“We are proud to design and build our bikes in Britain”: Orro on reshoring its assembly, innovation, and plans to go international

Britain’s Orro Bikes has built a strong following over the past decade off the back of an ever-expanding range that’s designed and developed in-house, and it has just moved into a brand new 25,000ft² facility in Sussex where it plans to assemble the entire lineup. We paid Orro a visit to check out the new site, find out why it’s so big on building up bikes under its own roof, and take a look at some of the 2023 additions to the range.

If you’re not familiar with Orro, a huge sheet just inside the front door helpfully gets you up to speed in no time.

“At Orro we are proud to design and build our bikes in Britain.

“We produce beautifully engineered bicycles in the heart of Sussex in the South Downs National Park, an area of outstanding natural beauty; an inspiration and a perfect testing ground for our bikes.

“Orro was conceived to meet a wonderfully simple brief – to create the best and most stylish bikes for serious riders.”

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We’ve been reviewing Orros on road.cc for a few years and we’ve been impressed by the design, the attention to detail – the brand obsesses over everything from frame materials to small design features and paintwork – and the performance out on the road… And out on the tracks and trails too, because Orro offers a wide range of gravel bikes.

The big sheet by Orro’s front door also features a picture of a martlet, a mythical bird that appears on the heraldic shield of Sussex. Who’d have thought you’d be reading about martlets and heraldic shields on road.cc today? Being from Sussex is a big part of the brand’s identity. Right from the start, Orro focused on designing and developing its bikes here, and although the framesets are made in the Far East, all of its bikes will be assembled in-house at its new facility near Hailsham, the brand having just moved over from its previous place at the foot of Ditchling Beacon.

“This reshoring is about who we are,” says Orro Chairman Ian Wilson (above left). “For me, it’s very exciting that we’re under one roof because it’s about our general community here and it’s about controlling standards. A lot of our technicians have been trained in the way that we do something, and a lot of them have been trained by Campagnolo and other brands as well. It’s about bringing them through their Cytech training [accreditation schemes for bicycle technicians] and about them being part of the Orro family, if you like.

“So the reshoring is to do with the standards but it’s also to do with who we are. We are happier with the fact that we build our bikes here. They feel more like our own bikes than something that’s built overseas.

“We had a vision 10 years ago when we started that everything would be assembled in the UK. It takes you a little while to get there, but now that we’re there, we have to be commercial. The challenge for us is to offer artisan quality on a commercial scale.”

Ian says that the Orro way of doing things is similar to that of many other European brands in other sectors.

“Quite a few years ago, about 2014, we’d just started Orro and it was going quite well. I was on an aeroplane and there was a video about the Lamborghini factory.

“What they do in Italy is design the car, the body shape and so on. The carbon shell and carbon tub are made somewhere completely different and shipped to them. They spec the best wheels for their type of driving, they spec the best Recaro seats, the best Brembo brakes, the best transmission, and that’s exactly what we do. That’s when it occurred to me that Orro is a manufacturer in the same way, it’s just a different way of manufacturing from many years ago when brands like Ferrari or whoever made more on-site.

“We design everything on-site, we spec the best wheels, the best brakes from Shimano, SRAM or whoever, and then we assemble it here, so seeing how Lamborghini works was quite an inspiration, giving us confidence in who we are.”

Orro bikes have been developed in-house since day one. The brand owns the designs and moulds so you’ll never see the same frame badged up and sold by anyone else.

“We could have created a brand the easy way,” says Orro CEO Paul Butler. “We could have used a load of open mould frames and stuck our own colours and decals on them and been successful. We’ve done it the hard way, but it’s the right way. This is 100% us. These bikes are 100% developed on Sussex roads.”

Orro’s first model was the Gold, introduced as a gran fondo bike for the UK.

“The original Gold is 10 years old now,” says Ian. “Paul and I did the Dragon Ride and the Etape du Tour together and we wanted to develop something for a lot of challenge riders. Some of them were trying to ride the same bike as Bradley Wiggins, whether that was the right geometry for them or not, and we decided we wanted to develop a bike for UK sportives.”

The Gold was – and still is – designed for getting in the big miles quickly and in comfort: lightweight and stiff but with a more relaxed geometry than a full-on race bike, and with a little more stability too (the one pictured above is from 2015).

Since then Orro has introduced the Venturi aero road bike – which is just about to get added to the UCI’s List of Approved Models of Framesets so it can be raced at any level – and its Terra bikes in various materials and different configurations for road and gravel. It has used also incorporated innovative materials technology designed to improve performance, like spread tow carbon from British materials brand Sigmatex to reduce weight on the road and Innegra in the gravel lineup to provide protection from pinging stones.

The common denominator, Orro says, is that all of the bikes are designed for the types of riding that are popular with the team or people they know.

“We were early adopters of gravel because of the sort of riding that people were doing around here,” says Ian.

Orro’s past and present sites are close to the South Downs Way, for instance.

“As with the Gold, we were designing for what people ride in the UK,” Paul says. “I don't think there’s another manufacturer in the UK that can offer a gravel bike in steel, titanium, aluminium and carbon.”

A recent introduction to the range is the Terra E electric bike that we reviewed on road.cc earlier in the year.

> Check out our review of the Orro Terra E Shimano GRX 1x E-bike 

Paul says, “We thought about an e-bike for the road, but is that right for the UK? We haven’t got those long 20km climbs where it’s actually going to be a benefit. If a slower rider goes on a club run with an e-road bike, they’ll still get dropped because the assistance will cut out at 15mph, whereas they’ll stand a chance of staying with faster riders up Ventoux or something because everyone else will be riding slower – but we don’t have those climbs in the UK.

