How Rapha is Inspiring the World to Live Life by Bike: Daniel Blumire

In this podcast, we connected with Daniel Blumire, Co-Managing Director of Rapha — the UK-based cycling apparel brand. Below are some highlights from the conversation.

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Daniel’s passion for cycling and what led him to join Rapha

Kyriakos: Daniel, good to see you. The first real question — are you a cyclist?

Daniel: Am I a cyclist? Well, I am a cyclist — definitely. However, I’m a different type of cyclist than I was probably five years ago, and ten years ago, and even two years ago. Because at the moment, I’ve got four children, two young ones, and I’m more of a kind of everyday commuter rather than a long-distance cyclist.

Kyriakos: How did you start cycling? Was it ever competitive for you?

Daniel: It was never competitive for me. I mean, competitive with my friends. So growing up, many children my age just kind of hung around on our bikes, getting into trouble. I had a mountain bike, a BMX bike, and then it wasn’t until I was probably about in my mid-20s that I started mountain biking again. And then when I was about 28, 29, just at the end of Lance’s career, I started getting kind of back into the Tour de France and then kind of discovered road biking. And then for the next five or six years, I was obsessed with it. And that kind of led me into Rapha.

From humble beginnings in Kentish Town, North London to a global brand and powerful cycling community

Kyriakos: How many people were around when you initially joined Rapha?

Daniel: So the company wasn’t that big and it was based in Kentish Town in North London, in quite a small office, but the company had 100 people there, so it had a lot of people for the size of the company it was. And that’s because right from the start, Simon really wanted to build that kind of community. And there were a lot of people in the region.

So in the markets that we were building in, so in the US, in Seoul, in Tokyo, and in Australia and Sydney and Melbourne, places like that, we already had a good footprint, and we put people on the ground in their marketing teams, on the ground, to run those community, the community aspect of the band.

The product lifecycle at Rapha and working with elite cycling teams like EF Education-EasyPost and Team Sky

Kyriakos: Can you walk me through the product lifecycle at Rapha? How does a product come to life — from the beginning to the end?

Daniel: Sure. So I kind of call it almost a cycle of customer to customer in the end. So we will always start with the consumer and what the consumer needs. And I think what’s so great about Rafa right from the start is that everyone who works here is a cyclist. So you’ve already got this really great understanding of products and everyone there rides with other cyclists. But we’ll really mine the information and try and solve the customers' problems.

We also worked now with the pro teams in the peloton such as EF Education — EasyPost and formerly, obviously, Team Sky. And they’re great because they bring another set of problems you have to solve. So you have all that information for you. So what are the key problems we need to solve? What are the innovations? So are there any new fabrics, or any new technologies? And then you have the commercial needs of the business.

And our customer base has grown and they wanted to buy more stuff, whether that be more colors. You have that kind of commercial information on how to grow the business. And then when you’ve got all that, you kind of sit down at the start of the season, and the design team will have a creative concept. So you have that creative vision and then you just kind of sit down at the start and with all that information, armed with that, and start kind of hashing it out, what you want to come up with from a product point of view. You’ll have first ideas, first concepts, and then as you develop through the critical path, you’ll get the kind of more and more secure, and then you’ll get to a point where you’ll sign off the line list you’re going to work on for that season, which will involve the new products.

Creating a classic skin suit for Team Sky cyclists is like creating a luxury BMW — adding leather seats and producing a premium feel

Kyriakos: You spoke about the pro teams. What is the difference between the products a pro athlete needs and the everyday cyclist?

Daniel: The best example I was ever told was by one of the designers who worked on the Team Sky kit. When I first got there, and he compared it to cars, he said, making products for Rafa — he said, take a BMW. The classic jersey is a luxury BMW. That is the high end. You’ve got leather seats, you’ve got air conditioning, you’ve got heat in. And then the race version of it is a stock car where everything’s taken out. It needs to be as light as possible, as fast as possible, and do the purpose at hand.

There are a few other extra things the products need, though. They need to be able to be washed again and again and again and again. And you’ll notice on a lot of our clothing, we recommend washing at 30 degrees. However, the pro teams won’t do that. The teams’ll stick it in these special machines that they’ve got on the bus, so it needs to be adaptable for them. You’ve also got the big thing in the way the financial models of teams work, the product needs to be very clear in terms of sponsorship and advertising.

Rapha’s vision is to inspire the world to live life by bike — which is at the core of everything they do, including clubhouses

Kyriakos: Could you expand a bit on the Clubhouse? I was in one of your clubhouses yesterday — you have a retail shop where you can buy products, you can ride your bike there, or even rent a bike. You also have a wall with a lot of upcoming cycling events. Why this combination?

