Tore Juncher Jørgensen of Starfish Bicycles talks step-through frames, single-speeds and why a less serious approach to cycling is sometimes best
Words Paddy Maddison Photography Patrik Lundin
Strava stats, watts per kilo, ultrahigh modulus carbon… in the performance-obsessed world of modern road cycling, the simple joy of getting around on two wheels is easily overlooked. That glorious feeling of cruising along under your own steam can get forgotten when there’s a KoM up for grabs. But Tore Juncher Jørgensen of Starfish Bicycles is on a mission to change that.
From the Starfish workshop in Vester Skerninge, Denmark, Jørgensen crafts what they term ‘soft bikes for soft people’. These aren’t performance machines built for crushing PBs; they’re designed for fun with an emphasis on comfort, and what they sacrifice in speed they compensate for in character.
‘I’ve always been riding bikes,’ says Jørgensen. ‘To begin with it was just a means of transportation, but then around 2017 my sister worked in a bike shop and she gave me her old single-speed bike.
‘I was living in Copenhagen, which is the flattest of flat cities so a single-speed bike is perfect for getting around. It was an eye-opening experience for me and I slowly got into the single-speed scene, dabbled in a bit of fixed-gear touring and just enjoyed riding the bike. I do a lot of DIY and I’ve always been interested in learning about whatever I’m working with, so it was natural for me to just start experimenting with the mechanical side of things, which eventually turned into framebuilding.’
That’s the path that led Jørgensen to set up Starfish Bicycles. It’s a name they picked for a number of reasons, including their love of animals as well as the starfish’s characteristic softness and gender fluidity.
To date, Jørgensen has built a number of weird and wonderful bikes and parts in the Starfish workshop. These include a single-speed MTB, a multi-surface, mile-munching ATB, various racks, forks and even frame bags. But Starfish’s latest creation, and the one Jørgensen chose to show at Bespoked 2023, is their personal mixte-frame randonneuring bike.
‘The idea was to build my take on a rando bike,’ Jørgensen explains. ‘I wanted it to push the limits of softness. It was my goal to find out where that threshold is: at what point does a bike become too soft?’
Jørgensen built the frame using Rene Herse x Kaisei tubes. It was the thinnest tubing available at the diameters they
