Overnight Success

Episode 4 of this special industry series looks ahead at the future of the cycling industry after years of volatility. We draw on dozens of interviews with distributors, brand leaders, retailers, and skeptics to explore where growth might come from, who won’t survive, and how pricing, Chinese brands, regulation, and community will reshape the landscape. It’s a candid, sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately optimistic look at what’s next for the bike world.

Note that this episode is cut off part way through and the full audio is available to our Escape Collective members who fund our work...

They seemed to arrive overnight: Chinese bike brands turning up in the WorldTour peloton, in your local shop, and all over your feed. But almost no one inside the industry thinks it was sudden at all. Most of the bikes we ride have been built in Asia for decades, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before those factories started putting their own names on the down tube.

This episode digs into why these brands are expanding now, and the competition this poses for many Western brands who are already struggling. We cover China's national...

In episode one of this series — 'False Dawn' — we looked at the mistaken optimism the bike industry faced when the world opened up after the pandemic.

The more you dig into this story, the clearer it becomes that the boom and bust was only the surface. Underneath it, something more fundamental had already changed.

In this episode — which we're calling 'The Ground Shifted' — we hear from people who work at various levels of the supply chain about how the customer has changed, how the selling landscape has been redrawn, how private equity saw opportunity and moved in...

In our last Industry Special series, we asked how the bike industry got itself into such deep trouble. What we found was a supply chain riddled with problems, a leadership culture built on false optimism, and an industry that mistook a pandemic bump for a permanent new normal. They called it the bike gold rush. Sadly it came to an abrupt end. 

Since that time, businesses have gone bankrupt. Shops have closed. Thousands of employees have been laid off. 

So the question has changed. We know how the industry got into trouble. Now we're asking so...

In January 2025, I sat down with Rapha's newly appointed CEO, Fran Millar, after she'd been in the job for about three months. Founder and previous CEO Simon Mottram stepped away from the business in 2021 and hired William Kim as his successor. Kim was brought in as an outsider with impressive experience in luxury fashion and retail – Burberry, Gucci, Abercrombie & Fitch. Unfortunately he lasted less than a year, and after Kim stepped away in 2022, Rapha internally promoted François Convercey and Daniel Blumire as co-CEOs. Blumire left the business shortly after, and the sole leadership position was left to Convercey unt...

In this episode we take a deep dive into Rose Bikes - a 120 year old bicycle brand that many of you may not have heard of, and that's about to change. Rose Bikes is a German  company that sells direct to consumer, similar to Canyon. Founded in 1907 as a small family workshop, it evolved into one of Europe’s early adopters of the D2C model. 

Thank you to my colleague Suvi Loponen for doing this interview. You'll be hearing more from Suvi on this channel much more in the future, so stay tuned! 

If you l...

In this episode, we are going deep inside the founding story of Cannondale, which has arguably been one of the most innovative bike companies in the world to this day.

The founder who is the main character in this story is Joe Montgomery. But he wasn’t a hardcore cyclist as you might expect. He was an entrepreneur who liked building things, hired his customer, and figuring it out as he went. Sadly, Joe passed away peacefully on January 2, 2026. 

Telling Cannondale's origin story in this episode is Joe's son, Scott Montgomery. Scott lived and breathed Can...

This episode's guest is Rachel Burnside, who is the creator and force behind Uplift, a mentoring and networking program she built from scratch to support women working in the cycling industry.

Uplift started simply: connect women early in their careers with senior women who'd already navigated the road ahead. But it's grown into something much bigger - a global community with over a thousand women in the bike industry, and  live events at Sea Otter, Eurobike, the Tour de France Femmes and many other smaller ones. All of it built in Rachel's spare time, powered by goodwill, a...

In this episode replay, I speak to Phil Liggett about how he got his start in commentating, how he met Paul Sherwen, how he’s been doing since Paul’s untimely passing, about his relationship with Lance Armstrong, and the cut-throat nature of his position at the top of his profession.

Liggett is undeniably the most recognisable voice in cycling and his dulcet tones have brought the sport we all love into the mainstream through his ‘Liggetisms’, through his descriptions of châteaux, and through his partnership with co-commentator Paul Sherwen.

Many enthusiasts say that Phil is l...