“We love gravel so it made sense that we did a gravel e-bike. But then it had to look like a bike – so for us it needed to have a rear wheel motor, not something that changed the look at the bottom bracket and down tube area. We obsessed for a long time over which electrical assistance system to have.”

Orro went for the FSA System HM1 hub motor which offers smooth power delivery.

“It had to handle well too,” says Paul. “That was important to us, and weight was the hardest thing to achieve because we wanted it under 13kg. We didn’t want a generic e-bike, we wanted an evolution of the Terra range with the same geometries as the Terra C.”

Check out what Stu Kerton thought of the Orro Terra E in our review. 

The Terra S steel bike and the Terra Ti titanium bike are also new in the 2023 range after being a couple of years in the making, their introduction delayed a little by the Covid pandemic.

The Terra S, which we first caught sight of at a trade show last spring, is built around a chromoly frame and a carbon fork.

“The Terra S has done really well already,” says Paul. “When gravel was a new thing, we had the original Terra G as a do-it-all gravel bike. When most people buy a gravel bike they’re probably not going to ride it for more than four or five hours at a time so they need some luggage capacity but they don’t need everything. They’re more concerned about it being light and agile.

“But if you're going to do bike packing or adventure riding, you don't care so much about the weight because you’re carrying a tent. The guys who are away for days at a time are more interested in titanium and steel. They’re more worried about how strong the frame is and how much stuff you can bolt to it.”

Hence the Terra S has loads of mounts for carrying gear. You get three cage mounts on the down tube and seat tube so you can choose a bottle position that avoids frame bags if necessary, and further mounts on the underside of the down tube and on the fork.

It comes with a neat-looking head tube, an oversized seat tube, and a flattened top tube that’s designed to help keep a bag in place.

The Terra Ti uses the same geometry as the existing Terra C but it’s made with hydroformed 3Al/2.5V titanium with a 6Al/4v cast bottom bracket shell which takes a T47 threaded BB. It comes with mounting points for water bottles – including additional mounts on the underside of the down tube – racks, mudguards, a top tube bag… you name it.

You also get semi-integrated cable routing, meaning that everything ducks inside through the top of the head tube leaving plenty of bag space up front.

We’ve just taken delivery of an Orro Terra Ti so stay tuned for a review on road.cc in the next few weeks.

Orro has also been working hard on a tri bike and a super light version of the Venturi aero road bike: the Venturi S.

“The goal with the Venturi S was to make a full aero bike and get it to the UCI’s 6.8kg minimum weight limit,” says Paul. “The medium frame weight, painted and with the alloy components on it, is 820g. Built up, it comes in at 6.7kg and that’s not easy to do if you want a full aero frame design. There’s a lot of material there. It’s far easier on a frame with skinny tubes.

“The weight saving is down to a lot of work from us, the factory engineers, and most importantly from the guys at Sigmatex. We’re using a very expensive fibre from Sigmatex called STO36 that allows us to achieve the weight. We can use a different layup process which means we don’t have to use as much fibre to get the same results.

“We’ve been riding the prototypes for months and it gives a real top-end performance. For me, when you’re cornering, that’s the real difference between the S and the STC [the existing spread tow fibre version of the Venturi]. The S tracks better and you can definitely jump out of a corner faster because of the low weight. It’s more responsive.

“Because of weight, it’s only ever going to be available in a stealth finish, and in high-end builds. We might be able to offer a different matt finish but it’s impossible for us to offer gloss colours because you’re looking at an extra 60g for a clear coat on a frame.”

Of course, you have to pay extra for the lighter weight of the Venturi S. That’s the way cycling works. A complete bike built up with a Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 groupset is £8099.99 with an Ultegra Di2 version £6,599.99. SRAM Red eTap (£8,999.99) and SRAM Force eTap (£7,299.99) models are available too, while the frame is £2,599.99.

Orro has clearly been busy both in terms of bike development and production; where does it want to go from here?

Well, in the short term, there are a couple of other tech innovations in the pipeline that we're not allowed to tell you about yet. Trade secrets. Commercially sensitive. That kind of stuff. Beyond that, though?

“Our internal policy is one of constant development, so there will be tweaks to the bikes every year,” says Paul. “A change might not even be visual, it could be something like different moulding technologies. Anything that’s out there that’s available to us, we’ve got to make sure we put that technology into our frames.”

Ian says, “Every time we do a new product, there has to be a reason for it. Does it fit in with what we do? Is it for riding we do? If so, how do we develop it to be as good as it can be. And then we have the more value-minded products where we trickle down that technology, so the Gold Evo has the same geometry as the Gold STC.

“It would be too brash to say that we’re taking on the big boys or we’re going to be the next Specialized or the next Trek. They do a fantastic job but that’s not what we’re trying to be. We’re a specialist performance company. We don't want to be making everything for everybody. We’re trying to do everything our own way.

“We have the vision to be an important international bicycle company and what that means is that we don't lose sight of our DNA.

“The values that we set out for Orro at the beginning – quality, performance, innovation, style – these are as important today as they were at the outset. On top of that: Britishness.

“The key thing is that we don’t lose sight of that DNA, which is why I’m so pleased that this new home is in the South Downs because this is who we are. Yes, we do want to become international, we have an aspiration for that, but by bringing our values to that so we won't compromise what we do.”

Find out more about Orro here.