COMPANY: SK Forged
ROLE: Head of Design, sole designer
SCOPE: All creative assets including branding, physical products, web presence and promotional materials

You may not be familiar with the custom car industry, but when it comes to wheels all the well known styles were thought up years, sometimes decades ago. These archetypes are then modified slightly by each new brand. Risks are not taken and the only real choices customers get to make is what brand name they want on their split five spoke wheels, or what logo they want on their basket weave mesh wheels.

We shook up the industry by letting customers tell us how they picture their dream wheels and making them a reality. By doing this we created a closer relationship to the community and tapped directly into current design trends as they formed. This made big waves and because of my design work SK Forged went from an idea in the garage to a small, but globally known company with less than $50,000 of initial investment.

Wheels make a visual statement, but also keep a car attached to the road. Part failure was never an option, so my design process had to be perfect. I created a repeatable process that takes me, and the client, from sketch to 3D model to FEA stress simulation to manufacturing.

I utilized Solidworks software to model and run FEA stress simulations on our wheels. Over the 8 years I worked with SK Forged, I learned and pushed the limits of both the software and the CNC manufacturing process. By the end, many of our wheels made use of advanced undercutting techniques using ball end mills to create light and strong I-beam shaped spokes. We were one of the first companies to feature this technique throughout our product line.

Our wheels were used on 1200hp competition drift cars that occasionally spun into gravel at 100mph, and a couple customer cars where in road collisions, but the wheels never experienced a critical failure.

In an industry where copying other brands became the standard, and most brands are owned by large holding companies, I was able to make SK Forged stand out, without the help from large monetary investments and brand deals. This was done by finding a way to forge connections with car community members and car builders directly, and designing products specifically for them.

It gives me much pride to see photos and videos on Instagram and other media sources of my wheels on cars all over the world. Although it has not been easy, helping this brand grow has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.