Solo Rack started with a rental home and a problem most cyclists know too well: nowhere good to put the bike.

Like a lot of renters, I didn't have a garage — just a wall, and a lease that made me think twice about putting holes in it. The racks on the market solved half the problem at best. Multi-bracket systems meant multiple holes I couldn't patch invisibly. Basic hooks left rubber marks and scuffed frames against the wall. And even when a rack worked, it usually looked like it belonged in a garage, not on a wall you actually see every day. None of it felt like a real engineering solution — just compromises stacked on top of each other.

So I set out to design something better: a rack that held a bike securely, protected both the bike and the wall, and required only one anchor point — without looking like hardware store leftovers. Over the next year and a half, that idea went through repeated rounds of prototyping and testing — refining the wheel bracket geometry, the wall protection board, and the load path through a single mounting point until it could reliably hold real bikes, including e-bikes, at real weight.