Biancaneve

I – Introduction
II – The idea
III – The design Process
IV – The result

Biancaneve Introduction

Two friends, designers for passion and profession, jazz and wine lovers, and the reinterpretation of an Honda CX500 from 1979, dismounted piece by piece, stripped to the bare metal, repaired and restored until the mechanics came back to their original reliability.

Right over it, a deep body and user experience redesign to give a new essence to its shape, use and perception.

Biancaneve is a limited series production of twenty motorcycles, each exemplar will be customized based on the costumer’s requests (colors, materials, accessories and muche more), so that each piece of the series will be even more unique and exclusive.

Biancaneve The Idea

What are the basics for a product to be considered a motorcycle?

Are you sure?
Try to think about it again.
Try to remove everything that is unnecessary.
What’s left?

Two wheels, an engine and a way to ride it.

Why does it appear in our minds and thoughts exactly in the way we have always pictured it?
Isn’t there any other way to imagine it?

At the beginning of this journey, the possible result of our work wasn’t that important to us.
What we were trying to define and master was the approach, the creative process.
While working on it, what gave us energy were the thousands of questions we kept raising.

Where the rest of the world saw prerequisites, we tried to see opportunities.
We had no idea, then, but Biancaneve was already there.

Biancaneve Design Process

Nowadays, most of the design processes are devoided of any principle: they just take what exists and try to do it better.
Cooler.
In line with the Marketing trends.

Instead, our goal is: deciding what is worth keeping and discarding the rest.
Keeping only the essence of what we want to communicate and do it simply.

A motorcycle lives mostly two stages:
● When it’s parked it’s a personal symbol, something that communicates a lot about the rider’s charisma, something that represents him. A certain type of motorcycle can speak for an adventurous traveler or an adrenaline-addicted person that is searching for speed and shivers. But it can also represent a person who wants a tailor-made product based on his personality, as it happens in the cafè racer and chopper world.
● Then there is the driving involvement. You reach the bike, start the engine and the experience is thrilling because of its speed and its inborn feeling of danger: a rush of freedom.
The riding experience is something essential, that is innate in the motorbike. You could improve it of course but we decided just to ensure keeping it smooth.
The aesthetic side is a whole ‘nother story.

Biancaneve is our first answer.
It wants to be a sculpture to look at when it’s parked and give a smooth experience when ridden.
Nothing more, nothing less.

This approach gave us the opportunity of starting to model it as a pure shape, not caring much about the driver position, with the result of a body that seems to flow even if it’s still. Only after that, we started taking care of the riding experience.
Ensuring a comfortable driving position and an efficient and easy way of using Biancaneve.
You open it. You sit on it. And you ride it.

Now you have to decide which is its most suitable environment: is it better in your living room, parked in the center of an historic Italian square, or in a modern art museum?