BEST OF BRITISH: ASHMEI
Clothing brand Ashmei’s owner, Stuart Brooke, is all about pursuing perfection for his products. We join him on a ride to discover more about his design and business approach.
Rolling into the quintessentially English village of Aldbury, with its church, duck pond and rival pubs, you’d be forgiven for thinking that little has changed in this Hertfordshire outpost in centuries. You would be wrong, though. In former farm buildings just behind that village church, UK cycling and running brand Ashmei is revolutionising the way the kit we wear is made. In six short years Ashmei has muscled in on the established high-end cycling market with an approach born of independence, new thinking and the pursuit of excellence.
“I’ve been designing sportswear for 25 years,” explains founder Stuart Brooke over coffee before we head out into the neighbouring Chiltern Hills, “and I have a consultancy that has been designing sportswear for blue chip brands for 21 of those years, but I always wanted to have my own brand – not just another ‘me-too’ brand but one with a real USP.
“Of the 120 brands I’ve worked with, they all work in exactly the same way in that they give the design team a brief that is focused on price: we want a £200 jacket because our rivals are producing one and it’s their best seller, or if we can make one for £190 we can steal the market.
“What no one was doing was saying, let’s design a cycling jacket with no price point in mind, and just create something unique that performs better. As soon as you give a price point to a designer, that locks in an awful lot of what they can do. Immediately they know what they can spend per yard of fabric, what features can be built in without overspending on labour, what component parts they can use, what factories they can use. It compromises what you do.
“So our idea was to forget price, don’t even think about it, and look instead at what features the athlete needs, what the best performance fabrics are – do we even need to go back to the drawing board and look at how many fibres we need and how they should be blended? And if the fabric doesn’t exist, we need to create it because the fabric is the key, not the colour, not the logo…”
No compromise
It’s an ambitious approach, particularly for a newcomer to the market, but Stuart’s theory was that if he made compromises in the beginning, they would haunt Ashmei throughout the life of the company.
“There aren’t many brands, let alone cycle brands, approaching design like that,” admits Stuart. “We’re talking about maybe Apple and Dyson, whose products are much more expensive than their rivals but people love them because they work better.
“It took a year-and-a-half from having the idea to launching Ashmei in 2012, and I only had five products, one of which was a beanie hat, just to test the market. Once we knew we had a customer base that understood what we were trying to do and wanted the best, then we decided it was time to build up the brand and add to the range. Even then, we were only going to launch our additions when they were ready, rather than rush to market, so things
evolved slowly but that was always the plan. We had to make sure that our products would outperform any other, because if they didn’t there was no point bringing them to market.
“We can also build in all the features the rider might need because, again, we’re not compromised on price – we’ll never say that we can’t afford to put a waterproof pocket on a jersey, say. As a designer it’s a dream brand.”
There must be a danger that, without a deadline and with an attitude of no compromise, product never sees the light of day. There is, presumably, always something that can be tweaked. Art is never finished, only abandoned, said no lesser light than Leonardo da Vinci, though Stuart is keen to stress that what Ashmei does is not art.
“It’s a longer development process, for sure,” he admits, “and we haven’t launched our winter bib tights yet despite them being on the table for three years: we’ve been testing and testing, tweaking and tweaking, but they will be the best bib tights on the market because that’s what it takes. I’d rather wait and get it right than compromise or copy what others are doing to get to market. If we did that, people might as well buy any other brand.
“Ultimately we’re about engineering, not fashion. Although cycling is style-driven it’s not high-street fashion, where you have to wear lime green because lime green is on the catwalks, it’s about function: you can’t cycle naked, so you have to wear clothes, and
“Ultimately we’re about engineering, not fashion. Although cycling is style-driven it’s not high-street fashion” StuartBrooke
those clothes should benefit you with regard to performance and making you comfortable. It’s a problem we’re solving, rather than dressing people for the catwalk, but a lot of brands can think the opposite.”
Gloved up
There was still a chill in the air when we hit the local roads with Stuart back in spring this year, which gave us an opportunity to press him on the one garment that had really brought us here. If we can personalise this article for a moment, amid Ashmei’s admittedly sometimes eye-wateringly expensive range, sits a pair of modestly priced winter gloves so thin as to test the bounds of credibility. But these gloves had proven themselves to be the best I’d ever worn for keeping my fingers warm over winter, particularly when layered with the brand’s merino glove in the coldest of weather. How had Ashmei managed with this lightweight glove what other brands had failed to do for me with even their thickest offerings? The question gave Stuart a chance to really open up about the processes involved.
