Wouldn't it be amazing if you had a helmet that you could fold down like a piece of origami and put in your pocket? This is a thought familiar to anyone who has commuted by bike, tried to stash cycling kit in their bag and found to their frustration that the helmet takes up all the space inside, leaving no room for anything else. Ten years ago architectural designer Colin Herperger decided he was going to do something about it and now his company, Ventete – from French vent (wind) and tête (head) – has brought to market a revolutionary inflatable helmet that not only folds down like the originally imagined piece of origami to 10% its original size but also is performing better in impact tests than the traditional type made with expanded polystyrene foam (EPS) and has won a slew of industry awards including Red Dot and IPSO.
Consisting of 11 interconnected inflatable chambers made from a high-tenacity nylon and reinforced with glass-fibre ribs, the Ventete aH1 inflates in around 30 seconds via a standard Presta valve. It has an integrated pressure gauge and ships with an electric mini pump.
“It seemed technically very fascinating and very difficult, or on the edge of possibility,” says Herperger. “I was doing a PhD at UCL, and had started thinking about it on the sidelines. We began with 3D printing, and then got into advanced technical textiles for a very strong impact performance system. And what’s interesting is that it began as that desire for collapsibility, but through the development of the project, what we've actually created is a new headwear impact technology.”
Herperger is talking to Rouleur at Ventete's Hackney office/workshop/lab with his head of design Sam Davies and head of technology Patch Perez. We are surrounded by the machines that Ventete uses to test ideas and create prototypes, including a high-frequency welding machine that would normally be used in the medical industry to bond the edges of vessels such as blood bags, or in the marine industry to seal inflatable structures. For Ventete, it was key to turning the collapsible inflatable helmet into reality. “We had to invent the technology,” says Herperger. ”Typically, many companies will design something and send it off to a manufacturer to develop those drawings into the product. But for us the manufacturing system to make this helmet fundamentally didn't exist. So we started in a very small studio in Bermondsey, got this welding machine and started testing out ways to translate some of the 3D-printed ideas into the next level, using advanced technical textiles with it. That was the beginning of what has become Ventete. We've developed a helmet but we've also developed a system for manufacturing along the way.” The helmets are now manufactured in Switzerland using Ventete's method, while all the design and prototyping takes place at the workshop London, where we're standing talking.
The Ventete helmet is certified to EU and UK (BS EN 1078:2012+AI:2012) testing standards but in a third-party test carried out by HEAD Lab at Imperial College London, it was found to perform 44% better in a linear impact than the best-performing EPS helmet chosen from a study of 30 helmets – far beyond the requirements of the standards. According to the test, the peak linear acceleration (PLA) was lower for the Ventete compared with EPS due to “the nearly twice as long impact duration of the air-filled helmet”. The Ventete helmet’s overall rotational risk was slightly lower than the EPS helmet ranked middle. The test concluded: “This study shows the great promise of air-filled helmets for mitigating both linear and rotational brain injury risks in cycle incidents, while addressing the portability user requirement.”
Herperger explains: “They [HEAD Lab] were fascinated, because they're curious as to where safety technology is going. And before coming across Ventete, they thought that air would be the ultimate way of absorbing impact, better than foam. And quite quickly, that’s what we started to find in our testing. In an impact, you're trying to soften the blow to the head so that it lessens the strain on the brain. With the pneumatic structural system we’re able to have a much deeper area of impact depth so you get a softer curve, a longer absorption. We're very proud that we can point to their research and say that they found Ventete was 44% better than the best of all in linear impact. For rotational impacts we’re in the top third of the spectrum, highly competitive with and on the same bar as MIPS in terms of rotational.”
The aH1 includes a padding liner developed with Rheon Labs featuring a non-Newtonian superpolymer. The liner is soft and flexible in its natural state to adapt to your head for a superior fit. On impact, the material stiffens dynamically, shearing in multiple axes to dissipate energy and protect the head from rotational impacts. For easier understanding of how this works, an example of a 'non-Newtonian' substance is the mix of cornflour and water, which is liquid when stirred slowly but behaves like a solid when stirred vigorously.
