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 since. Not only have they had to deal with the lasting effects of COVID, but many customers will say that the brand is not what it used to be.
Last year, in August 2024, Fran Millar stepped into the role of CEO. She has a wide array of experience that has prepared her for this unique challenge, most recently turning around the struggling British heritage brand, Belstaff. Earlier, she was instrumental in starting and running Team Sky, organising Eliud Kipchoge’s sub-two-hour marathon project, and many other career achievements.
In this wide-ranging interview with Millar, we talk about what she intends on fixing at Rapha, how she’s going to go about that, and what her long-term vision is for the business.
This interview was lightly edited for clarity and readability.
If you prefer to listen to this full interview in audio form (which includes Millar’s career journey, how the Rapha opportunity emerged, her perceptions of Rapha before she joined, and lots more), the podcast will be published shortly on the Overnight Success feed.
Wade Wallace: When I worked at Rapha, a part of the hiring process was Simon getting me to create a 90-day plan. It was brilliant because it gave me the opportunity to figure things out on my own, do my research, and create a roadmap for the first 90 days. Did you have a similar process, or was your hiring experience different?
Fran Millar: Simon is not as involved operationally in the business as that, but the board certainly asked for a 100-day plan. My answer to that was, I’m not a “write it down in a PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheet” type of CEO. That’s not how I work. But I was very happy to discuss my plan for the business, which has been to understand the lived experience of the business, because I think the lived experience of any business can tell you pretty much everything you need to know about what’s going on. So I always prioritize speaking to people, spending time with the team. I try to meet every single member of HQ, and then try to meet all of the key leads in the regions. One of the reasons I’m in Australia is to spend some time in Sydney and Melbourne.
So I definitely had a plan. But like all good plans, they’re only good until you get into the field of play.
WW: Was there a particular mandate from the board when you came in, or were you setting the priorities from your own perceptions?
FM: They’ve been brilliant actually. The priorities are that you’ve got a group of people who are very passionate about the brand and about the sport. Our owners are probably some of the most impressive people when it comes to investing in cycling and believing in cycling. Their ability and desire to go again with Rapha – I think it’s been a really difficult seven years since they acquired the business. What they want more than anything else, like all fans of the brand, is for the brand to be back as the big, shiny jewel in the crown of the cycling industry. I think they were a bit like, “We’re not now sure how to do that, and what the best way to do that is. We’ve tried various things.” So they’d like to hear what I think we should do. They’ve been quite good at giving me the remit to come back to them and say, “This is what I think we need to do.”
WW: From your perception, externally, when you weren’t with the company, what direction do you think Rapha took, intentionally or not, that has led to this point where you’re coming in to fix?
FM: I think it can probably best be articulated by, for those of us who knew the brand in early days, Simon had this very clear purpose, which was to make the sport of road cycling the most popular sport in the world. The way that he did that was through the lens of the heritage of the sport, the beauty and the suffering, the glory and the suffering, those incredible stories of heroism, and it wasn’t just about winning. He was able to take a narrative from the heritage of the sport and make it relevant to the current human condition.
I think when they decided to sell the business, they felt that lens was maybe too tight and too narrow. Road cycling as it had been in 2004 had fundamentally changed by 2016-17. We suddenly had lots of different interesting characters winning bike races. It had become much more open and accessible. I always joke that when I used to tell people I worked in cycling 20 years ago, they thought I worked in a bike shop. Now you tell people you work in cycling, and they ask you what brand you work for or what team – people know about it, the consumer is more educated.
So I think they made this decision to try and open the aperture of the brand. They changed the purpose to become “inspiring people to live a life by bike.” While I think that’s incredibly aspirational and a beautiful sentiment, I think it’s too broad. It becomes a catch-all. If you don’t have somebody in the driving seat of the brand saying what that means — like, what do we mean by inspiring the world to live a life by bike? Where will we play, and where won’t we play? What can we do and what can’t we do? It becomes very easy for the whole business to be like, “Okay, this is inspiring people to live a life by bike. We can do off-bike, mountain bike, BMX, commuting…” So you suddenly can do all these things that historically you wouldn’t have had permission to do within the brand’s framework.
