A Chat With MAAP

For the past three weeks, coinciding with this year’s Tour de France, we’ve been busy celebrating the world of bikes and booze through our Tour Survival Kit. In short, we love the commonalities that exist between both the wine world and the bike world – something winemaker Col McBryde discussed in his brilliant essay for us last week. And while we’ve been blown away by the response from both our existing customers and the cycling community at large, we couldn’t have made this pack the success it was without the help and support of our friends at MAAP – one of the most exciting cycling apparel brands on the planet. While MAAP will already be familiar to many of you, we thought that with the final week of the tour upon us, now would be a great opportunity to introduce you to the team, and to find out a little more about how it all came to be. We recently caught up with MAAP co-founders Ollie Cousins and Jarrad Lory-Smith for a quick chat…
 

1. Tell us a little bit about your backgrounds – where did you grow up, what did you study and what path led you to what you are doing today?

 
OLLIE: Both Melbourne boys, I studied fashion design, and got my first job at Globe back in 2001. I worked for various brands including Split, Stüssy, Mambo and in the last eight years back at Globe as the Design Manager. Surfing was all I really cared about in terms of sport until I had kids and it became harder to find the time. That’s when I looked to riding my bike initially to keep fit and get to work, but like most people it starts there and slowly takes over you life!

JARRAD: I grew up in Melbourne with a very sporty upbringing, from surfing and swimming to beach volleyball and mountain biking. I switched over to full-tilt road cycling about 12 years ago and became addicted to racing road and crits. I spent about five years racing (more for fun than getting any results) and also travelled with my bike doing some cycling around Italy, France and Andorra. Checking out the Giro and the TDF being some of the highlights.

2. What eventually led you to start MAAP?

 
OLLIE: Honestly, it was just frustration in not being able to find apparel that we wanted to wear. There was high-quality product out there but not high-quality apparel that also had a design aesthetic or graphic direction that appealed to us. We had no expectations in terms of what the brand could become, we were happy just to be able to produce our own product and prove to ourselves that we could do it well. I knew friends that had maybe come from a skateboarding or surfing background and had started racing bikes, so I knew they would be thinking along the same lines as us, not being able to find kits that really suited them.

JARRAD: I met Ollie while I was working at Globe, as a contractor, in 2001. We spent some time together on a few work trips, and also on a surfing trip to Bali, so we had a good connection and a very similar style. We started to talk about getting into cycling, and there wasn’t much in the market that we wanted to wear, so we started developing some of our ideas and decided to start our own brand with our own style.

3. Can you give us a little insight into the inner workings of MAAP? How do you translate your ideas from concepts to finished product?

 
OLLIE: A lot of product testing, essentially we’re working on the fit and fabric combinations well in advance of considering design and art direction. We’ll either test items ourselves, or produce for the various teams we sponsor, and generally after three months of training and racing we’ve figured out whether a concept is good enough to release. Our main apparel factory is in Northern Italy, so we visit them a couple of times a year to work through development, and that’s been really beneficial.

4. Beyond simply producing great apparel, you’re heavily involved within the cycling community – State of Matter, for example – can you tell us about this?

 
OLLIE: State of Matter MAAP is an Australian UCI Continental Pro Team that we sponsor. It’s made up mostly of juniors – I think the average age of the squad is 21. They race the National series, and races like the Herald Sun Tour, the Cadel Evans Road Race and various international tours, against some pretty high level teams. It’s a way for us to help support the industry and the development of juniors, but we also use the team to develop and refine new products before we launch to market. This year we’ve also launched the Speedvagen MAAP CX team, which is a national cyclo-cross team in partnership with Portland bike builder The Vanilla Workshop. Our lead rider is Garry Millburn who was Australian CX rider of the year for 2015. We’re supporting Garry’s season with the view of him racing the World Champs next year in Europe.

5. What has been your proudest achievement with MAAP to date?

 
OLLIE: I constantly get blown away by how quickly this brand keeps evolving. I feel proud that we have five full-time employees, especially considering I was still working at Globe until last December! We were able to shoot our winter campaign in the Italian Alps this May, which was definitely a pinch yourself moment, and I’m looking forward to seeing how we can elevate the brand further in the coming seasons.

JARRAD: I struggle to think of one moment, as it feels like one big moment that keeps on getting better. Every day we are reviewing something new and exciting, so I suppose it’s just brilliant to be able to get up and go to work and love what you are doing and it doesn’t even really feel like work.

6. The bike world knows good coffee. Who makes your favourite?

 
OLLIE: Maker in Richmond has us covered and sets us up with a great filter system, run off a portable generator, for our MAAP tents on race days… particularly handy for the CX races in the middle of winter!

JARRAD: I’m a creature of habit and have been going to Wall Two 80 in St Kilda East for about 15 years. So it must be pretty good. Hahah.

7. Tell us about your desert island meal…

 
OLLIE: Pizza and vino.

JARRAD: Spag bol and red.

8. What’s your karaoke song of choice?

 
OLLIE: Snoop Dogg – anything from the Death Row era.

JARRAD: Biggie Smalls ‘Juicy’.

9. We’ve had a huge amount of fun collaborating with MAAP on The Tour Survival Kit. What do you hope people will take away from it?

 
OLLIE: For cycling nuts, they probably know everything they need to know about the tour, so for them it’s great to learn a bit about the producers and wine regions that the tour passes through. For me, it’s been great to try a few wines I wouldn’t normally drink – sometimes you get stuck in a comfort zone drinking the same thing over and over.

JARRAD: I hope people have been able to enjoy the variety of drinks as much as I have while watching the best TV program for the year. It doesn’t get much better than kicking back and watching a stage of the TDF with a glass of vino from the Pyrénées!