This article was produced in association with Gobik
This year the drought that has hit a large part of the Mediterranean basin of the Iberian Peninsula is being especially cruel to the south and to some regions in the north of Murcia, where the town of Yecla, an area with a very particular climate, is located. There are big changes in temperature here. The summers are very hot, and the winters are very cold. It is a harsh environment, with a continental climate that is further hardened by the lack of rainfall. Visitors might find it somewhat desolate, but at the same time the sense of terruño, the Spanish word that defines connection to the land where one is born and grows up, is also palpable here. The soil around Yecla is arid, but also productive – it just has to be worked hard. Yecla’s wine is as unique as its terroir, and there is a long tradition of textile work, of furniture making and upholstery. This is a place where trades connected with craftsmanship, skilled hands and hard labour thrive.
When Rouleur visits Gobik’s new facilities, on the outskirts of Yecla, the drought is still biting hard, but the company is a breath of fresh air for the region. It embodies the attachment to the land and the idea of sowing, working and growing for the community. Many of the staff travel to work by bike or on foot. The facilities have been renovated this year, with the offices, sales, design and product development departments occupying redecorated spaces. There is a huge illuminated sign with the slogan, ‘We won’t stop,’ which is hard to ignore. Also printed on the walls of the facilities: ‘What a ride.’
Three streets down, they have also acquired a whole new block, where the production line is located, and another plot of land in front of it, where they plan to construct another factory building in a few years. The facilities are designed to be as sustainable as possible, with solar panels on the roof which maximise one of the most abundant local resources: sunlight.
Jose Ramon Ortín and Alberto García, co-founders and CEOs of Gobik, were working for other companies when they started the brand, whose name derives from the acronym ‘Go Bike’, in 2010. Their initial intention was simply making the clothes they wanted to wear for their own cycling club.
Ortín was an industrial technician and García an architect, and through hard work they learned the codes and ways of the clothing industry. “We knew nothing of it,” they say of their start. Almost 15 years later, Gobik has become an internationally renowned brand in the cycling clothing sector. All of their production is done in-house, they employ more than 200 people and they continue to try to open new markets. The two most important pillars of their brand culture are the customisation service they offer and the development of increasingly technical and advanced garments.
They say that entering the professional cycling space was a turning point for Gobik. They began by sponsoring Carlos Coloma’s Primaflor-Mondraker-Rotor mountain biking team in 2017, and the same year they started to sponsor the Caja Rural ProConti team. Their first race on the UCI calendar was the Vuelta a la Comunidad Valenciana.
“When we joined the Vuelta, it was like going into a party you had never been to before, and you didn’t know what was going on there. Seeing professional cycling from the inside impressed us,” says Ortín.
In 2020, Gobik were the brand that dressed Tadej Pogačar when he won his first Tour de France with UAE Team Emirates. Then came the FDJ-Suez women’s team. And this year they are providing clothing for Movistar and the Ineos Grenadiers, which has put them in the industry’s spotlight for their ability to innovate and respond to the demands of top-level performance.
“When we started with UAE Team Emirates four seasons ago – and we have to thank its manager Joxean Matxín for this, because he was our godfather within the team – we had certain shortcomings at product level. So we had to develop all the product that the team needed in two months to have it ready for the start of the season. I didn’t sleep for three months, because of the tension and the pressure of seeing a guy who has won the Tour de France and having to be up to the task,” says García. “But the experience and all the demands that these people are making of us must make us stronger and make us better. That’s what we transmitted to our whole team, which we put under brutal stress and pressure.”
From that experience came the knowhow that they are continuing to develop now with Movistar and the ineos Grenadiers. “Sometimes when we are at the races, people make jokes with us and ask us, ‘Hey, do these Ineos guys give you a lot of trouble?’ Because they have a reputation for being a very demanding team,” says García. “But the truth is that we are delighted. It’s the biggest team we’ve worked with, with the biggest structure and a very professional way of working.”
The product development manager says that since Gobik started working with elite teams, they have had to form a group of people just to attend to the teams’ needs. “It’s very labour intensive,” he continues. “Right now the team has a lot of time-trial specialists, like Filippo Ganna and Josh Tarling. It’s June and we’re already on the fifth evolution of the time-trial suit. In the end you have to make one for each rider and adjust it to their specific needs. It’s pure and simple customisation per rider.”
And when asked if there is still room for improvement in performance, the answer is simple and clear: yes. “Right now, we are talking about everything being marginal, but if you modify little things, you can see gains and improvements,” Ortín says. “Clothing in cycling counts much, much more than people might think in terms of performance. In the end, the rider’s contact with the wind is much greater on their clothing than on the bike. In terms of aerodynamics, it gives the rider a lot of room for improvement.”
Many of the customisations take place in Gobik’s production development area, where photography is banned, and also in a workshop area where garments are made, parts repaired and urgent orders fulfilled. As Rouleur passes by, we see a worker sewing part of a jersey that ineos rider Carlos Rodríguez would use in the Tour de France. We also meet Rosi, the dressmaker who sewed the first Gobik clothing line 15 years ago and still works on the production line.
