Best of British: Meet team Malle
From making tough bags for bikes to bringing a whole new generation into biking
n just a few short years, Malle have grown from being a pair of cousins producing limited runs of motorcycle luggage to designing almost everything you would want to strap to yourself or bike. On top of this their events now include the Malle Mile, the Great Malle Rally, the Malle Beach Race and soon to be an international affair. Like most biking stories, the story of founders Robert Nightgale and Jonny Cazzola begins at home with a pair of old Triumphs. “Our dads rode old Triumphs and Hondas,” says Robert. “There are stories in our families of bike
Iadventures and travels from dads who spent their youth riding around with nothing more then some pals and spare underpants.” The pair entered the design industry separately but both continued a love of classic British bikes. They began to collaborate professionally but became tired of working with businesses that were risk averse.
“At time we were riding old British bikes and we had this idea in a bar one evening to create some luggage for those bikes,” says Robert. “Something robust enough for the weekend but smart enough to take to work in the week. “We bought an old sewing machine and basically learnt a whole set of skills that, in many ways, had been unchanged for a hundred years. We destroyed that first sewing machine quickly trying a few different materials. In that early phase we just went around second hand shops and fleamarkets trying to find luggage that had survived for decades to see what it was made from.”
“We also decided early on that we didn’t want to use synthetics,” adds Jonny. “At the time there was no one making waxed canvas bike luggage in that space but now there’s a lot of people doing it, which honestly is very flattering.”
Malle started with their first item, panniers, and also decided from the off they would offer everything with a lifetime guarantee, which means no one ever buys the same thing twice. Despite being told
‘We wanted to bring a fun, young edge to biking’
‘No-one was making waxed canvas luggage’
it was a rubbish business model, they’ve stuck to it ever since.
“In 2015 we decided we wanted to put our money where our mouth was but also really expand ourselves to knowing everything we could about luggage, so we did a 10,000 mile expedition across the US from New York to LA, via Mexico and Canada,” says Robert. “We learned so much about what you needed from luggage but also how it copes with vast heat to extreme cold, arid to swamp and everything in-between. R&D and testing is at the heart of everything we do, starting with an idea that becomes a
prototype that we basically destroy until it gets better and better before we finally launch it to the public.” Having spent so much time in the workshop, the duo wanted something else to look forward to that wasn’t just running a business. “We came up with the Malle Mile and this idea of a race that nobody cares about winning,” says Jonny. “We wanted to bring a fun, young edge to biking like when we were kids and thrashed old bikes around a farm but also wanted it to be open to friends, husbands, wives etc who aren’t into bikes. Six years on we’re expanding it to Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire, 50 times the size of the original site to accommodate as many people as possible.”
A couple of years later, when travelling across Mongolia with his wife, Robert happened across a 1000km pony race, which inspired their next step.
“The guys had been racing all day but at the end of it they all met around the campfire, laughing and joking before getting up next morning and doing it all again,” says Robert. “I just wanted to recreate this for biking, so we put on the first Great Malle Rally in 2017 and it’s grown every year since. Next year, covid permitting, we’ll expand once more for the first edition of the Great Malle Mountain Rally across Europe.”