It began with a cardboard box.

Golf has a strange contradiction at its centre. It is four hours of walking outdoors, in the fresh air, on grass — and almost everybody gets there by sitting in a car, in traffic, staring at the brake lights of the car ahead. You arrive at one of the healthiest things you'll do all week already stiff, already impatient, already slightly annoyed.

Berlin makes this especially silly. The course is a pleasant ride away. There is a bike in the hallway. The only thing standing between the two is that a golf bag is a floppy fabric tube with fourteen sticks in it, and there is no sensible way to put one on a bicycle.

Everything already existed. Nothing fitted together.

Cyclists solved cargo decades ago: panniers, racks, and a hook standard called KlickFix that clicks a bag onto a rear rack in a second and holds it there over cobblestones. Golfers solved carrying decades ago too: a bag with a stand leg that plants itself on the turf while you pick a club.

Both halves were mature, proven, boring technology. They had simply never been asked to be the same object. So in May 2023 the first attempt went onto the rear rack: a cardboard box, a bungee net over the top, and a short ride to find out whether the whole idea was nonsense.

It wasn't nonsense. A load sitting over the rear axle rides better than a bag on your back — no sweat between your shoulder blades, no weight shifting when you stand on the pedals. The cardboard lasted about as long as you'd expect. The idea lasted three years and counting.

Three prototypes, and one that stuck

Version two tried the obvious shortcut — take a soft pannier, attach the top of a golf bag, done — and failed for a reason that turned out to be the most useful thing learned so far: a golf bag can only mount to a rack if it is rigid. That is exactly why no such product sits on a shop shelf today. The rigid wall isn't a compromise to make the mounting work. It's the entire product.

Version three took that seriously: a tall rigid case with a KlickFix rail on the back, a fold-out stand leg on the bottom, a carry handle on top. It has been ridden to golf roughly every week since it was built, through three seasons, and it has never once come off the rack.

The most encouraging thing about v3 has nothing to do with engineering. It is that strangers at the driving range keep walking over to ask where they can buy one. Nobody asked them to. They just see a bike with clubs on the back and want the same thing.

Up to now the honest answer has been: you can't. There was even a small online shop for a while — it quietly sold nothing at all, mostly because there was nothing finished to sell. That is the gap this site exists to close.

Swiss brain, Berlin workshop

The thinking behind VeloCaddie is Swiss: work it out properly, over-engineer the parts that carry load, don't ship anything you wouldn't use yourself for a season first. The building happens in Berlin, by hand, one unit at a time. The mount hardware comes from a German manufacturer that has been making it since long before this project existed.

There is no factory, no investor, and no launch date being promised. There are three prototypes, two more on the workbench, and a set of decisions that would be much better made with input from other people who ride bikes and play golf.

What happens next

Two candidate versions are being built and ridden this season — one where the case is the golf bag, and one where a shell stays on the bike and your bag drops into it. Whichever survives becomes the first VeloCaddie anyone can actually buy. The full build log explains both, honestly, including what broke.

And then there is the part below, which is genuinely the most useful thing on this website: five questions. If you have ever thought about riding to the course, your answers change what gets built.