“All the clothing worn by the professionals is subjected to enormous stress and demands,” says García. “With the extreme fittings that are made, there is almost no room for any error. There are garments that come undone, there are tears, there are time-trial bodysuits that break when the riders are about to put them on. You have to have a super-fast services and reaction time. And that’s what gives you credibility in the end.”
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Gobik’s new premises are designed to balance order and the controlled chaos that creativity requires. White is the predominant colour, and it is combined with wood and metal. Overall there is a sense of harmony, but in the design area, pantographs, drawings, sketches and fabric samples are scattered around a central table where the magic happens. This is where a team of designers works intensively to complement the creative process of clubs, groups, companies and any organisation that needs their own designs.
At Gobik, they receive the order with a briefing, and the client gets a 3D design proposal back. Once approved, it’s manufactured and sent back to clients in a few days. One of the designers explains: “We bring our approach and touch to the design. That’s the value we bring to the client.”
In the production area, in another warehouse on the same industrial estate, order and cleanliness are essential. All the parts that will later be sewn are laser-cut, labelled and stored in sealed boxes so that no dust can get into the priming and printing process. Engineers also monitor the entire process in order to optimise resources. On average, Gobik produces more than a million garments in a year.
The company has also built its own photography studio for maximum flexibility and immediacy and to further enhance communication. It is on the upper floor of a part of the warehouse that is still empty, but used as a small temporary storage area. In one corner, some old printing machines stand out. They are the first printers for the sublimation process that were bought almost two decades ago, in which the ink storage area had been modified to add a fifth ink, the fluorine, to obtain a more vivid colour palette. This caused several machines to break down, unusual parts to be purchased and Epson engineers from Japan to start asking, ‘What is going on in Yecla that they are buying so many printers?’ At one point, Epson’s engineers travelled from Japan to Spain and when they found the machines completely open and tuned, they decided to develop special printers for Gobik with five inks.
That passion for colour is still alive and well and can be seen in the brand’s collections, even if Gobik’s new headquarters are predominantly an elegant white. There is still empty space, but that’s no matter. “The idea is to continue to grow and for all this space to be occupied,” says Ortín. “The growth plans are there, we are reaching many more countries. We are not going to stop. We’re having a great time and we want to keep growing.”
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The pandemic was for Gobik, as it was for the entire bicycle sector, a turning point. Many brands had to embark on a tour de force to respond to unprecedented growth in demand. This made Gobik look in the mirror and ask themselves how they wanted to grow as a company. “That was the only situation in which the system became too strained,” says Ortín. “Everything was about to explode because the demand was at an all-time high. And we could have even grown more than we did at the time. We decided that with the resources we had, yes, we had to grow, but we had to grow in a sustainable way. Because if not, we were going to grow with feet of clay. We understood that it wasn’t going to be forever; it was a quite ephemeral situation.”
Having the ability to control production in-house was key to deciding how fast Gobik wanted to scale up. This reaffirmed their decision not to outsource production to other countries, but rather to continue to focus on local production, a complex decision in such a competitive world. “We have to consider that in the end we are working in Spain, which is an expensive country to manufacture clothes and a large part of the labour force is here. We do it ourselves,” says García. “And being competitive in Spain can only be done if you are sustainable, because you have to use solar panels, reducing waste. You have to optimise every metre of fabric and the waste has to be minimal, because you have gone into all the details a thousand times over to gain margin.
“Being sustainable also means taking care of people’s working conditions, trying to make working life compatible with family life. In other words, trying to make an industry and a company sustainable and a company in keeping with the country in which we live and in keeping with the times.”
Gobik is a relatively young company but they are still constantly rebranding and modernising, while still remaining faithful to their founding origins. “For a long time we wanted to have a new logo, revise the typography we were using, work on the maturity of the brand,” says Ortín. “That it was more legible, that there was a logo that represents the brand when you can’t write the word.”
And they strive to be at the cutting edge of professional clothing, which has a trickle-down effect on what they can offer the rest of us. “It’s clear that when you’re investing hours in the wind tunnel in a time-trial suit, you’re not going to replicate that directly for an amateur, to an average consumer. But from that you get knowledge, textures, fabrics, ways of making panelling, which in the end, are all applied,” says Ortín.
And García adds: “Our brand has always had room for practically every type of cyclist, customer and user. And the price range is for everyone and not exclusive. Leaving people by the wayside or trying to stick to just one type of cyclist is very dangerous.”
In that sense, Gobik has tried to be close to the regular cyclist, supporting many cyclotourist rides and races and reinforcing and continuing to invest in the Custom Works department, which is the most direct way of getting to know its customers, what they want and how they experience cycling.
“Right now, we can be proud of the fact that we are able to manufacture in Yecla, here in the middle of nowhere, on the high plateau of Murcia, the most complicated garment you can think of in terms of tailoring or technology,” says Garcia.
Ortín looks out of the window at the high plateau around that is still awaiting the rain, and the terruño which Gobik itself is continuing to work, and says, “Sometimes we have to look back and say, ‘Wow, we’ve really come a long way, haven’t we?’"