The board and Simon and the leadership changes, and all the things that happened over the seven years since acquisition, meant that without a very clear, tight brand purpose, and without a clear leadership structure saying “This is what we mean by this over the next 2, 3, 4, 10 years,” it all became loose. The brand was doing everything and all things, and went from being a very clear brand for a certain type of person that meant something to those people — it doesn’t mean that to those people anymore, and it didn’t acquire new people for whom it meant something. That’s been the biggest challenge. You now have this messy middle we need to sharpen up.
WW: It’s interesting because I was going to ask you why that purpose statement changed. A lot of people think those are just words, but they’re really important within a company for showing everyone the direction. Do you foresee that changing again to tighten it up?
FM: It’s really interesting because I agree, they’re really important words. I think Simon was a genius with how he led the brand from a purpose perspective. Equally, I think probably for the first time in my career, I’ve realized the importance of an incredibly strong purpose with incredibly strong leadership. Those two things — if you’ve got one without the other, you can’t drive success. While I probably tacitly knew it, I’d never seen it so viscerally brought to life as I have at Rapha.
Yes, I probably will sharpen it up with the help of the team, and we are looking at ways of articulating that. But ultimately, those words are only as important as the actions that we then take to back them up. The bit that we’ve got to get right as a brand is to decide what we stand for, but then in everything we do, keep showing up in that way. Every product that we make, every piece of content that we create, every person we hire – we have to be really clear: do they enhance and move us towards that direction? Be really almost evangelical about how we’re going to do that.
The concept of inspiring people to live a life by bike isn’t wrong. That’s not the wrong purpose for Rapha. You could absolutely make that something special. What was wrong is that nobody got hold of it and said, “How do we make that happen? What’s the timeline of that?” Because we can’t do that overnight. So what’s the first two years of that? What’s the next two years after that?
My reason for changing it will be that I think the business needs something new to get behind. I think customers need something new to get behind. I think we need to galvanize people back behind what Rapha is for and who it stands for. Keeping the existing messy middle won’t enable us to do that. So yes, it will be changing.
WW: That’s a really hard thing to do. Is it starting to formulate in your head?
FM: Yes, and again, it is really hard. I did a big full business day on December 12th to try and get the business thinking differently and moving on. I presented the first layer of that thinking, and I think it got really emotionally connected with people – they’re really excited about it. Then I’ve taken it away and realized it’s still not sharp enough. Simon’s challenged me that it’s not sharp enough. The board has too, and I’ve gone out to a whole host of people.
I feel more of a burden of responsibility about getting this right than I’ve ever felt about anything professionally in my life. It keeps me up at night. I wake up thinking, “I still haven’t got this right.” It’s because I think it means so much to people. It was such a talismanic brand, and it was so unbelievably successful at creating something that people could point to and say, “That’s for me, I get that.” I want to give that back to people. I want people to look at it and say, “She’s nailed it.” I’m not going to put it out into the world until I’ve got to a place where I can stand behind it for the next 10 years and drive this business into the future. If that takes another two or three months, I’m happy for it to take that time.
WW: You mentioned really defining and nailing down who you’re for, who you’re not for. The other part of that is the competition that’s arisen in the marketplace that Rapha was largely responsible for creating. How do you see the landscape of the competition and navigating that in the challenge ahead of you? Is that something you really think about? Are you just thinking about Rapha?
FM: I think there are two parts to it. If you’d asked me that question two or three months ago, I would have given you quite a binary answer, which is, the competition is kind of irrelevant. I come from a high-performance sports background. I know that the more time you spend looking at the competition, the less time you spend getting better yourself. I used the analogy when I first started at Rapha — a guy in a breakaway, the point that he looks over his shoulder is the point at which he knows he’s in trouble.
So it’s about being really ruthless and laser-focused on the performance we need to achieve. What does Rapha need to do to win? Because ultimately, that will define how you operate around the competition. But having spent some time out now; I haven’t been in cycling for the last four and a half years, and the landscape has fundamentally changed. From a commercial perspective, it’s very interesting being back at a bike race for the first time in five years. Nothing has changed from a bike race perspective, it’s so similar it’s quite shocking, but the landscape has changed.
They are a threat. I think they’re very real. Some of the stuff they’re doing is really fantastic. I’ve got a lot of admiration for what the brands have done that have come up behind Rapha. I think we have a huge advantage in our scale and size. We have a huge advantage in our community. We have managed to create this unbelievably connected, global community that I think we can leverage brilliantly in a way that other brands can’t.