Mikel Delagrange is the reluctant face of Team AMANI. While he prefers the title of 'Head Cheerleader,' he was left to carry the torch after the project's founder, Sule Kangangi, tragically died in a high-speed crash in Vermont. Now leading the mission to dismantle the barriers facing African cyclists, Mikel oversees a unique ecosystem: From building a high-altitude training center in Kenya to the Migration Gravel Race. With a moonshot goal of fielding an all-African team at the Tour de France, Team AMANI is fighting to ensure the next generation can bridge the gap to the sport's highest...

Last month, I traveled to the Great Karoo in South Africa for the inaugural Nedbank Gravel Burn. It is the latest brainchild of Kevin Vermaak, the man who built the legendary Cape Epic.

I cannot overstate how spectacular the experience was for me. While the riding was incredibly challenging, the event's culture was the true standout. It was a rare leveling of the playing field: World Tour pros like Tom Pidcock. Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio, and Alison Jackson,  Ivan Glasenberg’s cohort of Glencore billionaires, all telling the same war stories from the road around the campfire and and din...

In this episode we speak to Graham Watson, perhaps the world's most prolific cycling photographer. Over five decades, Graham didn't just witness cycling history - he documented it. Some might say the pioneers had it easy, but as you'll hear, Graham's path was anything but. He made his own luck, opening doors through persistence and talent. And whoever said "nice guys finish last" never met Graham.

Today's episode runs longer than usual because there's no way to do justice to Graham's remarkable 40-year career in an hour. Buckle up for a ride with the man who captured...

In 1999, Joe Friel was drowning in faxes. The legendary cycling coach, later author of The Cyclist’s Training Bible, had 72 clients sending training data every Monday. His desk was buried under paper. His son Dirk, then racing in Belgium, figured there had to be a better way.

Over beers at The George in Vail, Dirk convinced his best man—and the only web developer he knew—Gear Fisher, to build a solution. Dirk paid him $3,000. That handshake deal became TrainingPeaks, now the go-to platform for endurance athletes, from amateurs to Tour de France winners.

If you’ve...

Charlie Stewart, Rupert Hartley, and Jack Howker started the British apparel brand Albion nearly a decade ago. It began not in a boardroom, but in the wild weather of Wales. 

I first met founders Charlie and Rupert by chance on the roads of Mallorca, before they’d launched a single product. Years later, Albion has grown into a respected name in the ultra-distance and adventure cycling scene. This episode traces their journey from pre-dawn London rides to post-work email threads, through the hurdles of product development and the pivotal hires, like legendary designer Graeme Raeburn, that helped tra...

Over the weekend The Service Course announced its closure. This is a re-play of the episode we previously did that talks about its origin story. We will aim to do a follow-up when the time is right.

---

If you follow professional cycling and are attracted to specialty coffee, beautiful custom bikes, and boutique travel, then you’ve surely come across Christian and Amber Meier’s businesses. The couple from Canada, of all places, embarked on a professional cycling career for Christian and settled in the once sleepy Catalan town of Girona. The two of them...

In this episode of Overnight Success we hear the story of cycling commentator Matthew Keenan. 

The Pro's Closet represents a quintessential modern startup journey, evolving from a professional mountain biker's eBay side hustle into America's largest certified pre-owned bicycle marketplace. The company's trajectory mirrors both the opportunities and challenges of the pandemic era, riding high on $90 million in funding before facing the harsh realities of market volatility.

The Pro's Closet experienced a meteoric rise during the pandemic cycling boom. However, the company soon encountered the perfect storm of challenges that defined the era: cheap capital driving unsustainable growth, miscalculating the cycling boom's longevity, and the whiplash effect that rattled the entire bike...

Rapha recently celebrated its 20-year anniversary and for the majority of that time it was the darling brand of cycling. Everything Rapha touched turned to gold. Founder Simon Mottram saw cycling apparel differently than anyone else and created an entirely new market for people who connected with his vision.

In 2017, RZC, the Walton brothers’ investment arm, bought a majority stake in Rapha. Things began to change, and not in a way their customers and community hoped. In 2021, Mottram stepped down as CEO and the business has gone through two (or three, depending on how you count) CEOs si...

Welcome to this special episode where we dive deep into one of cycling's oldest, most fascinating, and perhaps largely unknown stories - how a single French family, best known as their business entity the Amaury Sporting Organisation or ASO, came to control the Tour de France, the world's most famous bicycle race. Because, if you recall, they didn’t invent the TdF. A little french newspaper called L’Auto did. 

Today we're exploring this remarkable story detailed in Alex Duff's book "Le Fric" (which is slang in french for The Money) and we’ll be speaking with Alex hi...

