CHRISTOPHER
HOFFMANN
AWARD-WINNING INVENTOR | FOUNDER | SPEAKER | AUTHOR
ABOUT
We’re Changing the Way the World Thinks
Christopher Hoffmann has invested his creative life calibrating and tuning his artistic skills to a high level of refinement. Today he offers his awareness of the technical and emotional world around him, as a change instigator, a catalyst and king maker, to shift the perspective of small groups or thousands of people, from doubt to abundance.
Following his early years as a machine designer in the Detroit auto Industry, he continues to amass patents, national TV appearances and design awards. His biggest breakthrough came with creating RYNO — the world’s first one-wheel electric motorcycle.
After raising a round of startup funding, the RYNO Bike went viral with over 24 million social media views, international press coverage, Hollywood film appearances, and shipping to global customers, including Dubai’s largest theme park for its security team. The “RYNO Bike” was even invited to cameo on the IFC-comedy series, Portlandia.
Gaining an almost cult status in the e-Bike space, Christopher inspired audiences with talks on the innovation process, the future of urban transportation, including a talk on the TEDx stage.
Today, he continues to prove his uncanny ability to predict new trends by pivoting his patented accelerometer-based balance-control software. . . into glow-motion lighting products for festivals and kids’ toys plus looking at a new wave of enhanced AI home products which will respond with life-like motion as they interact with people.
Earning a proven track record of merging inventions with sound business savvy, informed by a seasoned set of manufacturing skills, Christopher now offers his visionary thinking, boundless creativity, and unstoppable drive to YOUR product team — helping you turn the impossible into reality.
History
“The Product is the Doorway into the Experience”
My path to understanding how to recreate emotion, in a product or artistic performance, started as I went kicking and screaming out of high-school and the claustrophobic monotony of formal education. Carrying a few drawings from drafting class, and the gift of growing up with access to my dad’s machine-shop, I earned my keep through a 15-year career as a mechanical engineer in the Auto Industry. To counter the white-collar sound of Musak during the day, I taught myself to play bass guitar and joined a punk rock band, playing night-clubs in Detroit.
After four years thriving in NYC in the late 80s, working in music studios as an audio engineer, taking voice lessons, acting improv, scoring the soundtrack and acting in a short film winning the CINE Golden Eagle award, I consolidated all those life lessons and returned to my mechanical engineering roots in Detroit. There, I not only designed high tech manufacturing systems but the more sophisticated products they produced.
Fully adopting the life of an inventor, I dove deep into the psychology of product design. One of my favorite stories, how Malcolm Sayer, the designer of the Jaguar XK-E must have embodied the “feeling” of what he wanted the XK-E to illicit and then proceeded to push the body-styling clay around until it recreated that feeling.
As a solo inventor or team leader on the “sleeves-up” frontlines of cutting-edge innovation, I’ve built global supplier relations, communicated with advanced software teams, circuit board layout, mold tooling, pilot lines and every aspect of product engineering. All while continually assuring what I’m building will resonate in the market.
Today, I offer my highly tuned intuition and manufacturing skill to clients who are starving for the same inspiration, to bring my un-stuck, “looking out over a Mosh-pit” view on life, helping others to see what’s already there, or to shine a light on something they missed.
My Services
I offer design inspiration to teams and personal guidance to others on their journey to becoming a highly effective, skillful, unstuck force of nature. On stage as a motivational speaker, through my training as an improv actor, I’ve refined the skill of taking the audience on an emotional roller-coaster and then dropping down into a valley of honesty.
My classes, talks, and seminars are for those well on their way to mastering their craft.
COMPANIES
Past
Projects
Having built three companies of my own, across multiple industries, I offer design and manufacturing innovation from start-ups to fortune 100 companies.
Explore my past projects to see how leveraging emerging technologies has strengthened brand loyalty and enhanced customer experience.
RYNO MOTORS
COSTUME LIGHTING
COLORFLY
Accomplishments In Numbers
80,000
Hours on the Job
1000s
Creative Projects
100,000
Lessons Learned
25M
YouTube Views
CHRISTOPHER’S BOOK
HEART in GEAR isn’t just a men’s self-help book, it’s a visceral descent into the psyche of Chris Hoffmann as he claws his way through his start-up adventures as founder of RYNO Motors. Hoffmann boldly invites his readers to bear witness to his trials of the heart as he embarked on a journey to use his heroic explorations as his most liberating act of rebellion. Across these personal narratives and insights into how men can’t stand up in a culture until they know what they are standing up in, we follow Chris as he evolves from a rigid, up-in-his-head engineer into an embodied, awakened man and leader.
From his dogged determination to build a global business as inventor of one of the world’s first single-wheel, electric motorcycles, to lessons learned trying to navigate single life after a 20-year marriage, these stories illuminate what it means to immerse oneself in tough challenges, impactful relationships, and true surrender.
