This article was produced in association with Rapha
In the early 21st century road cycling was badly in need of a makeover. Tour de France winners no longer looked like matinee idols and under Lance Armstrong the romance of the sport – not to mention its integrity – was enduring a long, slow death. What’s more, it looked awful. Lurid Lycra covered in sponsors’ names was deeply unflattering on anyone other than the pros themselves – Kelme’s Colombian diesel Santiago Botero might have looked cool in green, blue and white stripes but the rest of us definitely didn’t. Among all this, Rapha launched in 2004 with its original Classic Jersey, which was all black with a single white band on the sleeve. It was made from sportwool, not polyester, and the process of salvation for road cycling’s aesthetic had begun. Next it was the turn of cycling magazines: the first issue of Rouleur launched a year later.
Simon Mottram: Guy and I met before Rapha, when I was first putting the plan together, even before I started trying to raise money. I was still trying to work out, is there a way of doing cycling better? I banged down the doors of anyone who had anything to do with cycling to find out what I could, became a bit obsessive about it and then I met Phil [Cavell] and Jules [Wall] at Cyclefit. They said, don’t do it, stick with your day job, but we’ve got this friend Guy who knows everything about cycling and the industry and he’s a great journalist. So I went and met Guy in an office in Battersea.
Guy Andrews: It must have been 2003. At the time, for cycle clothing there was Assos if you had money, and then there was everything else. People would wear their club kit. That was the market at the time. Then Simon rocks up and we start chatting. I said, I don’t know why you’d bother setting up a clothing company, there’s no money in it. Assos do a really good job, most people wear club kit and that’s the end of it.
SM: Most people said that. They couldn’t really see how you’d do it and less so direct-to-consumer. You’d go to your bike shop and they’ve already got Assos and everything else. But I went away and carried on building the plan, while Guy went away to be founding editor of Road Cycling UK, so he became one of my main media targets when I was launching. I kept on saying, can I tell you about this thing? I remember having the Citroën H van outside the Islington Business Design Centre at the International Cycle Show in 2004. Guy came past with a group of hitters wearing exactly the same club kit. They parked their bikes, marched into the Business Design Centre like kings of the hill, past this rusty H van with a film in the back and a couple of jerseys.
GA: That was a very big line-in-the-sand day because everybody had to walk past that van to get to the Cycle Show. Tim Ashton, who was one of the early investors, said to Simon he needed to have some sort of three-dimensional object that typified the brand and he suggested an H van. It was that involvement with the early days of the Tour de France, that it was a broomwagon, subconscious recognition of it for people, and it’s in Belleville Rendezvous… all these things almost congregate. I remember walking past and thinking, ‘That’s really cool. What’s that doing here?’ And then obviously I saw Simon, got chatting again, and he’d launched Rapha.
SM: We’d spent zero pounds on being outside with the van. We couldn’t get inside because we had no money and they probably didn’t want us. People were quite territorial at the time. People didn’t understand Rapha. But Guy used to come to the Imperial Works, our first office in Kentish Town. I showed him our jerseys and whatever we were doing. We spent a lot of time talking, we’d go for a coffee. We’d been looking at Rapha products, looking at the sport, and none of what we were doing appeared in the magazines.
GA: What Rapha did with clothing is now referred to as taking the low-hanging fruit of the sport. But what I realised as soon as Rapha launched was that a lot of the imagery they were using, the touchpoints, were aesthetically very sophisticated. And that’s where it rang bells with me. I was really quite nerdy about cycling photography. I’d been to the archives down the years and looked at the stuff that had never been published and got quite excited. That was like the germ of the idea. I don’t think that was my pitch – my pitch was that cycling needed something more interesting.
SM: We kept concluding our coffees with: “There must be a better way, there needs to be a better magazine.” Guy said, I think I might have an idea for one. I said, if you want to do it, why don’t we work together on it? It can be your thing, I’ll finance it in the early days, get behind it, but it won’t be called Rapha. You already had Rouleur in your mind, didn’t you?
GA: I’d been thinking about this for many years but had never done anything about it. I pitched it to Simon and thought he’d probably say no. I think part of the reason why he said yes is because he didn’t realise what was involved in producing a magazine. Then it was yes and I thought, oh fuck, now I’ve got to do the damn thing. Everybody has this idea that Rouleur started with tonnes of money but in fact we had nothing.
SM: But it had the look, the dimension, the advertising, the copy style and the price – £9. Sixty-two pages for nine quid and Rapha had already attracted comment because our first jersey was £105. I was comfortable with high prices – I think you were going for £5 and I was going for £10 or £12. We ended up at £9 because that was the price of the congestion charge in London in 2005 at the time of the first issue. You have to pay the same amount to drive into London that you could pay for a really high-quality cycling magazine.
GA: We got hammered for it but we sold out. And we sold out of the next issue and the next. It was that kind of symbiotic relationship that we had at that stage. I think it was the second Christmas – I remember you announced it at the Rapha Christmas do – that Rouleur was the top-selling Rapha product. Not by value obviously but by volume. It even outsold Rapha socks. Although when we did our first subscription you did get a free pair of Rapha socks.
