To celebrate both the Japanese company’s 100th anniversary and their long relationship, Trek’s Project One team collaborated with SHIMANO on a unique bicycle. In a vein similar to Sakai’s forging history, inspiration for this special finish came from the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, a form of artistic pottery repair that uses lacquer mixed with precious metals to not only mend but also highlight imperfections in handmade items.
In its own way, this Project one bike brings the seemingly contradictory forces of perfection and imperfection into harmony. It’s a marvel of precision engineering, but it’s not meant just to be marveled at. This bike, like all bikes, is meant to be ridden – to collect scratches and scars that tell of past adventures, which then become part of a greater story.