Jakob Lorre

Jakob Lorré keeps returning to one word when he explains why Cyclowax works: clean. He says the question he always asks athletes is "Why do you like Cyclowax?" and the answer is almost always "Because it's clean" . For a rider like Hanne De Vet, that means both marginal performance gains, since "every watt counts," and a practical, unglamorous benefit that rarely gets discussed: no chain oil on the bike case, the race kit, or her hands . Lorré treats that dual appeal, watts plus tidiness, as the emotional core of the product, and he pairs it with a much larger claim about the underlying technique itself. On the SuperNova podcast he states flatly that he believes hot wax will "take over the market" and that Cyclowax intends to "change the market with hot wax" ⁷. The cleanliness message is the accessible hook; the belief that hot waxing is simply a better technology is the conviction underneath it.

That conviction is inseparable from his philosophy about execution. In Dutch-language interviews he is blunt: "Het succes is 1% een idee hebben en 99% uitwerken" — success is one percent having the idea and ninety-nine percent working it out ⁸. He backs this with an aphorism about ambition without follow-through, "De straten liggen geplaveid met mislukte genieën," the streets are paved with failed geniuses ⁸, and with concrete advice drawn from his own career: "Als je een idee hebt, dan zit de kracht hem in het doen, en blijf niet te lang vast zitten in uw plan" ⁸. He traces this lesson back to a mentor who refused to hear his business plan and instead demanded a quote for a single video, forcing him to produce something concrete rather than dream on paper ⁸. That same bias toward doing over planning shows up years later in the Cyclowax story he tells on LinkedIn, moving from "melting wax in my garage" to shipping a "purpose-built wax heater" worldwide , from an idea to a product thousands of cyclists were waiting for .

Underneath the operational hustle sits a more ambitious, almost proprietary vision of the category. He openly says, "Als ik eerlijk moet zijn, dan wil ik de grootste leverancier worden van kettingen" — if he's honest, he wants to become the largest supplier of chains ⁸. On the podcast this hardens into strategy: Cyclowax's Strava-connected app gives them what he calls an unmatched asset, "there is no other party besides us that has such an amount of data on real life chainware in the market" ⁷. He frames bike maintenance today as purely reactive and wants Cyclowax to pioneer a proactive model built on that data ⁸. The technical frontier he keeps pointing to is removing the last barrier to adoption entirely: "The holy grail in hot waxing is that you don't have to take the chain off," and he says they already have patented working prototypes to do it ⁷. He backs the demand for hot wax itself with a number he cites directly, that a test program "in total converted about 150,000 cyclists to hot wax" ⁷, and with a striking retention figure: "80% of all those test riders were like, I'm never switching back to oil" ⁷.

He is equally direct about the mechanics of building a physical product company, which he treats as a different discipline than the service business he ran before. He describes judging categories by value-to-weight ratio, contrasting a 100-gram, fifty-euro supplement shipment with Cyclowax's three-kilogram, two-hundred-plus-euro kit, as a way of explaining why some e-commerce categories scale easily and others do not ⁷. On hardware specifically, he insists that founders must "bridge the gap between the dreamed-up product and what is actually manufacturable," accounting for part count, packaging, assembly cost, and import duties from day one ⁷, a lesson he applied literally by reverse-engineering an off-the-shelf leg-waxing heater from the beauty industry into Cyclowax's own device ⁷.

Brand and community are the other half of how he talks about the company, and he's explicit that he wants Cyclowax to be more than hardware. He describes flying a single customer to the Tour de France each year instead of investors or press, because "there's nothing like bringing a customer behind the scenes of the world's biggest cycling race," and because he still remembers his own first time there . He says plainly, "I've always wanted Cyclowax to be more than just great products" . That same instinct shows up in his account of partnering with LeBlanq around its "Joyriding" philosophy, standing alongside Johan Museeuw and Greg Van Avermaet, and concluding that cycling is "ultimately about enjoying the ride," a sentiment he says has always been close to what Cyclowax is about . Mil