About us
We're a two-person thing. Max lives in Prague, where LAYR is run, and Patrick lives near Frankfurt. We met at university there, studying Game Development, and we've been tinkering on side projects together ever since. This is the side project that actually turned into a business.
We both still work full-time, so LAYR happens around our day jobs — evenings, weekends, whenever there's time. And it's genuinely small: there's no warehouse and no team in the back. The whole thing runs out of our apartment, where every map is printed, framed and packed before it's posted to you.
How it started
It started as a present. Max's fiancée got into running. She hated it at first, stuck with it anyway, and in May 2026 she ran the Karlovy Vary half-marathon. To mark it, Max made 3D-printed maps of the route — one for her, one for the friend she ran it with — with the real terrain of the course and their route running through it.
He gave them the maps near the finish line and took a photo of the two of them holding them next to their medals. While he was taking it, a stranger walked over and asked where she could order one for her husband. There wasn't anywhere. That moment — a customer a hundred metres past the finish, before a company existed — is the whole reason LAYR exists.
The idea hasn't changed since: the medal says you finished. The map shows what it took — every hill of it. And because one race tends to lead to another, the maps are made to sit side by side: a small wall of the things you've done.
What we each do
Max does 3D for video games and handles the design and the printing side. Patrick is a web and backend developer and built most of the configurator and the bits behind the site. Between us, that covers most of what's needed.
The main thing we built is a small 3D configurator, so you can design your own map without a long back-and-forth with us. You pick a route — from a library of around 500 marathons and half-marathons, or your own GPX file — choose a design, add your stats, and see the finished piece in a live 3D preview before you pay.
The recycled-plastic part
The relief is printed in 100% recycled PLA (rPLA). We went with recycled from the start rather than switching to it later — it made sense for the kind of thing this is. The packaging is recycled and plastic-free too, and because every map is made to order, we don't print things nobody asked for.
If you'd like to put a route of your own on the wall, have a look.