Rapha’s Excess program turns scrap material into new kits

If you’re a cycling apparel company, what do you do with the material leftover from creating kits? The answer unfortunately is usually a simple one: bin it and ship it off to the landfill. But Rapha has come up with a better solution: make brand new kits from those excess scraps.

Rapha Excess is a new program where the apparel brand takes leftover materials and gives them new life in other products. 

The brand acknowledges that surplus material is “unavoidable” in making apparel, but says that “giving new life to discarded material is where we can make all the difference.”

Rapha’s first go at the program is a limited release, owing in part to the nature of creating kits this way — the brand has only so much excess material.

The collection includes the men’s and women’s Pro Team Training Jersey, men’s and women’s cotton T-Shirt, and Pro Team Socks and Musette.

Significantly, Rapha is extending the collection to high performance pieces like the men’s and women’s Pro Team Bib Shorts and men’s and women’s Pro Team Aero Jersey, showing that creating kits this way still results in high quality gear. 

The collection is made from 100 percent leftover fabric, using a total of 2,303 meters (7,556 feet) of leftover fabric, or roughly 24 kilograms (52.9 pounds) of yarn. Excess zippers, elastics, and size labels have also been used when possible, Rapha says. 

The training jersey retails for $128, $2 less than the non-excess version, while the aero jersey costs $215, $5 more than the non-excess version. The pro team bibs cost $293, $3 more than the non-excess version.

Raced at the highest level

Rapha is debuting the program in a high profile way by creating a special swap-out kit for the EF Education-EasyPost and EF Education-TIBCO-SVB teams at the Giro d’Italia this month. 

Those kits will be 72 percent excess material instead of fully surplus material because the UCI, cycling’s governing body, mandates uniformity in team kits and that wasn’t possible for Rapha to achieve without some new material in the mix. Regardless, it’s a step in the right direction for minimizing the amount of virgin material needed.