FEATURE End of an era After 17 years at the helm, Simon Mottram is stepping down as Rapha CEO. Alex Ballinger sits down with the London-based founder to talk past, present and future
fashion brand All Saints, who also previously held senior positions at Burberry, Abercrombie & Fitch and Gucci.
The long wind down The hunt for a new CEO started late last year when Mottram announced to the Rapha board that he intended to step down to make way for a new era. “It’s been quite a long winding down, because I’ve known about it for a long time,” Mottram told BikeBiz. “But actually it’s been in my head for a long time and we had the guy identified a long time ago, but had to keep his name embargoed for various legal reasons. I’ve been getting my head around it for a long time, but it’s still strange.” Mottram, who founded Rapha in north London in 2004, said he had become acutely aware that for the next phase in its development Rapha would need new leadership, someone with experience of running a large organisation. “I think I’ve got the skills of a founder,” Mottram said. “I’m
Picture by Honor Elliott I
t’s hard to picture the road cycling scene back in 2004, but there was a bleak landscape according to Rapha’s long- standing CEO Simon Mottram.
Poor uptake, a lacklustre market for cycling clothing, and not a British Tour de France winner in sight, road riding was an exiled pastime in the mid-noughties. Now 17 years on, Mottram is stepping down from his place at the helm of Rapha, having built the brand into a global empire of cycling culture, reaching from the WorldTour peloton to the local club run. Having made the decision to step down 12 months ago,
Mottram announced his departure in late November last year, as the 55-year-old steps aside to make way for a new chief executive, who he hopes can develop the brand even further. Mottram’s successor will be William Kim, former CEO of
quite good at saying ‘we’re going over here, come with me,’ but that doesn’t really work after a certain scale. “You have to be much more sophisticated in the way that you run a company, and the way you bring people along. I think [William] has that in spades. He knows what that step up is like, he’s worked in bigger organisations, so he gets how it works. The challenge is to drive all that growth while still being careful about the brand, protective of the core - he totally understands that’s the issue.”
A better future At the time of Rapha’s inception, the road cycling scene in the UK was a shadow of its current state, Mottram said, with just a handful of quality retail stores, poor choice of cycling clothing brands, and very little cycling content for consumers to devour. That image has since been wiped away, in part thanks
to the influence of Rapha and its unashamed embracing of cycling culture, as the UK now more closely resembles a true cycling heartland like France, Belgium, or the Netherlands.
14 | January 2022
www.bikebiz.com
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