Inside the Brainchild Lab with Ralf Gröesel

The Brazilian Brothers are in Bitola, North Macedonia, a beautiful little town on the border of Greece and North Macedonia, for a very special strike mission. After grabbing a taxi, and noting that one Euro equals 60 Macedonian money, they head to an undisclosed location to check out the Brainchild production lab.

Upon arrival, they're met by the Brainchild guard dog and Ralf Gröesel, the founder of Brainchild. They step inside the facility where everything started. This is the exact place where ideas are converted into final products.

After spending countless hours on the water with Brainchild products, the brothers are stoked to finally make it to the lab. They just came from the GKA Big Air World Cup in Mykonos, Greece, where Lorenzo Casati and Leo Casati were riding a prototype made at the Brainchild lab. That very prototype helped Leo take the World Champion title, making the visit to the manufacturing site incredibly exciting.

Where It All Began: The Broken Sewing Machine

Ralf explains that his journey started a long, long time ago with a broken sewing machine when he was just 12 years old. While the lab now features advanced technology like massive laser cutters, the foundation was built on learning how to operate and repair that broken sewing machine. For Ralf, it was about the journey from a dream to creating something real. If there was one single spark that ignited his entire career, it was that broken sewing machine.

The Gift of Visualizing Fluids

Ralf has a unique, natural ability to visualize fluids. He can see air flowing around an object, creating vortexes, and he can predict how the oscillation of a flexible wing will take place in the wind. For a long time, he was under the impression that everyone could do this, only to figure out later that very few people can actually see nature and the environment in this way.

Early years of Ralf Groesel designing sailplanes

The Paragliding Connection

The fascination with flexible wings started on a holiday trip to Bulgaria with his mother when he was 12. He saw people flying very old versions of paragliders. At the time, he was heavily into radio-controlled sailplanes, which were never ready-to-fly kits — they had to be built out of hundreds of pieces to make a big puzzle come alive. Seeing the flexible paraglider wings triggered his brain, and he realized how fascinating it was to think about flexible wings and how they interact with the wind.

When he got back, he asked his mother if she had a sewing machine. She had a really old one in the basement. Ralf took it, repaired it, and started creating patterns and designing his own profiles. He wanted to understand what it actually meant to create a flexible wing and how to make it safer for when he would eventually fly the glider himself.

The Trade Show at 16 Years Old

At 16 years old, Ralf went to the biggest paragliding trade show of the time. He showcased his planforms, computer-aided design drawings, and a highly complicated 64-chamber scaled version of a paraglider. The big paragliding manufacturers basically kicked him off their stands — they couldn't believe that a 16-year-old kid with poor English was capable of developing wings that were far ahead of their time.

One company did believe he was capable of doing it himself, though. That became the starting point of his career, leading him to work as a paragliding test pilot for a couple of years before officially moving into designing.

Transitioning to Kitesurfing

Eventually, kitesurfing came around. Ralf and Armin saw the movie High by the Tronolone brothers on an old cassette. They watched it a million times and decided that kitesurfing was cooler than paragliding, so they had to progress into it. They had the idea that an inflatable soft kite would be the answer to a tube kite, bringing the soft kite and paragliding concepts directly into kitesurfing.

The Core Principles of Brainchild

When asked about his core principles, Ralf emphasizes that an idea is worth nothing if you can't make it come true. You have to create the environment to make those ideas a reality. That philosophy is exactly what he has been doing his entire career. The end result of all those variables, all that knowledge, and everything he's learned is sitting right under the roof of the Brainchild manufacturing site.

Inside the Brainchild Production facility