Hi, I'm Will.
This is my journey to starting Auren Bikes.

I've been taking bikes apart for as long as I can remember.

I got my first bike at the age of 9. It was a Kmart clunker, the kind most kids start on.

It was good enough to feel the freedom of two wheels, and bad enough to make me want a better one, but I didn't have the money.

What I did have was a shed full of old steel bikes my dad had picked up at garage sales for ten dollars each. They'd been sitting for years, rusted, seized, forgotten. So I taught myself to bring them back. YouTube, a set of spanners, and a lot of trial and error.

Restoring those bikes became the hobby that ran through my whole adolescence. The passion grew beyond fixing to optimising for performance, comfort and how I liked to ride.

At fifteen, I discovered that people were selling decent, slightly-outdated bike parts cheaply on eBay. I wanted to upgrade from the 80s steel bike restorations, so I bought secondhand components and a carbon frame to build my own road bike.

The bikes taught me to think like an engineer.

By the time I finished school, the tinkering had a name. I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, so I went to study it at NYU Abu Dhabi and applied to run the university's bike program. The brief was simple: get more students riding, and keep the fleet maintained. I did the same for a city bike-share program in Abu Dhabi.

Maintaining a fleet and talking to hundreds of cyclists, I got a sense of common issues, questions and moments of joy cycling can bring. You see the same issues, over and over, across hundreds of bikes. After a while, you stop asking "how do I fix this again?" and start asking how do we design better bikes.

Back on my old carbon bike, something didn't sit right.

When I came back to Melbourne, I wanted to work on bikes, but the engineering roles in the industry were few and far between. So I took a job at a well-known bike shop and entered the local ecosystem.

I was back riding the carbon road bike I built as a teenager. And the longer I rode it, the more two things bothered me: the fit was never quite mine, and the feel of the carbon wasn't what I wanted.

This part is just my experience, not a verdict on the material; plenty of riders love carbon. But for me, hitting a bump, the frame felt hollow. It didn't give me the confidence or the planted, stable feeling I was after. I started thinking about a new build. One that fit me properly, in a material I actually trusted.

Titanium does several things at once that nothing else manages. It's strong, light, and genuinely durable, it doesn't fatigue the way aluminium does, and it doesn't rust, so you can run it raw and unpainted and it still looks new in thirty years. It takes the edge off rough roads instead of transmitting every hit.

But the reason that mattered most to me was customisation. A titanium frame is built tube by tube to a rider's geometry. Carbon needs moulds, which means standard shapes, standard sizes, and a fit that's close for most people and perfect for almost none. For someone two metres tall, "close" had never been good enough. Titanium was how I could finally build a frame around the rider, not the other way around.

The day I met Dave.

One day I was on the shop floor, and Dave walked in and approached me and said "Do you sell titanium bikes?" My ears were immediately burning. The store didn't sell titanium bikes, but we talked for 30 minutes on our mutual desire for a custom titanium bike. We kept in touch, and shortly after, Dave took a leap of faith and trusted me to custom-build him a titanium bike from scratch. I built his, and I built my own alongside it, the bike I'd been wanting for years. Both turned out better than we hoped.

Then it spread by word of mouth, the way it still does. One of the mechanics at the shop saw the builds and wanted a hardtail for the trails. A regular customer wanted a gravel bike for long weekends away. The store manager wanted a road bike. Every frame built around the person who'd ride it.

With 5 custom titanium builds under my belt, I had a portfolio. The thing I'd been doing for fun since I was a kid was something people genuinely wanted. So I decided to build a business around it: doing work I'm passionate about, and putting my engineering into the thing I care about most.