Rapha — Scheybeler+

Scheybeler+rapha

luke scheybeler co-founder

culture, brand, creative, design, product, storytelling, founders, technology, ecommerce.

Before Rapha, cycling was a niche sport with no interest in style. We set out to make it an aspirational one.

Founded in 2004. We led every part of the customer's experience — logo, product, fabrics, website, photography, content, events and the first shops — and ran the company together: strategy, sales, marketing, and a network of agencies, suppliers and factories.

Rapha became the defining brand in cycling. Its approach is taught as a case study in business schools and has been copied across the sport and beyond. Some customers have the logo tattooed.

photography

Photography is the foundation of the brand. With Ben Ingham we combined 1950s sports reportage with the finish of European fashion photography, shot in the places that matter to the sport: Flanders, the Alps, the Dolomites, the Cévennes.

Each morning we handed the riders a bag of clothes, pointed at a spot on the map and followed. If they argued with a truck driver, we shot the argument. If they crashed, we shot the clean-up. If they met a shepherd on a mountain pass, we stayed for the conversation.

the stripe

Striped jerseys are the visual language of cycling's glory years. We reduced them to a single band on the arm: one mark that says Rapha at 30kmph, with a logo embroidered white on white for when you get close.

We wanted to be the antidote to the neon that dominated cycling in the 1990s. For research I rode around central London in full Mapei kit to gauge reaction.

The first jersey. The arm stripe is a minimal reading of the striped jerseys of the 1950s — and of a Paul Smith sweater with a single rainbow band, seen in Selfridges.

product

Each piece was designed to work at two distances: recognisable on a rider across the road, with the detail and quality to reward a closer look. Technical fabrics, clean construction, references drawn from the sport's history. Suppliers in Italy, Eastern Europe and Asia. The design principles set in 2004 are still in use twenty years on.

the logo

I drew the Rapha logo in 2004 and refined it with the calligrapher Nick Cooke. The letterforms come from hand-painted lettering on the side of a 1950s Citroën H Van, found in a French book, Le Tour de France Intime. The open p was the first thing I liked about it.

It is paired with Trade Gothic — the signature-and-condensed-sans combination of European commercial graphics of the period. “Performance Roadwear” began as placeholder copy to balance the logo and stayed: it made the technical claim and the focus on the road in two words.

The work was exhibited at the Design Museum, London.