You never really pay full price at PizzaExpress. When I was nineteen it felt like a nice meal out. Now someone checks for a voucher before anyone orders, and paying the price printed on the menu feels reckless, incompetent. The pizza may thankfully be much as it was. What has changed is what customers think it ought to cost.
Le Col, late of this parish, had a version of this problem. Complete a Strava challenge, get money off. A challenge this summer offered 30% off full-price kit. It was clever: cyclists were already on Strava, already inclined to chase a target, and the reward sent them to the shop. It also gave them a reason to wait. Once you have bought a jersey with a code, the price without one becomes a penalty for being impatient.
Personally I never really bought into Le Col, although I could see its appeal. Yanto Barker had raced professionally, the kit looked good, and you could believe that someone who had spent years in the saddle might have useful opinions about where to put a seam. Its former operating company entered administration in June. The offers alone cannot explain that, but they leave whoever carries the name forward with an awkward job: persuading riders that the price on the label is a real one.
Rapha is different for me. I remember what it felt like when it arrived on the scene. It made road cycling and courier-style urban commuting look stylish while keeping the suffering, odd rituals and long history intact. The clothes, photography and writing belonged together. For a British company to take that idea across Europe, Grand Tours and into the US was quite something. Rapha helped establish the visual language that newer brands now work within.
Today its website still calls the clothes “the world’s finest”. That is an extraordinary thing to ask a customer to continue to accept. There was a time when I might have let the boast pass on design grounds alone. Rapha made some of the kit everyone else seemed to be reacting to. Now many of us would look through the range and struggle to see what earns a claim of superiority across all of it, perhaps in some areas of technology and some of design, but universally?
The UK men’s shop alone currently shows 467 product listings. Alongside jerseys and bib shorts are shoes, sunglasses, hoodies, bikepacking bags, bar tape and a bookstore. There is nothing inherently wrong with a broad range, and the number includes many perfectly sensible products for different sorts of riding. But breadth changes the nature of the claim. “The finest” sounds rather different when it has to stretch from a racing skinsuit to a pair of casual trousers.
Rapha’s own account of itself still sounds like the brand I admired: demanding rides, clothes tested by professionals, stories told through photography and film, a club that at least says it “makes cycling sociable” though is almost certainly a fierce clique of try hards Much of that work is real. But I don’t think a professional rider testing one collection settles the quality of everything in the shop, or that a well-made film tells me which of several near identical jerseys is worth its price. The story has become larger and more confident while my reasons for believing every part of it have become less clear.
It is also a far more familiar sight on the road. That is success of a type, of course. Rapha opened up a particular idea of cycling to a lot of people, myself included. But a brand that once made you feel you had found something can’t depend on that feeling indefinitely. The product has to carry more of the weight once the badge is commonplace and demographically diverse.
MAAP and Pas Normal Studios now occupy some of the space Rapha once owned. They run offers too, so this isn’t a claim that their pricing is pure or every garment better. Their advantage, to my eye, is that each has a more recognisable point of view. MAAP can be loud and restless; Pas Normal can look like the entire club has agreed on a dress code without telling anyone else, a cycling murmuration. I don’t admire every choice, but I can usually see the choice being made.
Rapha says it is reducing its reliance on promotions. That is a difficult thing to do when customers have learnt the sale calendar, and its latest financial figures offer little comfort yet. Fran Millar also set about reducing the number of product launches and putting more attention back on the kit. She has since stepped down as chief executive, with further cuts planned. Unlike the ambulance chasers on LinkedIn, I wouldn’t use the accounts to declare her approach a failure. Recovering those full-price customers takes longer than ending a succession of sales.
Le Col shows the pricing problem in its most obvious form: too many opportunities to buy at a discount can make the advertised price hard to believe. Rapha has a more daunting task. It has to decide which parts of a large, successful brand still justify the claims made on its behalf, and which are there because a large business kept telling its team to keep finding new things it could sell.
On the Rapha homepage today, the invitation to shop the new collection sits alongside an offer to bundle and save up to 20%. I can understand both messages. I’m less sure they belong to the same idea of “the world’s finest”.
AI: Ai naturally helped me get some wider context on what’s been going on and checking some details. I wrote the piece.
