel seen, thank you for that!
We are finalizing the decal design, which will be a bit avant garde, though simple as well. The production fork blades are being made at Reynolds around this time and the framesets should be ready around end of august. So a little bit of delay again, but nothing major.
In the previous Tunk Times we showed a sample of the Dark Bronze color, we still need to figure out a way to display the Racing Burgundy, as we don’t have a physical sample of the very final version at hand. Here’s the powder manufacturers page on the color, which gives some idea:
https://www.prismaticpowders.com/shop/powder-coating-colors/PMB-5941/racing-burgundy
The clear coat will be a foggy semi matte, which makes the color a bit lighter maybe.
We are working on a “How to load up a Tunk” article which will explain the carry capacity, rack and bag compatibility etc of the Hike-Use. This should be ready in a week or so.
We will also soon show the final fork designs now that we have test samples back from Zedler’s laboratory, and maybe write a little piece about the whole fork saga.
Until next time
Tunk crew
