Ten years ago today, on 20 August 2016, we listed our first headlight decals. There were a handful of models and no idea whether anyone would buy them.
Since then about 3,000 sets a year have gone out to riders in something like fifty countries. This seems like a reasonable moment to explain where the whole thing came from.
It started with a question nobody could answer
Back in 2013 I was running one of the biggest motorcycle magazines in the Czech Republic. That job meant a lot of paddock time, and in the paddock you notice things.
What I noticed was that every World Superbike machine wore headlights that weren't headlights. Race bodywork has no lights in it. There is nothing to light and nothing to break. So the teams put on decals that look like the road bike's headlight, because a Superbike is supposed to look like the bike you can buy.
Then trackday riders started asking where to get them. They had race fairings on their own bikes, and a blank nose looks like an unfinished job.
Nobody made them. Not as a product you could order. You either knew someone in a team, or you cut your own and lived with the result.
So I started drawing them.
What the first three years actually looked like
Getting the shape right turned out to be the easy part. Getting the film right took considerably longer.
The first attempts used ordinary monomeric vinyl, the stuff sign shops use for flat surfaces. It goes on fine and looks good for a month. Then it shrinks, the edges lift, and one hot session later you have a decal that has migrated somewhere it shouldn't be.
A headlight isn't flat. It's a compound curve, it sits right in the airflow, and on a trackday it gets hot, gets pressure-washed and gets brake cleaner on it. What works is polymeric 3M film with a UV laminate over the top. It conforms to the curve, it stays where you put it, and it survives the chemicals. It costs more. It's also the only thing that actually works, so that argument settles itself.
By 2016 the process was repeatable, so the shop went live.
What changed in ten years
The catalogue. A handful of models then, 59 now. Most of that came from riders emailing to ask whether we did their bike. Usually the honest answer was no, and then it was yes a few weeks later.
The method. Every set is drawn from a real machine: photographed, measured, test-fitted, corrected. Not scaled off a press photo. That's why an R6 set fits an R6 and doesn't need trimming to get there.
The speed. These days new bikes get covered while they're still new. The R9, the ZX-4R, the 2025 Panigale, the 2026 ZX-10R were all ready when riders started putting race bodywork on them, not two years later.
The part that still surprises me
Photos. People send them.
A Panigale in Vancouver. A ZX-10R in the United States. An MV Agusta F3 in Germany. A Ducati in Norway. Oli Bayliss ran our decals on an R6. If you had told me that in 2013, while I was cutting vinyl badly in a workshop, I would not have believed it.
Every one of those is somebody who spent their own money on race bodywork and then went looking for the last detail. That's the whole customer in one sentence, and it hasn't changed in ten years.
What's next
More models. Tail light sets across the full catalogue instead of just a few bikes. And a proper guide to trackday light rules, because “do I have to tape my headlight” is still one of the most common questions we get and the answers online are a mess.
If you've bought a set at some point in the last decade, thank you. It genuinely wouldn't have lasted this long otherwise.
Use code 10YEARS for 10% off until 30 September.