BGD Brand Guidelines: Bruce Goldsmith’s Paraglider Brand and Its Wild Colours

A designer with two paragliding starts behind him.

BGD stands for Bruce Goldsmith Design, and its history starts long before the company. Goldsmith is a British pilot and designer; English Wikipedia describes him as a civil engineer by profession. BGD’s timeline says he learned to hang glide in Britain in 1979 and to paraglide in Australia in 1987, while its crew page places the hang-gliding in the 1980s, when he was an engineering student at Imperial College in London.

His design career began at Airwave. Cross Country magazine reported in February 2010 that he started Airwave’s paraglider production in 1989, having persuaded the then hang-glider maker that paragliders would be more than a passing fad. When Airwave collapsed under its original British management in 1998, the magazine said, he left to start Ozone; English Wikipedia says he was its managing director and designed its first four paragliders. He then returned to Airwave, by then revived by Markus Villinger and moved to Austria’s Stubai valley, and stayed as head of design for about a decade. English Wikipedia dates that return to 2000.

He was also winning. Goldsmith became paragliding world champion at Manilla in Australia in 2007 on an Airwave Magic FR3. Cross Country called him the first pilot to win the world championships on a glider of his own design. BGD says he was British paragliding champion three times and British hang-gliding champion twice, and its timeline records a design trophy from the Royal Aero Club in London in 1998.

The magazine reported in February 2010 that he had left Airwave for the Swiss maker Advance, and BGD says he designed for Advance for two years. His column Icaristics had by then run in Cross Country for 22 years, the magazine said; the book 50 Ways to Fly Better came from the same publisher in 2015.

Three founders and a garage.

BGD’s timeline records its founding in 2012 by Bruce Goldsmith, Arna Reynisdottir and Christoph Scheer. The company says it “started as a small company working out of a garage.” Its directors’ page splits the work in three: Goldsmith runs research and development as managing director, Reynisdottir runs marketing and Scheer runs finance. Scheer, it says, was a construction engineer in Austria who left that field in 2012 to help establish the company. English Wikipedia also dates the brand to 2012; Cross Country, in a review from October 2015, said Goldsmith and Scheer, an Austrian pilot and entrepreneur, had started it two years earlier.

An early wing was the Tala. Cross Country called BGD “the new paraglider manufacturer” in June 2013 and reviewed the EN C Tala, whose main feature was a chord cut billow, a way of keeping the glider as clean as possible. The magazine’s February 2024 review of the Lynx 2 still described the Chord Cut Billow as something the company uses as an alternative to the spanwise 3D seams of other makers. The same publication’s 2015 review of the EN B Base gave Goldsmith’s idea as paragliders “with the fewest possible cells.”

The range then filled out. The Wasp, an EN B, came before the Base; the EN C Cure was selling strongly in 2016, Goldsmith told The Paraglider, and its third version, a two-liner with 70 cells, was announced in July 2025. Today the wings run from the Adam 2 school glider and the Magic 2, which Cross Country reported in March 2024 as BGD’s “performance EN-A,” to the two-line EN-D Diva 2. The Magic name had earlier been used on an Airwave wing Goldsmith designed.

Recent launches show how widely the name now reaches. The lightweight Tigra EN-C was unveiled in June 2026. The Epic Freestyle, an EN-B wing for first acro moves, was revamped that July. The Kiss 2 of August 2026 converts between paraglider and parakite through a new riser system, and the Dual 3 of July 2025 is a tandem. BGD also sells harnesses, reserves and paramotor wings. In November 2016, The Paraglider reported that the company had doubled in size every year since 2012, with 14 staff and sales in 103 countries.

Design and documentation.

A paraglider has no bodywork or badge plate, so most of what a maker shows the world is cloth. The wing is the largest thing it builds, and it is seen in two main ways: spread out on a launch slope before take-off, or overhead in the air. Makers’ websites and catalogues return to those two views again and again.

Colour comes in panels, because a wing is sewn from many pieces of sail cloth rather than painted. Makers often sell a small set of schemes: Cross Country reported in February 2026 that one new wing came in two standard colour schemes. The cloth is named as well, by mill and weight, in launch notes and reviews, and the stitched cell openings along the leading edge are among the details a close-up photograph tends to pick out.

Engineering drawing is part of the look. Manuals carry line plans and riser diagrams, and catalogues add feature tables and glossaries, so a brand’s printed material can read like technical documentation. Video does a similar job in a friendlier voice. Test pilots and designers appear on camera to explain what went into a new wing, and Cross Country has filmed one such session at a maker’s headquarters.

The trade’s shop window is the Coupe Icare festival. Cross Country describes its expo as a chance to see all the free-flight brands together in one space, and as the moment when companies celebrate their successes and announce next season’s gliders and harnesses. Stands there can be part of the brand: Ojo Volador reported that one maker marked its founder’s 40 years in free flight in 2018 with a party on its stand, a special red harness and live Korean folk music. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker, and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

“Paragliders with Personality.”

BGD spreads itself across three countries, by its own account: “the R&D department is based in the south of France where the sun always shines; distribution is in Austria, and the factory is in Sri Lanka.” The website’s legal notice names the company as BGD GmbH, of St. Gertraud in Austria, with Bruce Goldsmith as publisher, and the company says Scheer runs its European distribution from the Austrian office and distribution centre. A BGD news post of June 2014 pointed to a film showing what it called the modern facility in Sri Lanka where its gliders are made, including a laser cutter and an inflation inspection system.

The research side has been documented by the trade press. Cross Country interviewed the BGD designer Lucas Bonin in January 2025 and described him as working in research and development, in the south of France, after studying aerodynamics at the National Civil Aviation School in Toulouse.

Colour runs through how the company describes itself. BGD’s line is “Paragliders with Personality.” Its timeline credits Ant Green with bringing “a new look and feel to the BGD wing design” in 2014, and its crew page says he has been with the company from the start, “bringing all the wild colors to the products”; he is also credited with the website’s design. The same page calls BGD “the most colourful brand out there.” Colourways get names of their own: the Dual 3 tandem comes in Cherry, Fern or Lemon, Cross Country reported, and the Wrap harness in Fire or Ice. Shape does some of the work as well: the magazine wrote in 2025 that the arc and swept-back, tapered tips of the Base 3 gave it a “distinctly rakish look.”

Logos are a product too. BGD says it has produced custom-logo paragliders since 2016, with cut-in logos sewn into the panels during construction and stuck-on logos for small or detailed artwork. The two methods have different limits, it says: cut-in logos generally need to be more than 5cm across, and stuck-on logos should not cover more than two square metres.

Competition is part of the brand as well. Cross Country reported that the sixth BGD Weightless took place at Laragne-Montéglin in France in August 2025, using multiple radius turnpoints that give pilots of different weights different distances; Goldsmith himself was on the Sports class podium.

For a design guide, BGD shows how a founder’s name, reduced to three letters, can sit behind a loud colour language. Compare Ozone, the brand Goldsmith helped to start, and Advance, where he designed before BGD. For this guide we use a violet, a gold and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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