Daniel: Our purpose — what Rapha exists for is to inspire the world to live life by bike. That is the kind of halo in terms of everything we do. I think people, when they think of companies and they think of businesses, it’s all about making money. But our kind of overarching aim is to get the world cycling and help them on that journey.

So everything we do within our clubs, those rides, is to do that, to promote that. And I think ten years ago, when I started at Rapha, it was interesting when people asked you who you worked for Rapha, they’re like, who’s that? And trying to explain something cool, not knowing. Whereas now everyone knows about them, and everyone you tell kind of automatically knows you have that cool cycling around or something along those lines.

So the Club Brewer Street is a beautiful store, but it’s in one place and doesn’t move. Whereas cycling, doing the ride, doing the community, doing all that, almost takes the brand on the road and gets people into cycling, which is why we exist.

Kyriakos: It sounds like the brand is the community.

Daniel: Yeah, or you can even say — the community is the brand. You can do it both ways. I think I’ve been lucky enough in my roles to kind of travel all over the world — Europe, the US, Asia and ridden with so many different people in so many different events. And when you do it, you really do feel so connected and it makes the world almost feel a very small place through the brand.

I think it is what makes our point of difference. I know a lot of other brands now in cycling are doing the same model, which is great that more people will get those experiences and ultimately, cycling will be the winner.

About 60% of Rapha’s customers learn about them from seeing their products on the road or word-of-mouth.

Kyriakos: How does a new customer today learn about Rapha?

Daniel: I’m not sure if this status is still up to date, but 60% of our customers used to learn about Rapha from seeing a product on the road or through advocacy people telling them about it.

So our marketing model is kind of through our clubhouses, so that’s why they’re there — to drive awareness and the whole kind of microenvironment around them. We have obviously the teams, so we have EF Education First-EasyPost men’s and women’s teams, Legion in the US, and a number of ambassadors, males and females.

We do all kinds of different type of different types of events and then we’ve got a lot of free press, but we have more and more of our reliance on the kind of digital marketing side of it. So trying to push through that, through social, through digital advertising, and people like.

How Netflix shows advertise Rapha through Tour de France cyclists and Formula 1 drivers

Kyriakos: How much do shows like Netflix’s Tour de France series help your brand?

Daniel: It’s hard to tell, really. The funny thing is we’ve recently had a bit of a run on Netflix. So on the show Drive to Survive, Mick Schumacher was on an episode. He was head-to-toe dressed in Rapha.

It was a great advert for us riding through on the road to Switzerland. And then even recently, the series Beast, if you watch that, there were a couple of scenes in there that Rapha was really prominent in. It’s one of those things that’s just really hard to measure. We don’t see huge kind of spikes in it at that point in time. But I think one of those is that you need to see things seven times before getting aware of them and stuff. So it can only help, I think.

Why suffering is an important aspect of Rapha’s strong culture

Kyriakos: What about the values? What are you looking at during hiring?

Daniel: So our values are really clear. So we’ve got four leading values here that I’ve got in front of me. It’s 1) love the sport, 2) think for yourself, 3) suffer and 4) inspire others.

We really encourage and inspire our starters and love the sport. So on a Monday morning, we have a big town hall meeting every Monday morning at 10 am and we always start it off with the highlights from the week in terms of racing, and what’s happened, and we get someone to come up and give their interpretation for the week.

We’ll celebrate all of the riding our staff have done that week, any events they’ve done and kind of recognize them in that way. It’s essential for us to keep that kind of culture going. We have Wednesday mornings free for staff to ride, so we encourage them to ride with either their colleagues or customers and then finish the ride ahead of us. So it’s one of those kinds of unique things I think makes a professional.

Kyriakos: You mentioned the third one is suffering. That aligns with our culture at Terra. However, I imagine you’ve had a lot of pushback when you have something like that. I would understand it perfectly because if you’re a cyclist, you must go through the struggle to get the results. But how do you interpret it?

Daniel: It’s exactly that, really. And it is one of those that when we reissued these a couple of years ago, it’s one of our big discussions. Is it right that we still include the word suffer in there with its negative connotations? But it is really about that cycling experience. And you take a kind of big, long climb when you’re in the apps; when you’re going up, you’re churning up.

You get to that point where the suffering is awful, but then you push through it and then the kind of glory that comes after it, that feeling of achievement, and you get to the top. You get the view, the magic. You’ve done it with friends. The kind of pride.

And it is about that and going back to what I said just a minute ago, about us having to keep doing new things and being once before and being the better, sometimes you’ve got to go through that kind of suffering element to do it. So it’s not that we want to make our staff life miserable or anything like that. I’m sure sometimes we do stuff inadvertently that makes it hard for people.