A two-wheeled love affair

Fifteen years on from the Beijing Olympics, where Britain’s cycling renaissance really shifted into top gear, the sport is still enjoying a high profile in the UK. Subsequent Olympic and Tour de France successes built upon the pioneering work of the Lottery-funded athletes who paved the way and became household names; Hoy, Wiggins, Cavendish, Trott, Pendleton, Froome, Deignan and Thomas. The explosion of interest has been bolstered by the cleaning up of a once notorious doping problem and a number of Netflix series that have shed light on the more arcane aspects of this most fiercely traditional of sports.

Cycling clothing brand Rapha drew heavily on that traditional milieu when they launched in 2004, unapologetically harking back to the 1950s and 1960s Golden Age of Cycling by evoking the twin pillars of suffering and style that underpin the world of professional racing. Initially an online retailer, Rapha approached us in 2010 to start their long journey to a physical space – their now prolific ‘clubhouses’, which fuse the ideas of shop and café into a single destination that values community as highly as it does conversion rates. The new template became an instant success - an era-defining concept that has been widely copied across the world.

Side by side with the explosion in numbers of weekend riders, tackling their local country lanes in the instantly recognisable Rapha kit, was an exponential growth in home-training. Strava and Zwift rewrote the rules of what could be achieved on a stationary bike, and spin classes were quick to integrate these new technologies with their equipment to bring a ‘gamified’ experience to fitness. Brinkworth worked closely with Psycle on their London projects to create spaces that brought their community together once again in what one punter described as ‘like clubbing on a bike’.?

But community remains at the heart of cycling and Brinkworth returned to that ideal for a café and shop in Douglas on the Isle of Man. The island is a true hotbed of cycling talent; it is home to Mark Cavendish and Peter Kennaugh who used the rugged roads made famous by the annual TT races to train on as youths. BIKESTYLE opened in 2017 and was an intimate, conversational project led for Brinkworth by avid cyclist and workshop manager Graham Russell.

Australian cycle clothing company MAAP then asked us to help them bring their elegant apparel to the European market. After designing an initial concession in Harrods, we have been working with MAAP on a number of locations across the continent, the first of which is due to open towards the end of this year.

Recently we have returned to the challenge of bringing an established online retailer into a physical space. German bike manufacturer Canyon Bicycles GmbH rewrote the rule book of bike buying with their future-facing, direct-to-consumer web-based sales model. Despite their anti-nostalgia stance, they too are now looking to bring face-to-face customer service and community initiatives to the fore. They see e-bikes as the future of urban mobility and asked us to work on a range of concept formats and scales for them to roll this out. The Canyon Factory Service store is now open in Eindhoven with others across Europe soon to follow in its wake.