Guy Salens – THE PACK: “I stumbled across this on LinkedIn and couldn’t scroll past it. Taras Kravtchouk, the founder and designer behind Tarform, had written something honest about what it really takes to do less, without losing everything that made you worth following in the first place.”
Tarform builds handcrafted electric motorcycles out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Hand-shaped aluminum, TIG-welded frames, parts grown from plants. Their first bike, Luna, became something closer to sculpture than vehicle. Vera is what came next.
This is Taras, in his own words:
“When we built our first motorcycle, Luna, we didn’t hold back.
It was obsessive.
I was redrawing the silhouette hundreds of times.
Hand-shaped aluminum. 3D-printed brass details.
Hand-welded TIG frames. Parts made out of plants.
Every part was pushed as far as we could take it.
For many of the people who own it, it’s closer to a sculpture than a vehicle.
Then people started asking us to make something smaller. More accessible.
At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
We tried the obvious approach – remove parts, swap components, simplify where we could.
Technically… it worked.
But it didn’t feel right.
It didn’t make sense to take something we built without compromise and turn it into an inferior version of itself. So we stopped.
Vera had to be its own thing, or not exist at all.
What followed wasn’t simplification. It was a redesign.
A different purpose.
Parts that are easier to machine.
More repeatable to build.
But not of inferior quality.
That balance was harder than starting from scratch.
Because it’s easy to remove complexity.
It’s much harder to remove it without losing integrity.
How do you make something lighter without it feeling like less?
How do you design something for everyday use without losing what made it special?
Vera is our answer to that.
It’s not a reduced Luna.
It’s a different expression of the same intent.
Vera is our first pre-production prototype.
If you want to see it, or ride, we’re based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”
More info:
Images: © Tarform – via LinkedIn.
