Obviously your bike will run fine without little bits of bicycle art and color. But these items can provide an important psychological boost. They’re also a way to make your bike really yours, if you desire.
This is a curated list. Because more expensive products tend to be more prominent in our attention, it may be biased towards the pricey stuff, but I’ll make effort to include less costly items.
Brass and similar materials
This is going to be head badges, top caps, maybe bar end plugs.
Jen Green headtube badges. Her Instagram is here and her site is here
. Prices look to be US$100-200. She may have done a run of head badges for Wilde Cycles.
VéloColour also does custom head badges. They advertise steel, nickel silver, brass, and copper, and they can do small production runs. CA$125 for simple badges, going up to CA$400 at the high end. Not related to the thread, they also do custom paint, garment repair, saddle bags, and maybe a few other things.
Nao Tomii does stem caps and bar end plugs. Some just straight up brasswork, some inlaid with things like turquoise.
Yellow Bird Thread Works does top caps and bar end plugs. They do some work exclusive to Wilde Bicycles.
Keith at Kumo Cycles does a lovely Guilloche stem cap in brass (matching camera shutter button also available, as is a hammered brass option).
Titanium bits
Note that titanium anodizing has limited colors. The color is produced not by dye (as in aluminum anodizing) but by an interference effect, so only a few colors are physically possible.
Agave Finish Works
does titanium anodizing for eeWings cranks, bottle cages, Terske ti valves, seatpost collars, and a few other things. They’ll even refinish your frame!
Joshua Ogle was first introduced by James Huang at Cyclingtips, I think. He makes US$200 titanium lockrings. And he is offering seat clamps and MTB stems.
Firefly Bicycles will sell you seatposts, seat collars, ti spacers, a ti headset, and most interestingly of all, a ti Silca Impero pump. And they’ll anodize them.
Leather
Leather is mainly for bar tape, but you can take a saddle and replace the cover with leather. The downside of leather bar tape is that it lacks padding. It can slip. Putting hockey tape on your handlebars makes it slip less. You should use a leather conditioner periodically. It’s also not suitable if you do a lot of wet riding.
Leh Cycles
does leather handlebar tape and he may also cover saddles. So does Mick Peel, aka Busyman.
Eonkim does handlebar tape, saddle covers, and a few misc items. They only appear to communicate in Korean, though.
I’m not sure if Handlebra is still active, but his site is up. Side note, this guy does not fully trust modern fractional reserve central banking. He would always refer to dollars as frn (Federal Reserve notes). I believe he’s wrong on the merits, but it is kind of funny. I first became aware of leather when this guy mentioned his project on the Paceline forum.
All of these manufacturers offer stitching with colored thread. Eonkim and Busyman will do perforations + dye.
icon at the bottom of your post and select the “Make Wiki” option. This will allow others to contribute to your list. No pressure at all, but just wanted you to be aware of the option if you were interested.