The heart and the hands behind P1 ICON bikes

Some masterpieces begin with a sketch. Others start with silence – the kind shared by two people who don’t need to speak to understand each other.

Micah Moran and Kyle Doney don’t finish each other’s sentences. They don’t need to. As the creative force behind Trek’s most innovative Project One ICON paint schemes, they operate in a kind of neuro-linked flow – one thinks it and the other executes.

Micah is Project One’s Art Director, a design visionary always chasing the edge of possibility. Kyle is a design-trained painter turned hybrid of both – equal parts craftsman and experimentalist. Their partnership isn’t built on process so much as proximity, trust and a shared appetite for failure in pursuit of something original.

“Fail fast, fail often,” they say. It’s not just a motto – it’s permission. To take risks. To surprise themselves. To make something the world has never seen before.

They’ve been working together since 2018, but their story starts earlier than that. Kyle spent five years as a Project One painter before he was brought on as a design intern – someone with raw talent and rare precision. For a full year, Kyle painted from 4 a.m. to 1 p.m., then worked with the design team until 5. The team nicknamed him “The Mule” – a nod to both his work ethic and his last name, Doney.

What began as mentorship quickly became collaboration. When Project One ICON was first launched with five original bespoke schemes, Micah and Kyle were at the centre. The mission was clear: redefine what custom paint could be. Make bikes that looked like nothing else on the road. And make sure the craft matched the concept.

It wasn’t a given that riders would understand the vision. ICON was a bet on artistry, on obsession, on a deeper kind of custom. But Micah and his team had done the homework. They’d benchmarked elite design experiences and had a lightbulb moment after visiting a Porsche custom shop, when the manager of a local Trek shop said, “The customer for those cars is the exact same customer for ICON.”

That customer isn’t just buying a paint scheme – they’re buying into an ethos. Every ICON design is built on hours of experimentation, iteration and detail work most people will never see. And that comes from both mastery of the craft and something not quite as easy to define. “What makes Kyle special is that he notices the stuff that matters,” Micah says.

They’ve designed countless one-off bikes for Trek athletes, often working directly with them to bring a story to life. “Sometimes the athletes are even better designers than we are,” Kyle says with a laugh. That’s part of the point: ICON is a two-way conversation. It honors the rider. It celebrates what’s personal. And because of the nature of the designs, no two are the same.

Still, the most important collaboration is the one between Micah and Kyle. It’s not flashy. It’s not a performance. It’s the quiet kind of synergy that powers an entire design language – and turns customised bikes into rolling art.

They know they’re onto something when it startles them. When a colour shift feels impossible. When they step back and see something that shouldn’t exist but now does.

“There are no dream-killers here,” Micah says. That freedom – to explore, to obsess, to build something that no one asked for, but everyone wants – is what sets Project One ICON apart.

Because at the highest level of artistry, it’s not just about having the tools. It’s about the hands that use them – and the heart that guides them.