Charge custom saddle: here’s ours

Charge are now offering you the chance to design your own custom saddle and our man Oli has done just that. Here’s the finished article.

We’ve told you about the process before. You just go to the Charge website, click on the heading that says ‘custom saddle’, and away you go. It’s easy peasy.

The saddle you get to play with is the popular Charge Spoon that we reviewed here on road.cc ages and ages ago. It’s still a great design. We said of the Spoon: “Good looking, extremely comfortable, light and affordable. An instant classic.” Of course, you can change those looks according to your own taste now.

You get to choose the rail material – either cromoly steel or titanium alloy – and then you pick your own colours for the cover (including leather options), base, bumpers, logos and stitching.

“I was after something to complement my metallic orange Genesis Equilibirum so I went for a black cover with orange stitching, and threw in a blue logo to add a bit of extra interest," says Oli.

“I chose the same colours for the underside, going with a blue base and orange bumpers. There are nine colours to choose from for the base and bumpers so plenty of combinations to allow you to match your saddle to your steed, and there's also a 'shuffle' option if you're looking for something, ahem, unique.”

Oli is our design bloke. He knows about colours and that.

The custom saddles start at £69.99. A leather cover will cost you £20 extra and ti alloy rails are £30 more. Oli went for standard cromoly rails and a leather cover, so his one is £89.99.

Okay, that’s not exactly cheap but custom kit never is. Charge have to make each one of these individually and they deliver within 30 days. There are [gets out calculator] 134,784 different combinations you could opt for here so you’re very unlikely to see anyone else with exactly the same saddle as you.

So how does Oli rate the finished saddle?

“On the whole I’m really pleased with it. I've had an off-the-peg Spoon for quite a while so I knew it would be comfy. If I’m being picky, the on-screen colours and the actual colours of the saddle don’t match exactly, and I noticed some stress marks in the light blue plastic around the rail bed, but nothing serious.

“It’s a cool-looking saddle and I’ve found it really comfortable over the few weeks I’ve been riding it. Plus, the biggest positive is that I have a distinctive saddle that’s built to my own design, and I can be pretty confident no one else will have one exactly the same.”

So don’t go copying Oli’s design or he’ll be really upset, and you know what those artistic types are like. If you’d like to have your own custom saddle made, head over to Charge’s website.