SM: We were quite scrappy then. Everything was scrappy because you had to try to make it work. We didn’t have any money. We had to pay contributors with Rapha product. We had to duck and dive. We didn’t have a distribution model or sales team. It was essentially going direct to Rapha customers. But we got to about 4,000 subscribers without going on a newsstand.
GA: When we started there was a glut of 40-something cyclists who were already into cycling and who read magazines and an upcoming bunch of 20 and 30-somethings who were also starting to look at cycling. And it was a perfect storm in that respect. For me it was more about the design, the photography, the presentation of the sport. And as Simon said earlier, the interesting stories, some of it so random. I would let writers and photographers do what the hell they liked because I think that’s the way you get best results. It’s credit to Rapha that there was a freedom of ideas and creativity. Obviously within a few years we were doing pretty well and it was helping Rapha because it was presenting an authenticity for the brand.
SM: It was a good combination of Guy knowing the sport inside out, trying to go a bit further in understanding and reportage and getting to the stories deep in the sport. Whereas I didn’t know the sport very well. I was just a fan, but I wanted to take cycling and put it on a pedestal with the greatest brands in the world because I loved the sport and wanted it to be seen as a much more desirable thing. That combination came together in Rouleur. Proper writing about the people in the sport, plus advertising from luxury brands, the packaging of it and the pricing of it that was saying this isn’t about cycling as you know it – this is something else. This is where cycling should be.
When and how did Rapha and Rouleur go their separate ways?
SM: There was a point at which we had to not separate completely, but Rapha sold its stake in 2010 or 2011. In the years before that, what Rouleur had to do to make itself a successful magazine was increasingly stretching what Rapha wanted or what Rapha could spend money on. For example, going after more and more cycling brands and then starting to take advertising from other clothing brands… there was a slightly perverse pleasure in doing that, but you’re taking their money to put their product in front of Rapha customers, so it became a bit more challenging. So eventually Rouleur moved out of Kentish Town into its own office and it all made sense and it was all part of us both growing.
Did you expect 2024 to look like this? Rapha was originally the answer to all that garish Lycra with its more chic, subdued colours and no writing. Now, look at the EF kit, it’s the loudest out there.
SM: Cycling has become much more interchangeable with fashion and so things go through cycles much more quickly and you have to be prepared to keep moving. I used to talk about jerseys being like explosions in a paint factory. That was what I didn’t want to wear. Some of the latest Rapha designs are like explosions in a paint factory. I don’t wear them because I’m 58, but they’re a better designed explosion in a paint factory, a more carefully controlled explosion with a better colour palette. There’s a difference between good design and bad design, and cycling used to have a lot of really bad design. You can do garish in a well designed way and lots of people are doing that, but equally it will probably go back to much more monochrome again because trends change and kids of a certain age don’t want the things that older people are wearing. But at the core of it you’ve got to have stuff that’s really well designed, visually as well as functionally, and people will tend to come back to things that are more flattering rather than things that ‘wear them’. And cycling has changed hugely, too. Off-bike products are part of the business too, we’ve got 25,000 club members around the world, this amazing community that’s grown up over 20 years and for them Rapha is cycling.
The special editions to mark 20 years in cycling
Simon Mottram has helped pin down some of Rapha’s highlights that are to be reinterpreted for 2024 as special editions. The first was for a special change-out kit for the EF Pro Cycling team to wear at the Tour of Flanders.
“We thought Flanders would be great to mark the beginning of the anniversary celebrations and for this we’re back to a very early Rapha script, a logo with sans serif typeface that’s very much like that of the original Rapha team of the 1960s – and it’s gone back to monochrome.”
Rapha’s UK marketing manager Jess Morgan adds: “Usually EF’s change-out kits are very bright, standout, but because their kit is already very bright this year, it’s going the opposite way: full black. And it will stand out because in the peloton no one else’s kit is black any more.”
Next up is a reissue of the classic Gazzetta gilet but on a modern Pro Team garment. Mottram says: “For many years we designed our own Gazzetta print and we used it as tissue paper in our packaging. If you bought a Rapha product you’d get it wrapped in pink Gazzetta paper. But it wasn’t from Gazzetta dello Sport, it was a Rouleur advert and we had it translated into Italian. When our gilets had a single panel down the back, like the Team Sky jerseys, we had one that had a panel of Gazzetta print and they did really well at the time. So this is a new version, the original design on a modern Pro Team gilet.”
There are three more special edition anniversary items that Rapha will be launching throughout the anniversary year, and in September the brand will stage an exhibition at the Truman Brewery in London, where the original launch took place with the Kings of Pain exhibition.
Morgan says: “We’re going back to where we started and when we were very much an underdog, start-up brand. But this exhibition won’t be looking back at the last 20 years, it will be looking into the future at the next 20 years. Not just what Rapha will do, but what will cycling do? A good example is the Women’s 100, which has been running for 10 years and is now one of the biggest global women’s events. What will that be like in 20 years? It’s almost like a thinkpiece, a vision of the future.”
