March 8, 2023
For anyone that wasn’t there to witness it, the entrance of Rapha on the cycling scene in the early 2010s felt like a tectonic shift. Their interpretation of road cycling clothing was totally unique. Rapha founder Simon Mottram had an extensive background in luxury goods and branding and he saw a sizable gap in the cycling clothing market, which he proceeded to fill.
In Europe, up until the early 2000s, road cycling clothing had strong ties to local clubs. The typical road cyclist would either purchase a kit from a local shop, often with the shop logos, or be part of a club and therefore wear the club kit. These kits were plastered with logos and rarely had style sensibility.
Rapha’s signature style and their prodigal sense for marketing to cyclists was like lambs to the slaughter. People could not get enough of the brand. And the prices were typically higher than the competition. Much higher. All this was happening while selling direct with full margins. Instead of taking money off the table, Mottram ploughed profits back into the brand and built up the community, in hindsight this was strategic to get the flywheel spinning which eventually led to his exit in 2017 for £200m.
Dozens of clothing brands with a style influenced by Rapha sprung up from the years 2015-2020. Examples include: La Passione, Isadore, Pas Normal Studios, MAAP, to name a few. Many of these brands flourished as road cycling supplanted Golf as the sport of choice for middle aged upper middle class men across Europe and North America. The acronym that was borne from this trend is MAMIL – middle aged men in lycra. Things have since changed as COVID and post-COVID impacted clothing brands substantially, but I will save this for another post.
It would be reasonable to say that Rapha impacted the way that all cycling brands approach marketing and branding. The typical Rapha content features high quality photography in picturesque locations. Men and women suffering in the saddle, then enjoying coffee after the ride. Don’t get me wrong, Rapha tells a beautiful cycling story: beautiful destinations, camaraderie, style, effort. It’s relatable and it works. But it sometimes feels like that has become the de facto story for all brands.
I recently spoke with ex-pro cyclist and Cycling Marketing Consultant David Van Orsdel about this topic recently on the BOC podcast “I constantly heard from brands over the last few years saying ‘I want it to look like Rapha, make it look like Rapha.’ I would tell them that that is Rapha’s brand story. They’ve done that already. You need to tell your own story.”
I wholeheartedly agree with David here. It’s relatively easy to fall into this mindset, just make it look like Rapha and the job is done. Cycling is traditionally conservative, this is one of the main reasons why things have gotten so homogenised. The average Cycling brand is small, and budgets are tight. Especially in this brutal post-Covid glut of product in the market.
So it’s seductive for brands to want to replicate the Rapha brand story. Noone ever got fired for making it look like Rapha. But if brands don’t tell a unique story, their unique story, how can the consumer tell one brand apart from the next?
