SRAM purchases Velocio, with founders to stay on with the clothing company
SRAM owns multiple hardgood brands, like Zipp, Quarq, and RockShox. This is its first clothing brand.
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On Wednesday, the high-end cycling apparel company Velocio announced its sale to SRAM, the hardgoods company that not only rivals Shimano in road and mountain bike components, but whose stable also includes Zipp wheels, Quarq power meters, Time pedals, Hammerhead computers, RockShox suspension, and TruVativ components.
Brad Sheehan and Andrew Gardner created Velocio in 2013, and the pair outlined their thoughts on the sale in an open letter that was also signed by Velocio partner Olivia Dillon.
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Gardner told VeloNews that the three, as well as all of their employees, will remain with the company going forward.
“There’s a unique challenge to running a business that often gets overlooked: succeed and your reward is a deeper expectation to grow. Grow too large, too fast and the risk is the often-lamented loss of brand, the dilution of product, and corner-cutting changes to boost profits. We won’t do any of those things,” Gardner wrote in the open letter.
“In selling Velocio, our focus was on finding a partner, a large brand or brand family that would value our three pillars: design, responsibility and culture. We approached SRAM precisely because we thought there might be a place in their well-respected orbit of components and bike products for us. We approached SRAM because our cultures are compatible,” Gardner wrote.
This is SRAM’s first softgoods brand. SRAM is based in Chicago, Illinois, with manufacturing and other offices around the world. Velocio is a remote company.
“What’s exciting is that we’ll now have SRAM’s backing for more independent product design and development, including a still bigger push towards sustainability in our product offerings and how we deliver them,” Gardner wrote. “We’ll also have SRAM’s reach into racing and teams as well as their insights into global distribution and retail support.”
The sale price was not disclosed.