But I would be foolish to ignore them. I think one of the things I’ve talked a lot about is that Rapha has this window of time, probably the last two years, where it’s behaved a bit like Blockbuster — that kind of “no one’s ever going to get DVDs through the post, they’re never going to get big enough to challenge us, they’re just a little challenger brand.” That’s very dangerous. Being borderline arrogant about our size, our scale, and the fact that we were here first, and they all copied us and are just following our playbook — having that attitude is not going to be the thing that gets us back out in front.
I’m very conscious of them. I think they’re really interesting to look at and see what they’ve done well and what maybe we could do differently or learn from them. But then the attention has to go fully back to how we win, how we win for our customers, and how we bring new customers into the sport and into the brand.
Rapha was never, in my opinion, an apparel brand. It was never created to win on the field of play with apparel. It was to win for cycling, and it was to get people into this amazing sport that we’re all deeply passionate about. I think that has to be the role that Rapha plays. How do we continue to be at the front of bringing people into this sport, falling in love with this sport, understanding this sport, and making it a bigger and better sport for the world?
WW: I think about the purpose-driven brand like Rapha having such strength, and then a lot of the competition, they don’t have that deeper purpose. They’re just nice designs and good quality, but I find it interesting that the strength of a purpose-driven brand hasn’t endured like we’d expect.
FM: I wonder if that’s a generational thing. Is a purpose-led brand something really important for people of our generation? I think we’re a similar age, I’m in my mid-40s. We grew up in that world where purpose-led brands really came to fruition through the Gen X period. I wonder if Gen Z see the world like that.
What they do care about is sustainability, quality, inclusion. I think for a brand to stand true in its own purpose but also reflect the way young people think about the world is really important. Where we can win is we’re not just going to a factory and choosing fabrics off the shelf, not just picking patterns somebody else has created, not just doing iterative changes to off-the-shelf product. We are a ground-up business that starts from first principles around what’s the best possible product to ride a bike in.
We work really hard to develop environmentally friendly materials. We’ve spent three years redeveloping our rain jackets to make sure they’re PFAS free. We take our role in the world from a sustainability perspective really seriously. One of the reasons I was so excited to come back to cycling and to Rapha was I knew they had this incredibly strong view of their impact on the world, both from getting people to ride bikes and leaving a footprint from a sustainability perspective.
More and more, constant consumption is going to be questioned. People aren’t going to just keep buying more. The generation below millennials is going to keep thinking about the lifecycle of a product — how they can reuse it, repair it, resell it. Rapha has a really strong role to play in that. More than the purpose-led piece, although it fits into our purpose, where we can play against the competition so strongly is in our product integrity, our product lifecycle, the way we think about the impact of our product in the world, and the fact that we get people riding bikes.
WW: Late last year the media was picking apart your financials. How much sleep did you lose over that?
FM: Zero. It’s interesting that financial journalists don’t know how to read a balance sheet. I had exactly the same at Belstaff. Even though we took it to break even, the balance sheets and accounts that get submitted have all the legacy debts and legacy loans. It’s very hard to justify that to a journalist. I’m not remotely worried about it. We have amazing backers, amazing customers, an amazing business. They wouldn’t have hired me into this brand if they didn’t want to take it to the next level. They would have probably mothballed it and let it tick along as a double-digit million brand. They want to make it something really special.
WW: Is profitability in your short to medium term list of priorities?
FM: It has to be. I’m not interested in running a loss-making business. I like winning. To be truly sustainable, you have to be able to wash your own face and build your own growth and support your own growth. For our team and business and the people who work for Rapha, I want them to feel safe and secure and not that we’re relying constantly on going back to owners to ask for backing. I fundamentally believe we can do that. As a brand, we have an unbelievably strong foundation to grow from.
WW: What do you see as a high-level pathway to that? Is it cost cutting? Is it selling more? Are there legacy things or COVID after-effects that need to flush out?
FM: It’s not cost cutting. You don’t build a business through cost cutting, but it’s much better management of the P&L. Understanding where to invest our time and energy from a product perspective to drive margin, and where we don’t. Value engineering our product to make sure it’s the best possible product at the best possible quality point, but we’re not putting anything we don’t need to into it.
