BRANDS LUCA laps in Richmond Park
female chest and less revealing. As a result, LUCA has found that women wear it as a standalone piece without a jersey on top. The Road All-In-One is designed to be elegant and decent, offering women a solution that is both technical and a pleasure to wear. At LUCA, product development is intentionally iterative.
Production takes place in Portugal in small batches, allowing the brand to refine designs between runs. Rather than treating a launch as a finished design, Kuhn uses customer feedback to refine each item over time. For example, she is considering the addition of pockets to the Road All-In-One after riders reported wearing it without a jersey on summer rides.
Challenges and advantages of female- founders LUCA faces many of the challenges common to small businesses. The brand currently operates primarily as a direct-to-consumer brand. Kuhn says the decision to focus on online sales was partly financial: wholesale margins can be difficult for a small apparel brand to absorb: “The second you go wholesale, you hand over a lot of control. I don’t want to build a brand and then have retailers deciding how and when products get discounted.” Without a retail footprint, LUCA has focused on grassroots
marketing. Kuhn travels across the UK hosting rides, workshops and pop-up events to introduce the brand to riders in person. “You can spend a lot on ads, but it doesn’t replace someone trying the product or seeing it on another rider,” she says. Kuhn has, however, faced specific resistance due to
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the nature of her offer, especially from bike shops, who regularly declined to collaborate based on the fact that they just didn’t have enough female customers or riders in their community. Kuhn argues that ignoring female riders is a missed commercial opportunity. “It is a vicious circle: because you don’t open up to them, you don’t make it welcoming, why would women come to you?”. On the other hand, Kuhn has seen interest in female- founded brands increase in recent years, with larger companies looking to collaborate with women-led businesses as part of broader diversity initiatives. Additionally, the unique designs and the target market provide a strong foundation for community building.
The future of LUCA LUCA currently operates with a small team: Kuhn herself, a designer, and a handful of freelance collaborators. Kuhn sees scaling up as gradual and has no intention of changing her small-batch production approach overnight. Scaling up is likely to mean adding cycling disciplines to the brand’s portfolio, offering endurance or gravel-oriented products. Creating a men’s line is not on the cards for LUCA, as Kuhn considers there is already so much choice for men and that there is a long way to go to address the needs of female cyclists. As LUCA grows, its direction will be shaped as much by its community as its products. Weekly ‘LUCA laps’ in Richmond Park bring together riders of all levels, offering a low-pressure entry point into the sport, illustrating Kuhn’s wider argument that if the industry wants to attract more women, it needs to create spaces that genuinely welcome them.
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