The Shop
Would you like to come by the shop? During the week, we are open from 10.00 until 18.00, sometimes later. Saturdays we are usually open between 10.00 and 16.00. If you would like to sit down for a while to talk your next bicycle over with us, please make an appointment in advance.
Welcome to Skt Peders Stræde
Walking down the narrow Skt Peders Stræde just a little north of Strøget, the main pedestrianised shopping zone in downtown Copenhagen, you pass small shops, restaurants and eateries. There are bakeries, a comic-book shop, kiosks and tattoo parlours - and a 400 year old church, the Sankt Petri. This is one of the areas in central Copenhagen that was the last to get running water , and the street lies within what Copenhageners call "Latinerkvarteret" - The Latin Quarter.
Get inside
After passing the restaurant BROR and the small travel agency Grace Tours you reach number 30A. Come on in! Just to the right of the entrance stands an old round wooden table, often covered with bicycle parts, magazines and coffee cups. There’s a vitrine filled with spare parts with a coffee machine on top of it, t-shirts hanging on a home-made iron rail, bicycle frames hanging on every wall, a counter filled with more bicycle parts and Sögreni designs like the lamps and bells. A special wall of the shop is dedicated to saddles and bags from Brooks of England. The shop floor and windows are packed with bicycles, and strange objects and things Søren Sögreni collected from all over the world, many of them from Central and South America. The creation of the bicycles takes place in two different areas of the shop: in the back, with a door leading out into the backyard, and in the part of the shop leading from the sales area up to the office. That's it: Sögreni cannot produce more than two bicycles at once; we’re a long way from mass production here.
We start with the frame and the wheels
When you’ve chosen your size, model and colour, we start by taking one of the frames, which are either hanging in the store in our storage room located a little north of the city. The frames are all ‘new-old’ stock, frames that Søren has been collecting all his life, only purchasing those he could see were of good steel quality and professionally welded. We send the frame (and the fork, and any other parts you have chosen to have in the same colour as the frame) to the paint-shop and it is given three coats of the desired colour. The first coat contains zinc to protect against corrosion. If you’ve opted for a matte finish, it gets a fourth coat of paint. In the meantime, we produce the wheels by hand in the shop. Each wheel has thirty-six spokes, and it takes about an hour and a half for a well trained Sögreni bicycle mechanic to produce and test each wheel.
Mounting the fork and crank-set
Now the frame is back from the paint-shop, and we can start the fun part: building the bicycle. We mount the fork into the head tube with the controlling fittings and bearings that will ensure a stable and smooth build. At this stage we use a lot of our grease, a special blend with a formula that we guard as if it were the secret recipe for Coca-Cola. The grease is one of the most important details: Bicycles built by robots in factories can never be greased as perfectly and thoroughly as we do it, and therefore those bicycles will rust and simply fall apart over time - ours will not. Next comes the crank-set and the bottom bracket - and yes we give them a good portion of grease as well.
And now...
Fenders are mounted, the seat post follows, the stem and the handlebar. All of these parts (except for the seat post) can be painted in the same colour as the frame. It is time for the saddle to be put on, then we mount the wheels (now with their tires on and filled with air), the delta treated chain and the pedals. The pedals are original Sögreni pedals in whichever material you have opted for.
Almost there!
It is time to get the footbrake working, and if you have chosen an extra front brake, this is when we mount it. The delta treated kickstand is put into place, as is the luggage carrier if you opted for that extra. Finally we mount the original Sögreni leather handles, together with the gears if you have chosen them. All Sögreni bicycles are born as single-speed bicycles.
The test ride and the certificate
Everything is checked and adjusted until every nut and bolt, and every detail looks and feels perfect. When we are satisfied with the bicycle, one or two mechanics take it for a short ride in the city (don't worry, we clean it afterwards!) to be 100% sure that everything is fine. And in a sort of sentimental way, a bike from Copenhagen should also have its first contact with the ground right here. We dismount the pedals and turn the handlebar so that the bicycle can fit into the huge carbon box, together with some packing material to protect it. Your bicycle is now ready for shipping, and it will arrive with a certificate, proving that this is an original Sögreni bicycle. The certificate is signed by Søren Sögreni himself.