It’s about really looking at where’s the value for the customer and how we build that value into everything we do. The community we have around the RCC, for example — massive opportunity for us to do a much better job of servicing them. One of the things the business has done to its detriment is chase new customers. That’s a really hard thing to do if you don’t know who your current customer is instinctively and intuitively.
One of the things early Rapha did so well was it lived and breathed who that customer was. Everyone in the business was the customer. Simon was the customer. They understood how the customer acted and would react not just to product, but to content, experiences, travel. We’ve lost that connectivity to our customers. That’s where we’ll win ultimately.
We have 17,000 members of RCC. We have this unbelievable 22 global clubhouses all over the world. The opportunity to get to profitability is about how you build a business and community that can really drive value to the cycling lives of our customers.
WW: I saw in Simon’s book that recently came out (The Extra Mile), the original business plan that he wrote. Going deep with a narrow customer was explicitly stated. It sounds like that’s what you’re more or less getting back to, versus going wide.
FM: I think there’s a little bit — I probably feel you can do a little more width. We probably went slightly too narrow. That’s probably been the challenge of the brand. He was so narrow and so deep that, to my point about the aperture of the brand needing to be opened up, I think it was right to try and open it up and get more breadth in that customer base. But without the precision of how they were going to do that, that’s how they got distracted.
We have to be broader. We’ve done an amazing job in the early years of appealing to different and diverse backgrounds, getting more women into the sport, looking at mountain biking, thinking about gravel. A lot of the work we did in the early days around some of the Continental stuff — we pioneered a lot of that stuff. And then we let people come in and take our lunch, as it were. So it is about being really connected to our customer but just broadening that customer base a little bit.
WW: It’s a very different strategy from when Simon started versus where you are 20 years later. That’s a great thing to start a business, but not necessarily what’s going to take it into the future.
You mentioned RCC. I did have questions about what you’re doing with RCC. Are there plans for changing, enhancing it?
FM: People have referenced it as the jewel in the crown of Rapha. Our community is genuine. I’m very conscious that I don’t want to do anything with the RCC that’s not both customer and data-led. We have this unbelievable pool of data around why people join, how long they stay, what they’re like, why they lapse. We’ve never really harnessed that data to inform the offering we give to our customers.
So yes, I will be changing it, but evolving it to make it better. We’ve got several challenges at RCC level. One is how it started. For founder members, it was a handwritten letter from Simon, you had to write an essay to get in, it was incredibly curated, very bespoke. Then you have people who joined in COVID for £75 because they wanted bike insurance. The diametric opposition of what some people’s experience has been to others has meant we’ve ended up with this messy middle offering where it’s like — is it a loyalty program? Is it a cycling club? Is it a membership scheme?
For me, there are several facets. One is we as a brand should absolutely have a place where our evangelical, loyal membership can come and feel special and feel like they’re part of something. I have to rebuild that. Then we have and should have an amazing International Cycling Club – you have a kit, you ride together, you know your community, you can communicate with each other. Then there probably is a loyalty-type program, because 50% of our most frequent and highest spending customers have never joined the RCC. I’ve personally never joined a cycling club in my life though I’ve ridden a bike my whole life.
There are certain people who will never join a cycling club, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t feel close to the brand and recognized by it. We have a Kyoto summit for RCC members in April of this year. My plan is to get there with a very clear “this is what the RCC will be going forward, and this is what you can expect from it.”
WW: The discounting has been talked about with Rapha for a long time. There’s a perception of “it will be on sale, so why buy it now?” Is that something intentional in keeping around, or something you need to plug the hole on?
FM: I’ve only been in the business for three and a half months. Stock is bought a year in advance — you’re managing stock and inventory. I can’t just cut that off completely because that’s how the business has been built so far. Absolutely, I want to move away from discounting. You can’t build a brand through discounting just like you can’t build it through cost cutting.
There’s probably a period of time where just switching that off won’t work. You annoy people and they walk away. It comes down to having great product. We as a brand need to get our heat back and get people desperate for the product when it goes on sale at full price, where they think “I want to buy it now because it might not be available when a sale comes.”