The best-known independent helmet rating is carried out by Virginia Tech in the USA – does Ventete aim to rank there? Sam Davies explains: “There's slight differences between the European standard of testing and the American standard of testing [in the US the test failure threshold is 300G whereas it’s 250G in Europe]. This year, we're moving to get the American certification, and as we do our first point of call is to Virginia Tech to have them do the same study.” According to Ventete, HEAD Lab aspires to be the European Virginia Tech and has a growing catalogue of helmets it has tested independently called HIPER (helmet impact protection effectiveness rating) that’s funded by the Road Safety Trust.
Clearly, inflatable helmets have significant advantages, both in terms of impact performance and portability – but perhaps 10 years ago, when Herperger first thought about that ‘origami’ helmet, was there a market or even an appetite for it? Davies continues: “In terms of the development of interest in cycling and mobility, it's massively changed. And largely the electric bike has allowed a lot more people to get into cycling. At that time, the Boris Bike scheme in London had begun, the general public had more access to cycling as a mode of transport, and we were intrigued. It was the prediction that we were working on. The three of us all come from an architecture background, and architecture is not only design and the execution of design but also the study of culture and looking at where our culture is going. Cycling as transport has become much more present within our culture than it was 10 years ago and a lot of people are looking quite carefully at the challenge of, how is the cycle helmet going to change for the future? Cycling has become much more diverse, more accessible… cyclist identity has gone from being quite cellular to a part of daily life where people jump on bikes: they might get a Lime bike to work and a bus home. And as that's happened, safety is trying to keep up with it, and so people are trying to make helmets that fit with that lifestyle.”
Herperger continues: “We're delighted that nobody else has really been able to do what we’re doing, because that's always a fear. When you're making a fundamentally new technology, there's a long time frame to develop it, it's incredibly difficult to bring it to market, and yet more so to make one that moves the bar forward in terms of safety performance. So we're happy to be on this side of that journey.”
Although nobody else has done exactly what Ventete has done, there have been at least two relatively high-profile attempts at using air technology to protect heads against cycling impacts, the most memorable being by Swedish company Hövding which, like Ventete, won awards for its design. Rather than making an inflatable helmet, the Hövding system was an airbag concealed inside a collar that inflated when accelerometers detected a crash. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2023.
“Hovding was a fascinating technology that was very different from Ventete,” says Perez, “but it helped transition consumer trust from EPS to an air system, and that might have helped pave the way for Ventete. Hövding works through its massive depth and squishiness, whereas people are surprised by how rigid out helmet is when you pick it up. Actually extraordinarily strong. We've driven cars over it and it's been absolutely fine. That's part of what those structural ribs are doing, adding that extra layer of rigidity which does a lot for the performance, but also does a lot just for the consumer confidence in it.”
Davies agrees: “We always had a lot of respect for Hövding, because it was a very challenging thing to make, and it was extraordinarily safe, by far the safest thing that you could wear. There were issues around deployability, and that sort of shook people's trust. But in terms of the use of air, it was extraordinary.”
As for the future of inflatable helmets, Davies envisions a scenario where cycling equipment becomes more lifestyle-influenced, perhaps less about cycling itself. “We're anticipating how that change in cycling might move forward, starting to rub up against other industries and other aspects of culture. You're seeing a big influence of streetwear and maybe high fashion, the Rapha x Palace collaboration for example. There’s an opportunity for cycling to move into these other areas and that not only makes it more interesting, but also makes it more interesting for people outside cycling to move into it as well. So part of what we're interested in, having made a product that is outside of the convention, is to try and encourage that same blending of different cultures and blending with different markets to redress cycling as it is in the present day, which is, yeah, everything increasingly diverse and increasingly more accessible.”
Herperger concludes: “Coming at it from an architecture design background, we've always been very fascinated about aesthetics, and Rapha did a great job of pushing forward the idea of identity in cycling. And I think something that we've been drawn to with Ventete is that the nature of the technology also forms the aesthetic, that they go hand in hand. The aesthetic is very much a result of pure performance: pure safety performance leads to the helmet looking the way it does. And we’re excited about trying to be part of the next generation of aesthetic linking and cycling, both in terms of performance, but also just in daily use. We've talked about it as a delight in the extraordinary, finding and making the extraordinary within the ordinary.”
For more information, go to Ventete’s website.
