'We’re not just trying to build a cycling brand, we want to build a global brand' - meeting MAAP's founders, Jarrad Smith and Oli Cousins

It all started with a pair of bibshorts. That seems simple enough.

"In the early days of starting the company, we realised that the first thing we needed was the best bibshorts," MAAP co-founder Jarrad Smith explains to Cycling Weekly, in Berlin. "We set about building that, and even today, we still use the blueprint of the bibs which we developed 10 years ago.

"When you come to the brand, you get in the bibs, you’re comfortable, and then you want to buy the jerseys, the jackets, everything else. The bibs were and are the cornerstone, the iconic piece to build the whole brand around.

"There was just a lot of product testing. If you don’t get the bibs right, then you’re not going to go back to that brand."

That was 10 years ago, when MAAP was just Smith and his co-founder Oliver Cousins, working out of the former's garage in Melbourne. Now, a decade on, the Australian brand has just opened its second store - a LaB in MAAP-speak - in Europe, and its seventh in the world. It is currently sponsoring its first WorldTour squad, Jayco AlUla, and is seemingly going from strength-to-strength.

"It’s mind-blowing to think I was sitting in my garage, packing bags, sending out socks and bibs, from that to now," Smith says. "But it’s been such a busy journey over the ten years, it doesn’t feel abnormal to be here now. This feels like the right time and the right place.

"We have this shop here in Berlin, in one of the coolest neighbourhoods, and it’s awesome. But it has been a lot of hard work along the way, so it doesn’t feel like a jump from day one to here, there has been a crazy building journey."

The two European stores - in Berlin and Amsterdam - are the proof of how far MAAP has come from those garage days, but are also not the limit of the ambitions. Both have opened in the last 12 months, along with five more across the world, with many more in the pipeline; it is just a coincidence that all these things have seemingly come at once, along with the Jayco deal.

"We were always confident that we could be a major player in this industry," Cousins adds. "Looking at the space at the time, there were a couple of brands like us who were coming from the surf industry, and we saw that opportunity in cycling. We had a vision on a global scale, and there was also this dream of opening retail stores too.

"We would have liked to have a store open every six months, or even every three months, but it all happened at once, and the deal with Jayco AlUla as well. You can have the greatest plans, but then everything gets thrown together at the same time. It wasn’t planned, but it’s going to lead to a pretty exciting 2025."

Building a brand

Whether through design or chance, MAAP has surfed fashion trends and it is fair to say is currently cool in the cycling world. It might not have the history of Castelli or the scale of Rapha, but at the moment, anyway, it has the cachet.

"We’re not following trends or what we think is cool, we’re trying to be the innovator and do things differently," Smith says.

"We’ve watched brands like Patagonia and North Face which have been able to stand the test of time, and return for different generations," Cousins adds. "It’s in their core, the DNA, and so that’s what we’ve been trying to do. MAAP is not Oli and Jarred, it’s for everyone. We want to work towards opening more stores which are engaging with the community and also profitable, and potentially a bigger off-bike collection than now, so people are just wearing MAAP in the street. We’re not just trying to build a cycling brand, we want to build a global brand."

Ultimately, it seems like the men behind MAAP want the brand to be bigger than the world of cycling, although it seems unlikely that they will abandon their origins in a bid to get there. Perhaps expect more t-shirts and leisurewear in time, but those bibshorts will always be there.

"There’s no magic number that we feel we need to get to," Cousins explains. “We’re not going to trade values for scale. We’re probably going to grow, but we’re not going to change our philosophy around good products to achieve that. Fashion is fickle, and there are life cycles, and we’ve just got to come back to keeping it authentic and true.

"We’re a private company, so we’ve got no one else to answer to, there’s no stock price, there’s no minimum growth or venture capital. We have challenges like every other business, but we try to manage it, and be at the level of risk we feel comfortable with."

Navigating Covid

Like the rest of the cycling industry, MAAP was not immune to the shifting dynamic of the pandemic and the perfect storm that followed. However, while other brands were forced to close, had their profits checked, or at the very least struggled with surplus stock, it seems like the Australian brand was fortunate to be the right size to sail through choppy waters.

"The bigger the company, the bigger the problem probably," Cousins says. "I think we navigated it pretty well. We saw a big increase through Covid, but we didn’t over-extend ourselves. The biggest impact was probably our wholesale account base, but we were exposed too much to that."

"We had a massive spike during Covid, like everyone, and then there was a dip in the wholesale afterwards," Smith echoes. "But for us, the direct-to-consumer was still growing, so it sort of balanced itself out. Then 18 months later, our wholesale partners were getting a bit confident. We’ve been growing since then."

What has worked for MAAP so far, and its founders hope will continue in 2025, is careful growth, and sticking to the values that were formed in that garage a decade ago.

"We’re a design-led brand," Cousins explains. "We are always trying to merge aesthetics and performance. We’re always saying to our team it’s not performance-led - it has to be aesthetically led and then perform well. So you don’t have one without the other. We don’t just let something slip through if it doesn’t tick both boxes, because that’s not authentic to what we believe in."