We still have product like that — our EF product sells out within a week. We’re still looking at making sure we order enough. Some of our really new, innovative product sells out incredibly quickly. Getting back to that over the next 18 months is fundamental to the strategy, recognizing that means a step back in revenue and EBITDA. It means thinking about a long game for the business from a commercial perspective and being willing to sit in the discomfort of that.
This isn’t just about Rapha. All apparel businesses running up to COVID, through COVID and post-COVID have experienced the same thing. Everyone went into the pandemic thinking it would always be like this — everyone shopping online, making loads of product. Then everyone was overstocked and went into that flush of discounting. We saw it massively at Belstaff as well.
The reality of the post-COVID world — I think that’s still whiplash, probably another 18 months before that gets fully washed through. All brands are going to have to think about how the new customer is shopping and how people are consuming product in this new post-COVID world. Cost of living crisis, people thinking about money they’re spending and interest rates. We all, as brands and companies, have a responsibility to think about what other ways people can engage with our brand that isn’t just about buying more stuff. That’s part of the challenge for me with Rapha, because just relying on buying more stuff is never going to be the way that you win.
WW: You just mentioned something interesting which made me think about the drama at Nike and their departing CEO. One of the main things that stands out was his mistake in retracting from their retail partnerships, like Foot Locker, and then doubled down on the D2C side. Rapha started basically D2C and then has branched out more to retailers. What’s your view on that mix for Rapha?
FM: I definitely had time to think about it. Belstaff was pretty much 50/50 wholesale when I went in — it was 30% wholesale, 70% D2C. Very quickly I was like, why would we not be in wholesale? Why wouldn’t we be selling to third parties? We only had four stores globally. Yes, we have an e-comm footprint, but increasingly it’s expensive to acquire customers via e-comm channels. Everyone’s competing for the same search terms, the same customer.
I very quickly realized that using third parties in different countries and territories to speak to new customers makes sense. As a consumer, some of the best brands I’ve discovered, I’ve discovered in multi-brand environments. Whether that’s Selfridges or Nordstrom, you go in there and you’ve got a plethora of brands, you wander around, touch and feel and see things. You don’t get that experience in online shopping.
The power of a well-structured wholesale proposition for a brand is huge — ability to acquire new customers, be in front of customers you wouldn’t otherwise be in front of, work with partners who know how to talk to their customer differently, get into territories you wouldn’t necessarily go to first. They’re fundamental to the growth of Rapha.
We’ve got some amazing partners. Giant Adelaide out here, the store looks beautiful, the product is curated incredibly well, they’ve educated their store staff, they all wear Rapha. But equally, when you do wholesale in an opportunistic way, when it’s just about driving revenue and you pump and dump from a product perspective and don’t care where it goes or what it looks like, that’s dangerous. Customers walking into a mass market, big box retailer and seeing a brand not hung properly, not displayed properly, with no point of sale – you start devaluing the brand.
It’s a really tricky balance. It’s fundamental to the strategy for growth from my perspective, but the way it’s been done over the last three years probably hasn’t been optimized for our customer and brand experience. There’s work to do cleaning up that portfolio and going after it again in a more considered, curated way that enables customers to discover us in unexpected places but be delighted rather than surprised in a negative way.
WW: Wiggle might have been one of those moves that didn’t seem to fit. At the same time, there was the Palace collaboration which went nuts, or stuff in the Apple Store. These things start to transcend the cycling market. Is that a long-term goal for Rapha to become an Arc’teryx or Lululemon, a brand that comes from cycling but you’ll see on the Champs-Élysées?
FM: One hundred percent. That’s what excites me about the brand. Not just because I’m the CEO, but because I believe in cycling and the power of cycling. Being the brand that can bring people into this incredible sport, in the same way that Lululemon brought so many people into yoga and democratized it — absolutely Rapha can play that role.
However, that’s a 10-15 year horizon, and it’s very dangerous to think Rapha could do that now, because it can’t. That’s the honest truth. We have a lot of work to do to rebuild our base. We need to be the most aspirational and desirable brand for cyclists right now, and we’re not. I’m honest enough with myself to know we have a long way to go, and until we do that, we can’t preach to the world to come shop from us for things not related to cycling.
I don’t think that’s a credible play, and it’s probably where the brand went slightly wrong over the last few years, thinking they could make that move quicker and do it on a big, bold stage. Until you’ve got your heartland absolutely nailed, you can’t go into those spaces with credibility.
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