The Cape Epic is widely regarded as the crown jewel in mountain bike stage racing. Many notable legends of the sport have called it the Tour de France of mountain biking. So how did Kevin Vermaak, a 30-year-old man new to mountain biking create a cultural phenomenon in the MTB world in the far away land of South Africa? This is his remarkable story...

If you like this podcast and want to hear more, please support our work by becoming a member: https://escapecollective.com/member/

You could argue that Bonnie Tu is the most powerful woman in cycling, although she wouldn’t think of describing herself that way. She’s best known for being the face of the Liv brand she created back in 2008, but more than that she’s chairperson of the largest bike brand in the world: the Giant Bicycle Group. What does that mean? Quite simply, she runs the entire company.

Giant Bicycles is a US$2.1 billion-per-annum publicly traded company that produces millions of bikes per year, while also serving as manufacturer for some of the largest and most reputa...

In recent years Rapha has been one of the most innovative, aspirational and disruptive businesses in cycling and Simon Mottram is the mastermind behind the brand. He took the company from a single idea, with the premise of how he felt about road cycling and how he wanted it portrayed. From a single jersey that wasn’t even ready in time for the company launch during in 2004, he build Rapha into the darling child of cycling brands that inspired an entirely new market of ‘micro apparel brands’ and showed many others of the cycling industry the power of storytelling and lo...

Indoor training has been around for longer than I can remember, but when Zwift came along in 2014 it changed the market forever. The company came into the world with bold ambitions, reimagined the space and what it could become, and has grown the market to a size that nobody could have imagined.

Some of the earliest pioneers in the indoor virtual world space were the likes of Computrainer and Tacx back in the late 90s, early 2000s. But they never really delivered on the promise of making indoor training much more enjoyable. They can’t be blamed fo...

To most of us it would seem inconceivable to build one of the biggest bike brands in the world from absolutely nothing. Think of the capital it would require, the global distribution network, complex supply chains, logistics, manufacturing, sales, design … It’s a daunting endeavour and hard to imagine where you’d even begin.

Well, it didn’t start with all of those elements in mind. Roman Arnold, Canyon's founder, simply started cycling as a way of competing for recognition and approval from his father over his three brothers. His father sold bike parts at his weekend races to...

Many would argue that Cervélo is one of the most innovative bike brands in the cycling industry. Back in the 1990s when they first started, almost everyone else was focusing on lightweight bikes. Cervélo, meanwhile, was busy pioneering bicycle aerodynamics. I’ve ask engineers at various bike companies which brand impresses them most with regards to engineering and innovation, and overwhelmingly I hear them say Cervélo.

The genesis of Cervélo started in 1995 when two young engineering students named Phil White and Gerard Vroomen met in the composites lab at McGill University in Canada. Over a...

For many years, bike brands have been known to collaborate with automobile and Formula 1 companies in order to align themselves with their halo of high level performance, innovation and technology. But factor bikes started in reverse to that. Factor might seem like a relative newcomer in the market, and that's partially true. It's been a mere eight years since their bikes became widely available, but they got their start almost 16 years ago when a gentleman named John Bailey came along, who owned a Formula One data measurement and composites company. His company was called British Formula One, or BF-1...

It’s been said that Kona is 'The Smallest Biggest Bike Company in the World'. They’re best known as the quintessential North Shore bike brand, yet their global head office is just down over the border in Ferndale, Washington.

The quirky company stood out with outrageous bike model names such as the Stinky Dee-Lux, Sex One, Sex Too, and, Jackshit, which placed them well and truly as the "alternative" bicycle company.

The business was founded by Dan Gerhard, Jacob Heilbron in Vancouver, BC along with mtb hall of famer Joe Murray as their designer.

In our final episode of this limited series, we turn the floor over to member questions. Thank you to everyone who became members throughout this series. Every single one of you helps make us produce more content like this. If you're not a member, you can join here: https://escapecollective.com/join/

You can listen another podcast you'll enjoy about 'Why are modern bikes so expensive' podcast here: https://escapecollective.com/why-are-modern-bikes-so-expensive/

In EP3, we heard about what much of the bike industry experienced during that dramatic slowdown of bike sales, and what resulted. In this episode, EP4, we'll hear about some of the learnings and takeaways from the past three years, and put forward some tough questions for the bike industry to ask itself.

This is the third episode in our series that takes a deep dive into what the bike industry experienced during the covid boom and how it got into the trouble it’s in now.

