20 years of kunstform (2005 - 2007): almost over before it really started

In 2005 kunstform was a good two years old, and the first real online shop had just gone live. The years up to 2007 were the ones in which the shop was least at home: it ran out of a shared flat in Stuttgart, then from Karlsruhe, and at the end of 2007 it arrived in the Heilbronner Straße. Along the way it was almost over before it really started.

Seppl had an internship semester and his diploma thesis ahead of him and went to his sponsor adidas in Erlangen and Herzogenaurach. So in 2005 kunstform moved: to Daniel Fuhrmann aka Fuhre, and his flatmate Simon. The shop was run out of their flat until 2006.

Studying by day, packing the orders in the evening, taking the parcels along to university the next morning and dropping them at the DHL parcel shop in the afternoon. It was simply what worked at the time.

Fuhre was a BMX flatland pro himself in those years, on the KHE Bikes team. KHE made his own bar, the DaFu Bar, and from 2007 his signature bike, the KHE Dafunction, which is still in our product archive today. A short clip by the FlatArt Crew from 2006 shows how he rode back then.

On the side, the online shop kept growing in those years. Fuhre and Simon both studied computer science and wanted to try their freshly learned programming skills on a real project. That is how the first custom functions and automations found their way into the shop. The shop you are reading this in started exactly there.

From 2006 to 2007 Raiko Biering took over. Raiko is a friend of Fuhre's from the Eberswalde connection, worked at KHE at the time and on the side ran a shop much like kunstform, Pigwoodsports. That made him the best person there could have been for those years: Fuhre was in Abu Dhabi, among other places, riding shows, and so Raiko was the only one who could carry it back then. He managed all the orders from near Karlsruhe, and we are grateful to him to this day that he took it on.

In the winter of 2007 Seppl went to Mallorca for a freedombmx cover shoot. While he was standing in front of the cathedral in Palma, the news came from home that he was going to be a father. The photo from that shoot became the cover of freedombmx 79, published in early 2008, with a long interview with Seppl inside.

At the end of 2007 it was unclear whether kunstform would go on at all. Then Flo Sailer said: I will do it. He brought the shop back to Stuttgart and ran it under his own name. Flo had been close to it from the start: he had begun BMX together with Seppl in Munich, had lived with him for a long time in the shared flat where kunstform had started, and had filled in there every now and then. On top of that, with his FlatArt Crew he had built the events that held the Stuttgart scene together, first of all the contest series Battle in da Club. So it all fit together, the crew, the series and the shop.

From then on the headquarters was room 0.44 at Heilbronner Straße 7, the old railway directorate right by the main station. In 2006 the company "Raum auf Zeit" had sublet the building as the H7 startup centre, to around 80 small companies from fashion, graphics, music and design, plus the club Rocker 33. Back then the H7 was a well-known address in Stuttgart, and kunstform was one of the companies in it, as a warehouse and an office to begin with.

In 2008 Fuhre came back from Abu Dhabi and decided to keep programming the shop and to support Flo in what he had planned. And Seppl never really left: he took a job at an online marketing company and supported Flo and Fuhre wherever he could. A year later the warehouse and office in the Heilbronner Straße became the first real store with opening hours. But that is the next story.

The Battle in da Club series can still be watched today, on the FlatArt Crew's YouTube channel, here the first stop of the 2007 tour.

What those years felt like is something Seppl, Flo and the others tell themselves in our documentary for the 20th anniversary.

All the best & Ride on
Your kunstform BMX Shop Team