Starting in the mid 2010s, new cycling clothing brands were popping up like mushrooms.

There were several contributing factors to this trend. I will break down how cycling clothing went from a dozen or so brands, to over a hundred in a span of 10 years from 2010-2020.

The overarching theme is something called ‘Barriers to Entry’. Barriers to entry is a business term describing factors that can prevent or impede newcomers into a market or industry sector, and so limit competition. These can include high start-up costs, distribution hurdles, or other obstacles that prevent new competitors from easily entering a business sector.

Let’s go back to the early 2000s. Once upon a time a cycling clothing brand had relatively limited outlets to sell its products. Most cycling clothing was sold at bike shops or at events. To sell you needed a distributor and a sales team. In each country you wanted to sell, you needed a different distributor. Marketing and localization were generally handled by distributors in their respective territory.

Clothing brands produced the product and distributors, and their dealers sold it.

Enter Rapha

Rapha was revolutionary in a several ways, I wrote an article about their impact on the cycling industry here. Rapha focused exclusively on selling D2C. They side stepped the distribution network and sold direct to consumers. This had several advantages, most of all the massive margin. The markup on cycling clothing is substantial as this is required so each player gets a slice of the pie. See above three tier distribution network.

Ecommerce

In the early 2010s, an ecommerce platforms would typically cost around €50.000 to implement. These solutions were totally custom-built with extremely high ongoing maintenance costs. Then came Shopify. Shopify was founded in 2006 by a German programmer named Tobias Lutke. Shopify rewrote the rules of ecommerce, it made creating an online store accessible to anyone. A store could be built and launched in hours rather than months for a fraction of the budget.

Facebook Ads

Anyone that was there will tell you that 2014 – 2019 was the golden age of Facebook ads. With quality photos and decent copy, a brand could target and acquire new customers effectively and at scale. Anywhere across the globe.

Instagram

The photo sharing became immensely popular during the 2010s. As people spent more time on the platform, brands could find new customers that were eager to discover new styles.

Shipping

Since clothing is lightweight and easy to ship. The costs were relatively low in terms of shipping. European based brands can ship throughout the EU and USA duties are applied only to shipments over 800 dollars.

All these factors combined made launching a new cycling clothing brand more accessible than ever before.

Here is a simple example: Say you want to start a new clothing brand with made in Italy kit. You can hire a designer on upwork to design your logo. You can call a top-quality Italian producer like Marcello Bergamo, Santini or Nalini. The minimums are relatively low (50 pcs). The Italian kit producers also have in house designers that will help you develop the kit. You choose 4 colorways for the tops to round out the range. Once you have prototypes you can find a couple of riders for a photo shooting in the Alps. Set up a Shopify store, open an Instagram account and you are done.

For less than €10.000 you are the proud owner of a Made in Italy cycling clothing brand.

People started to take notice and brands began to pop up like weeds.

Many of these factors are still true today, but the competition is much fiercer. This combined with a glut of inventory from the frothy days of COVID makes it much more difficult to start a new clothing brand. 

This has led to deep discounting which I wrote about here. I predict that we will see many brands pare back assortments or even close in the next few years.