“I like to ride gloveless in the summer so I can feel what’s happening under the wheel,” he starts, “so I wondered if there was a way we could achieve that in winter, because the roads are worse in winter so it’s even more important to know what’s happening. Dexterity was the key with this glove, so it had to be very thin. There was no point doing a ‘ski glove’, because everybody does them and ours wouldn’t have been any better.
“The challenge was to cut the wind completely, because that’s the major factor that makes your hands cold. We’ve also got to cut out the water, but it’s got to be thin and lightweight. Furthermore,
AmidAshmei’sadmittedly sometimeseye-wateringlyexpensive range,sitsapairofmodestlypriced winterglovessothinastotestthe boundsofcredibility
you generate the heat, so we have to protect that heat and keep it inside the glove.
“From there we know we need to use a microfibre, as then we get a really tight weave that cuts the wind. Also, the fact it gives us a weave rather than a knit means you can add 40 per cent stretch instead of 16 and keep things even tighter. If all of the fibres are dumped in silicone before the weave that repels the water, and it doesn’t wash off so it’s permanently water-resistant. That way we get a really lightweight fabric that stops all the elements coming through.
“Everybody uses membranes and padding and it’s really easy to think, ‘we need a deep winter item, skiing is a deep winter sport, what do they do?’ But while that’s simple, it doesn’t make it right for the cyclist: cycling in a ski glove isn’t optimal.”
Short story
Stuart is keen to stress as we ride that while the glove is unique, the approach that created it is not.
“Every product we look at follows that route,” he tells us. “In developing our bib short we asked what was wrong with those already on the market? The first thing is that the Lycra that everybody uses doesn’t fit, so you have to have a gripper, even if it’s a soft one. The next problem is that there’s not enough power and stretch in Lycra to even make that fit, so if that gripper isn’t the perfect size for your leg it’s either going to be too tight, like a tourniquet, or it will flap. The first issue for us was that we couldn’t just buy an Italian Lycra and make our shorts from that.
“It’s the same philosophy of going back to the drawing board and choosing a microfibre again to get that weave rather than knit, that means we can increase the Lycra content to 40 per cent instead of 16, which means the Lycra will then have enough power to fit.
“The next issue is that the traditional chamois is made from sponge, which is very comfortable when you first put it on but gets thinner over time, and it absorbs your sweat. On a long, hot ride that means you’re effectively wearing a nappy at the café, but on a multi-day ride it can mean your chamois not drying properly after you’ve washed it and you end up with saddle sores from riding on a damp chamois.
“We wanted to create something ourselves. We use a high-density foam that absorbs no water at all, which solves the dampness problem, and it also stays the same density: you could literally park the car on it, roll it back a day later, and it would return to normal, where sponge would be flat as a pancake. We then put a thin layer of sponge in to interface with the skin for comfort. It took us 25 prototypes, all of them ridden and tested and improved, to reach this point, but we’ve got something that just works.
“We don’t have a range of products, we have one bib short that is the best that we can produce. If we did another one, because these are £235, and we wanted to get a pair out there for less, they wouldn’t be as good and that compromises Ashmei. If you can’t afford £235 right now, save up for them and you’ll have the best.”
As we drop down Toms Hill from the National Trust’s Ashridge Estate back into Aldbury we can vouch for the nature of the brand’s testing ground, both as a place to put kit through its paces and a place to fall back in love with cycling.
“It’s fine giving our kit to someone else to test,” says Stuart, “and they’ll do the big mileage in it so we can get some durability testing done, but ultimately I’ll understand whether it is performing better or worse than something else, so I test as well. It’s important that I physically get in the gear and give it a go, and we’ve got the Chilterns to ride in. I also use time on the bike to get the mind space to solve problems, I can often finish a ride with a eureka moment that I would never have had sat at a desk.”
“It’s important that I physically get in the gear and give it a go, and we’ve got the Chilterns to ride in. I also use time on the bike to get the mind space to solve problems” Stuart Brooke