A tight integration of all the company’s activities is an essential part of the brand’s success, insists Scheybeler.
‘The design of our products is the core of the brand, but everything we do has to reflect the same values,’ he explains.
To achieve this, design is a core responsibility for Rapha’s senior management. Mottram and Scheybeler are intimately involved with all key design decisions, from product prototypes to catalogue photo shoots. ‘Design can’t be an afterthought, you need to build it in at the start,’ he continues.
At the same time, Rapha is a highly outsourced organization. Six full-time employees handle product development; marketing and order fulfillment but detailed design, sourcing and manufacture are all outsourced. ‘We use a network of freelance designers and small agencies to handle this work,’ says Scheybeler. ‘More often then not they are cyclists themselves and they bring their own passion to our concepts.’
Core members of Rapha’s extended network include Message, the web design agency that helps with the back-end design and functionality of its website, and Blue Associates, a clothing design and sourcing agency, for liaison with manufacturers and material suppliers. The company has also collaborated with clothing designer Paul Smith.
Managing such a loose network of contributors to produce a cohesive product range is a challenge for Rapha and the process has been a significant learning curve for Scheybeler. ‘I was a creative type in my old role; other people did the organizing: now it is really important that we get the product development process under control ourselves.’
To do this, Rapha has adopted a formal approach to the writing of briefs for every new product, carefully discussing and documenting as much as possible about their vision for each new product– who it is for, how it will be used, what it will be made of, what it will cost. Together with rough sketches produced in house, this brief provides first the company’s designers and later its material suppliers and manufacturing partners with a thorough understanding of the requirements.
Manufacturing takes place across the world, with items produced in the UK (London, Somerset, and Scotland) China, India, Spain, Vietnam and Italy. Increasingly, production is moving to the Far East, although Scheybeler insists that this has not been for cost reasons.
‘We actually found ourselves going to the Far East for quality reasons,’ he notes. ‘We do source from Italy too, but so much experience has been lost from the European textile industry that it was difficult to get the manufacturing expertise we needed.’
