20 years of kunstform: the online shop from 2003 to today

Twenty years of kunstform means twenty years of the team, twenty years of jams and sessions. And it means twenty years of kunstform.org. The online shop was there from the start and is the heart of kunstform to this day. It has grown as much as all the other areas in that time.

Sebastian Pospischil registered the domain kunstform.org in 2003. The business registration of 27 October 2003 already lists online sales of bike parts. Since then a few simple HTML pages have grown into a proper software project. We show you how the online shop developed: what the site looked like, what sits behind it, and what has gone through it in twenty years.

In the beginning kunstform.org was a handful of HTML files, written by hand with what one had taught oneself from SELFHTML back then. Orders came by mail. That page still exists, in the Internet Archive, with the Stuttgart flatland spot at the Württembergischer Kunstverein as its backdrop. The team page listed the first team riders: Seppl, Sven Steinbach, Chris Böhm and Daniel Hennig. Many of them still ride today. And the sentence Seppl used to describe the whole thing: kunstform?! saw itself first of all as a distributor for flatland products, but above all it was meant to be a platform, because the aim was not only to offer good parts but to support flatland in every area. Sponsoring belonged to that, and so did contests, jams and parties.

In 2006 there was a real online shop behind it, with a basket, a customer account and a checkout. The homepage carried a welcome text by Seppl that pretty much laid out the programme in advance: "As you can see, the new shop is finally online! It will keep growing over time, and that happens through you too!" And a little further down: "So as not to disappear into the sameness of all the other web shops, we decided to concentrate only on what we really understand: BMX flatland!"

The range was sorted into three categories: hardware, 192 items. Softgoods, 48. Media, 31. 271 products in all. A hit counter ran in the corner, and on 15 August 2006 it stood at 408,564 visits since 25 April 2005. The counter is long gone, the counting is not: since late 2019 alone there have been more than 48 million page views. Two things were in there from the start that we are still proud of: shipping costs staggered by weight, so that a small order stays affordable, and product lists you can sort by weight. It was all signed "Sebastian 'Seppl' Pospischil, shop owner & flatland pro".

And that is how it started: kunstform was a pure flatland shop. Then customers from other disciplines came, first street and park, later BMX race and MTB, and with the demand the range grew step by step. To this day it follows what you are looking for.

Since 2006 we have renewed the layout and the technology behind it again and again: for a long time the version with the wings on both sides and the words BMX MAILORDER, in 2014 the site many still remember, 2017 tidier, and in 2020 the layout that is still the basis today. There was never a complete redesign. We adjusted things and developed them further, the way our customers gave it back to us as feedback. Trends were never the yardstick, only the question of what helps you when ordering. And we use our own shop: as BMX riders we know what you need to find the info and the parts quickly.

At some point more people ordered from their phones than from a computer. We decided on a responsive layout fairly early, one page that adapts to every device, while other shops were still building separate mobile sites. That is why to this day there is exactly one kunstform shop, whether on a phone, a tablet or a computer.

The core of the shop is based on osCommerce, a free shop system from the early years of online retail. Little of it has stayed the way it was: we adapted the system to how we work, extended it piece by piece and kept the technology behind it up to date, from the programming language to the database to how the pages are delivered. What you do not see in those pictures is therefore the larger part. There is a whole apparatus behind the shop these days, programmed ourselves, always around what you as customers needed and what the demand brought with it. That is how the whole system behind it grew step by step and became more professional, with Daniel Fuhrmann leading the way. Technically the shop is state of the art today: it handles several thousand visitors at once without slowing down. What makes that possible is an elaborate caching system, in which finished pages, images in every size and database queries are kept ready so that most requests never reach the database at all. Add to that a CDN in front of the server and current software that is developed further all the time.

The distributors are connected through interfaces, so several times a day the shop reconciles what is available where. If a part for an order is missing, it lands in the ordering basket at the right supplier by itself. Once that basket is big enough, or the oldest line has waited too long, the order goes out on its own. On top of that: warehouse logistics, picking, labels, returns, invoices, price and VAT rules for Germany, the EU and third countries, and a product database that feeds the shop, the search engines and the marketplaces at the same time.

A lot of this shows on your side too: after buying you can still edit an order yourself, add products afterwards, change the quantity or cancel, as long as it has not been packed. A return is registered through our returns form without writing a mail first, and the status of order, shipment and return is in your account at any time.

What you also do not see is how much work went into it. A lot of it was built at night, on weekends, on Sundays and holidays, because a problem had to be solved before Monday's orders came in. Not because anybody demanded it, but because we wanted it to be better, for us and for you. Whatever gets added, the rule is the same as on day one: the customer always comes first.

None of it is spectacular when it works. Which is exactly why it is written down here: it is the reason an order that arrives at eleven at night is often in a parcel the next day.

And then there is the side of it that has nothing to do with code: shelves, boxes, tape. There are days when the warehouse is stacked with finished parcels from floor to ceiling and the DHL van has to come twice. Before Christmas of course, but also in spring when everybody starts riding again, or on the day the new complete bikes arrive and every preorder goes out at once.

Since the first order it has grown to several hundred thousand orders, from more than a hundred thousand different customers. We have shipped to 91 countries. More than a million emails have been answered or sent along the way. Around 14,000 products are online in the shop today. In 2006 there were 271.

The figure that means the most to us is a different one: more than 40,000 people have ordered here more than once. Over 3,400 of them ten times or more. Those are not clicks, those are customers who come back.

There are now around 2,400 reviews on Trustpilot at an average of 4.9 out of 5. Every single one of them was written voluntarily. The one thing praised most often in them: that on the phone or by mail somebody answers who rides BMX themselves and knows the parts. That was the plan in 2003, and nothing about it has changed, even if there are a few more lines of code in between now.

Thank you to everybody who has ordered here over twenty years. How a shop grew out of all this is told by Seppl, Fuhre, Flo and the others in our documentary for the 20th anniversary.

Cheers & ride on
Your kunstform BMX Shop team