Rapha has been cranking out premium road riding kit for fifteen years now, cementing a position among cyclists with typically understated designs, trusted performance, and reliable fits. For a decade Rapha developed their next gen gear with pro teams, offering a few more wild designs like the Canyon//SRAM women’s team kit. Now your team can get its own personalized look via Rapha Custom, with low 5-piece minimums and pricing even cheaper than stock designs.
Rapha Custom cycling kit with your team design
Rapha worked more with smaller sponsored teams over the last year to dial in their custom process, making minor design updates to key pieces of kit to make them easy to fully customize through dye sublimation printing. The result is the launch of Rapha Custom with two ranges: Pro Team for more performance features, and Classic for more relaxed fit & performance.
All of the Rapha Custom kit though was developed to perform as well as their regular kit to give smaller teams, clubs, and other cycling groups the ability to get premium riding kit customized at affordable pricing.
Keeping it simple and straightforward, Rapha Custom clothing shares sizing with standard Rapha gear, so it will be easy to get fits correct. Rapha also has the unique benefit (for a custom cycling clothing producer) of being able to tap into their global network of Rapha Clubhouses to get help with customization, fits, or just selecting which cycling kit is the best for you. Sure, not everyone has a clubhouse down the street, but almost no other custom cycling clothing maker has a comparable brick and mortar network.
Rapha semi-Custom cycling kit, Designed by you
The key to efficiently producing custom kit seems to be smoothing out the design process. So Rapha Custom spent the bulk of their time developing an easy-to-use, yet relatively flexible online design tool (remember the actual kit is pulled almost straight from their standard, proven products.)
The Rapha design tool makes it easy to pick from many basic layouts, then add pretty much any Pantone color, more than 60 patterns which can each be further modified, color fades, and the ability to upload vector graphics into more than a dozen pre-set locations on each clothing item.
As you go through the process, ideas are quickly visualized, and Rapha Custom shows you what the kit design will actually look like on a real person. The tool looks to be a happy medium between limited semi-custom design templates, and the more complicated & time-consuming full-custom process.
Rapha Custom Pro Team & Classic options, pricing & availability
Pretty much every item in the new Rapha Custom catalog is being offered in both men’s and women’s specific cuts (at the same prices), although the 5-piece minimum order for each style does apply separately to men’s & women’s kit. For now 3 men’s jerseys & 2 of the same style women’s jerseys with the same design will not meet the order minimums.
Pricing is surprisingly more affordable than the stock designs, saving more than 10-15% on average since you are buying five or more of each at a time. The items available now include a $170 / 140€ Pro Team Midweight Jersey, $155 / 130€ Classic Flyweight Jersey, $205 / 165€ Pro Team Long Sleeve Aero Jersey, $115 / 100€ Pro Team Lightweight Gilet, $65 / 50€ Pro Team Sleeveless Base Layer, $210 / 180€ Pro Team Bibshorts, or the unisex $50 / 40€ set of Lightweight Arm Warmers. All of those prices are for 5-9 pieces. You can figure on dropping another >10% each time your larger teams steps up the next 10, 25, 50, or 100 piece thresholds.
While that’s already a solid debut offering for Rapha Custom, they have plenty of other items in the works as they build out their customizer tools. Next up will be men’s & women’s Pro Team Aero Jerseys, Pro Team Aero Suits, Pro Team Lightweight Jerseys, Core Jerseys, Long Sleeve Core Jerseys, Core Bib Shorts, Core Shorts, and unisex Knee & Leg Warmers, and a Snood.
Rapha’s online design tool doesn’t quite offer the completely open-ended possibilities of conventional full-custom team kit. But anyone who has gone through that process (or rather down that rabbit hole) working on vector templates, will appreciate the almost limitless possibilities, graphic upload potential, and true customization Rapha Custom offers. And you will spend a lot less time trying to perfect the details that Rapha’s online tool smooths out. Plus WYSISYG, so you can share with your riding buddies and agree on the final design quickly. Then within eight weeks, Rapha will deliver new custom kit to your doorstep.
We certainly like the Rapha Custom idea, and look forward to giving it a try for some Bikerumor x Rapha riding gear. In the end, Rapha Custom lets you ride in trusted premium Rapha gear in the design of your choosing, and at surprisingly affordable pricing if you can get your friends to join you.