In Episode 2, we heard from various industry professionals about the early warning signals that told them that this bubble was about to burst, and some of the reckless behaviour and pressure that was being put onto various parts of the supply chain by some big brands. But it’s not so clear-cut. We’re also beginning to hear some finger-pointing in all...

In episode one we heard about the unexpected windfall that the cycling industry saw at the start of the pandemic and how many needed to react. 

Of course that didn’t last forever, and in this episode I’ve titled ‘the storm clouds’ we talk about the early signs that this new demand was coming to an abrupt halt, and the types of behaviour that was happening and the causes of that behaviour that led to the catastrophe that the industry would later see.

In this 4 part series, I wanted to explore the events that took place that led the bike industry to the troubling point it’s at now. I spoke to over a dozen industry professionals from all parts of the supply chain. From well run bike shops, forecasting analysts, distributors, the biggest bike brands in the world, and manufacturers. 

It’s well known that the bicycle industry went through an unprecedented boom during the pandemic from 2020 - 2022. 

Jump ahead to 2024 and much of the bike industry is in trouble. New demand...

There’s an undeniable truth that an overnight success takes about 10 years, not a single night. Almost no one comes up with a winning business idea all at once. And if you’re not Peter and Tom Marchment or those around them who created the aftermarket wheel brand Hunt, you might be mistaken that they came out of nowhere. 

Tom and Peter are brothers who grew up riding in a small fishing village on the Isle of Man and like most of us at the beginning, cycling was a way to get around and a source of freed...

DeFeet is mostly thought about as a sock brand, and that’s largely the case, even though they also make arm warmers, gloves and base layers. After 31 years of being in the trade, they’re the longest-standing business dedicated to socks in the cycling market that I’m aware of. 

Back in the 90’s socks may have been the least interesting, and most neglected piece of apparel in a cyclist's wardrobe, or any athlete’s for that matter. They were just flimsy tubes of cotton or wool that covered the feet. It was a thankless job nobody gave much t...

Bowhead is a business that’s only about 5 years old, but it’s been twenty years in the making. It’s a brand many of you probably haven’t heard of before, and despite this I truly hope that you do listen to this episode, because this one is one of the most inspiring stories that I’ve come across while making this podcast. 

Christian Bagg has been a lifelong adrenaline junkie who loved mountain biking and snowboarding. Christian broke his back in 1996 while snowboarding. His life changed forever because of this, but that didn’t hold him back...

Over the past decade, MAAP has risen to become one of the most successful and highly regarded apparel brands in the market. Born in the age of Instagram brands in 2014, there was an explosion of these micro-brands with a design-led ethos popping up all over the place. Cycling apparel was going through a big change at this time. People were loving untraditional and playful kits and they were beginning to become a fashion statement just as much as they were a technical product. The barrier to entry for apparel was getting fairly low at this time as custom kit w...

This month we’ve got a different episode for you. For a long time now I've been asked to share the origin story of CyclingTips in this podcast, but I always knew there was more to come in this journey. But now that the story is complete, I figured this is a good time to tell it.

Instead of this being a monologue, I asked Mitch Docker (from the Life in the Peloton podcast) to host this episode. Mitch's journey with Life in the Peloton is similar to my own in many ways, and I...

The story of an unassuming American who brought Castelli back from the grave.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more iconic brand in cycling than Castelli. The company dates back to the late 1800s, to around the time of the first-ever documented bike race. 

Castelli is an Italian brand with a long, complicated history, but much of its recent success is due to an American by the name of Steve Smith, who came onto the scene in 2000. He had no Italian heritage, no real cycling industry experience, but he did have a love of cyc...

In this episode of From the Top, I speak to The Sufferfest founder David McQuillen about how he went from working in the Swiss Banking industry, to creating one of the largest indoor training platforms in his spare time and later selling the business to Wahoo Fitness.

I first met David back in 2010 at the Road World Championships in Geelong and we became good friends thereafter. We were both in similar start-up stages of our businesses and we had lots in common. When David moved to Melbourne we got together frequently to discuss business, cycling and the...

So many of the businesses we’ve discovered in this show have been ‘happy accidents’ so to speak, and Scratch Labs embodies that very same organic build and hustling spirit. Founded by two longtime friends, Allan Lim and Ian McGregor as both were sidelined from the sport, they both described themselves as initially too ‘lazy’ to actually sell their ‘secret drink mix’ they were making for pro cycling teams at the time. But as one thing led to another, they found themselves in their kitchens making their products, mixing drink powders in paint shakers, and throwing pizza and beer parties with t...