Custom Apparel for Cycling Clubs: On and Off the Bike
By The Velocity Wear Team
A cycling club actually needs two wardrobes, and they are made completely differently. On-bike kit is sublimated polyester, because nothing can sit on the surface of a garment worn stretched and sweaty for four hours. Off-bike kit, which is where most clubs spend the majority of their money, is cotton-rich hoodies, polos and caps with embroidery. Design both for how they are seen: from behind, at speed, by a driver.
The Two Wardrobes and Why They Split
Club kit gets talked about as if it were one thing. It is not. Riding kit is technical, close-fitting and replaced every few seasons. Off-bike kit is the hoodie worn at the cafe stop, the polo the committee wears at the open time trial, the cap someone wears to the shops. The second group is seen by more people, for more hours, and costs far less per piece. Clubs that only ever order jerseys are missing the part of the wardrobe that does most of the recruiting.
Sublimation on the Bike, and Nothing Else
For anything worn riding, sublimation is the method. The dye lives inside the polyester, so there is no printed layer to crack when the fabric stretches over a back, no plastic patch trapping heat against a rider, and no edge to lift after a hundred washes. It also lets a design run across panels, down the sides and around to the rear without breaking. The constraints are the same as always: polyester only, light bases only, no surface layer.
That light-base rule catches clubs whose colours are predominantly black. You can still get black areas in a sublimated design, but the base garment has to start light, and a full black garment is not achievable this way. If black is non-negotiable, that part of the wardrobe moves to ready-dyed garments with screen printing, DTF or embroidery instead.
Designing for the View From Behind
Nearly everyone who sees your club sees the back of it. Following riders, drivers waiting to overtake, and the photographer at the club hill climb are all looking at the rear panel and the lower back. That is your highest-value real estate and most clubs waste it on a repeated pattern.
Put the club name there, big and simple. Reserve the chest for the crest. Sleeves and side panels are good for a secondary colour or a single sponsor. And be ruthless about small text: anything under roughly a centimetre tall becomes an illegible smudge at riding distance, so a sponsor who insists on their full legal name plus a strapline needs a conversation about what will actually be readable.
- Rear lower back: club name, largest element, highest contrast. This is what following traffic reads.
- Centre chest and left chest: club crest, sized so it survives being partly hidden by a zipped layer.
- Sleeves: one sponsor each at most, or a solid colour band that identifies the club at a glance in a bunch.
- Side panels: a good place for a fluorescent accent, since it stays visible when a rider is seen side-on at a junction.
- Off-bike hoodie and polo: left-chest embroidery, simplified to two or three thread colours.
Visibility Is a Design Decision, Not an Accessory
Deep navy, maroon and charcoal photograph beautifully and disappear at dusk on a grey B-road. Fluorescent yellow, orange and pink convert ultraviolet into visible light, which is why they look almost lit up on an overcast day. They do not glow at night, though. Night conspicuity comes from retroreflective materials returning headlight beams, which is a different technology and not something ink can imitate.
A sensible compromise for a club with dark colours is a fluorescent accent panel on the shoulders, sleeves or sides, so the identity survives while the rider stays conspicuous. For requirements and recommendations on the road, check current official guidance rather than taking a supplier as the authority.
Sponsors: One Zone Each
Local sponsors keep a lot of clubs solvent, and the instinct is to fit everyone on. Resist it. Five logos at postage-stamp size communicate nothing and make the kit look busy. Give each sponsor one clear zone at a readable size, and rotate them across garments or seasons if you have more sponsors than zones. A logo legible on the back of every rider is worth more than one of six on a sleeve.
“"If a sponsor logo cannot be read from the car behind, the club has taken their money and sold them nothing."”
Ordering Across a Membership That Spans Everything
A club roster runs from juniors to riders in their seventies, and from race fits to considerably more relaxed ones. Our minimum is 20 pieces per order with sizes mixed freely, so you do not need twenty of anything, and bulk discounts reach up to around 40% as quantities climb. That maths rewards a single club-wide ordering window over a trickle of small orders.
Publish the size chart with the order announcement and be explicit about which garments are cut close, because members buying a race fit and members buying a club fit are buying different things. Everything is done online, so the kit secretary can preview layouts in the free Design Studio and test quantity against price in the instant calculator before opening the window.
Timing Against the Season
Production begins at artwork approval rather than order placement, and sublimation and complex jobs sit nearer 15 to 20 working days from that point, with screen printing and embroidery around 10 to 15. UK delivery is typically 2 to 5 working days after dispatch on a tracked service. If the club wants new kit for the spring reliability rides, artwork needs signing off over the winter, not in March.