- As crazy as it may seem, it has officially
been a year since we all got sent home
to work from home until further notice.
What we all thought
was gonna be a week or two turned into a month.
And then that month turned into a couple of months
and then it turned into about half a year
and so on and so on.
It's really crazy to think how fast this year truly went.
And it's even crazier to think back
to what we at Fitment Industries were doing
around the same time as well.
See, we didn't quit when we went home,
we worked even harder.
In January of 2020 we went full steam ahead
into creating our very own wheel brand,
Artisa ArtFormed Wheels, if you haven't heard already.
Our goal was to launch a brand new wheel company
in 2020 that was founded by enthusiasts,
such as ourselves, to bring not only the correct fitment
to vehicles, but to also introduce wheels
that included the three elements
of function, presence and passion.
Now, here we are in 2021 with five brand new wheel designs
that we were able to launch with,
and we honestly couldn't be any more happier
about it and about what we've accomplished.
We were able to introduce the lightest
Deco Directional wheels that you can get on the market.
And we are here today to just kind of go over a little bit
of a backstory on how we were able
to accomplish just that.
In the past, direction wheels have gotten
a little bit of flack in the automotive industry.
If you look at other monoblock directional wheels
you'll find that once they are mounted on your car
one side will be twisting towards the back of the car,
and if you look on the other side
they'll be twisting towards the front.
- It's on wrong, it's the wrong way.
- And I don't know about you guys
but that's something that always bothered me
about directional wheels,
and honestly, really kind of made me grown
to not like them that much.
And that was just the general stereotype
of directional wheels.
So we decided, why not change that?
We wanted to do it right.
Now, when we were sitting down in all of our meetings,
throwing out design ideas
and what we wanted our wheels to be,
we all knew that we wanted our wheels to be lightweight.
And we wanted to keep that rotational mass
in mind because wheel weight truly matters
when it comes to your vehicles.
And we also knew that we wanted to bring forward
directional designs that had both
a left and right side design to them,
so that both sides of your car looked the same.
You know, we threw all those ideas out there, cool, right?
Easy, we got it.
Well, not exactly.
We quickly kind of found out why
this has never really been done before.
First off, directional designs,
in a sense of the engineering
and design aspect of things,
typically are not the strongest option.
You can't get the certain spoke design for them.
Meaning if you wanted to do something like that
they would require more material to make a thicker spoke
and to make sure that they were going to be strong enough
and have a high enough load rating.
With that, as you can imagine, also comes weight.
So, when we said that we wanted
to create lightweight directional wheels,
right out of the gate
we were met with a lot of resistance.
However, we were determined to make this happen
because we already told ourselves we were gonna do it
and we wanted to make it happen.
So we put all of our thoughts together
and started throwing out ideas left and right
on how we were truly going to make this work.
The first thing we looked at was how exactly
were these wheels going to be made?
Right now, when it comes to manufacturing of wheels,
you're met with typically three options.
You can go cast, you can go rotary forged
or flow formed or whatever the hell you call it,
or you go fully forged.
Casting was kind of just already out of the question
because we knew we couldn't get the weight we wanted
with that process.
So, we naturally looked at the forged option
which would have been able to easily hit the weight target
that we were shooting for,
however, they would've come in with a hefty price tag,
and that's something that we've really wanted
to stay away from as well.
We wanted Artisa Wheels
to be available to all enthusiasts.
So we kicked that idea to the curb as well.
Which left us with the flow forged, flow formed,
rotary forged, rotary whatever option.
And if you aren't familiar with that process,
it's basically the best of both worlds.
The face of the wheel does get cast
and then the barrel of the wheel is drawn out
through a forging process.
Doing this requires less material
to manufacture the overall wheel.
You don't have to pour, you know, an 18 by nine and a half.
You can pour an 18 by five
and stretch out the barrel.
But because the barrel is essentially forged
it can be much thinner while maintaining the strength
that the wheel needs to have.
For our wheels, for instance, the barrels have as thin
as a three millimeter cross-sectional area in some areas,
which is absolutely incredible.
This process and feature of the wheels
is known as our ArtFormed Technology,
and it's the biggest reason
as to how we were able to have directional designs
that came in super light
and have the same or better load ratings
as other well-known aftermarket performance wheels.
But that's not all we did
because we wanted to take it a little bit of a step further.
If you take a look at any Artisa design,
we've shaved as much weight off as we possibly could.
Any area that could have been made thinner
or could have had a window cut out
or material cut out of it, we did.
Take a look at the back of the wheel,
for instance, you'll see it around the hub,
especially the hub pocketing
in between each of the lug holes.
You'll also notice five holes
in between the lug holes themselves,
that also helps shave some weight,
as well as on the backside of the spokes
where we added pocketing
and milling to truly save as much weight
as we possibly could.
And with all of that
we were able to have an average wheel weight
of right around 19 pounds per wheel.
With the Titan, our six spoke design
coming in and an 18 by nine and a half
coming in at 18.7 pounds per wheel,
and our largest option, the 19 by 11 Elder,
which is absolutely a massive,
with a plus seven offset,
still coming in under 23 pounds per wheel.
We really did as much as we possibly could.
I remember designs coming back
and we would all just go, you know, it's close.
Those spokes could be a little bit thinner
or we should add the double recess lip
because it'll make the outside
of the lip stronger or, you know, we should really
try to cut some more weight out of the back.
And we went over and over and over,
and I'm pretty sure our factory
just ended up hating us
because of how many revisions we actually had.
Like I mentioned before, we also wanted to make sure
that our wheels had a left and a right side.
We wanted to clear the directional wheels
from their rough history of not being done correctly.
So we created our own term for that as well.
You'll see the term Deco Directional
becoming more and more popular,
taking inspiration from the term Art Deco,
which was an architectural styling
from the 1920s and 1930s,
which we thought was only, you know,
right to do for a 2020 wheel company
that featured geometric shapes
including arches and other symmetrical patterns.
Directional wheels are really cool, all right,
and they add a sense of movement for your vehicle.
But in the past, the only way
to get a true directional wheel that was done correctly
with a left and right side, was to pay thousands
upon thousands of dollars for a forged
or multi-piece wheel that would take
three to four months to get to your doorstep
and wasn't readily available.
We had to have left and right molds made for every model
and every size, and even had to make extra room
in our warehouse to hold the left and right sides
of the wheels.
And we all did that
because we knew that's what you guys wanted.
We did it for the car enthusiasts
that wanted more out of their wheels,
for those who care about the attention to details.
That's what Artisa is all about.
And for those who wanna take their car
from the track to their local meet,
and not have to worry about changing up their wheels
because why not have a wheel that can look as good
as it functions?
But it comes down to,
like when you really look at it, we're car enthusiasts.
We wanted to make a wheel brand that car enthusiasts wanted.
We took everything into consideration
as far as how light they were, how they look,
the finishes that they're available in
and what sizes they came in,
what cars were they gonna be able to fit on?
And we're just getting started.
So if you haven't checked out Artisa ArtFormed Wheels yet,
then hop on over to Fitment Industries
or hop on over to artisawheels.com.
We've gotta bunch of information there
for you guys to check out as well.
Check out some of the designs,
you can check out the gallery.
We got some of the guys here running wheels already.
We got people out in the world running wheels already.
They look really damn good,
so we'd really appreciate it
if you guys took just a couple of seconds
to go check 'em out.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
Hopefully we're able to provide a little more insight
on how we were able to create
the lightest directional wheels on the market today.
I'm Gels from Fitment Industries.
We'll see you guys later.
Peace.
(chill music)