Best bib shorts part 1

Posted by Kostüme on 6th Mar 2025

MARCH 06, 2025

BEHIND THE BRAND

The story behind the most comfortable bib shorts in the world

By Ed Bartlett

There seems to be a common thread among industry commentators recently that starting a cycling apparel brand is really easy nowadays.

There is a tiny amount of truth to the matter, thanks to the proliferation of factories offering near-turnkey solutions to make what would once have been seen as high quality kit. But that really only works if all you care about is branding and graphics, and the market has long since moved on from the time where that alone could equal success. In actual fact, the barrier to success is now higher than it ever has been, and if you are designing and specifying all of your products completely from scratch (as Kostüme does for everything) it’s an exceptionally challenging thing to do.

Coupled with the ‘big’ brands making equally big losses, this high bar (and increasing attrition rate) makes starting a cycling apparel brand ultra-risky. But in almost any business, there are opportunities for newcomers to innovate and succeed. And in the consumer goods world, making truly exceptional products is one such route.

Starting a new cycling apparel brand might be easier than ever, but making standout products in a cluttered market is a massive challenge for any brand.

It’s this absolute obsession with developing standout products that is the driving force behind Kostüme’s existence. Of course, our preorder batch model - and the changes we hope it might make to how apparel brands do business in future - is also central to our mission. But you can’t hope to achieve even low-level systemic change without exceptional products, because otherwise you simply aren’t proving the approach is a measurable step forward.

The success of the products and the business model are intrinsically linked, the extent of which will become clearer over the course of this two-part article exploring how a new independent brand was able to launch the most comfortable bib shorts on the market on its first try.

Product pillars

If you run a multi-product business, it's extremely beneficial to have a clear strategy and ethos in place. We have four clear pillars guiding all development at Kostüme, from the commissioning of entire new products, to the countless decisions that go into turning each one of them from a concept into functional reality:

It has to matter. Both to us, and to the customer, for the sake of the time, effort and resources involved. This might ruffle some feathers but there are simply too many half-baked products out there that don’t really need to exist. Consumers deserve better, but the planet really demands it.
If we can’t measurably improve on it, we don’t make it. A simple, direct and effective rule.
It has to deliver value. Our goal is to make exceptional products available to as many people as possible, not just those with deep pockets. We build and test products to the absolute extreme, but by doing so we are simply ensuring that they work for as many people as possible.
It has to solve a problem. An extension of points 1 and 2, but all the best products solve a pain point. It doesn’t need to a big one, it could be as simple as having labelled our arm warmers on the outside to stop the usual left/right/front/back mixup.

A fun little exercise: Take a quick look at your current collection of cycling apparel. If you run each product through those 4 filters, how many of them might not have been made? And would that be a real loss? We ran this as a thought experiment as part of a focus group and the results were pretty thought provoking. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

The bib short is undoubtedly the most important item of apparel when it comes to cycling comfort.

You might be wondering by now how any of this relates to our bib shorts?

Well, because bib shorts matter. Whatever kind of cyclist you are, it’s arguably the one piece of kit that really does matter. And it was partly the struggle to find a truly good bib short that eventually led to the launch of Kostüme.

It was clear from day one that creating the most comfortable bib shorts on the market was the first challenge and the most important goal, and that it would likely set the tone for everything else we did. Not only because it mattered, but also because there was a very good chance that we could also validate our preorder batch model by doing so.

But, in a hyper-competitive market, against brands with huge resources - and with no prior product design experience - was it complete fantasy to think that we could even get close?

Are you sitting comfortably?

The most important part of making the most comfortable bib shorts is undoubtedly the chamois pad. You can have the best fabrics, fit and functionality, but without a pad that takes the sting out of time spent in the saddle, you might as well not bother.

We actually had a huge stroke of good fortune sourcing our chamois, and it’s a constant reminder to this day not to design technical products in a silo.

With specialist items like a chamois pad, there are only so many suppliers, meaning sourcing is typically relatively straightforward. But each brand has numerous different pads in the range, all with a different purpose (and budget) in mind.

With our focus on Audax and long distance cycling, we were able to narrow our choice considerably. But as I prepared to head off for a week of back-to-back testing in the hills and lanes of Pembrokeshire in Wales, a friend (one of the core members of Audax Club Bristol, and creator of events like Bristol-Glasgow-Bristol, which would eventually be a test-bed for our final production sample short) got wind of the plan and contacted me about his personal favourite long distance cycling shorts. ‘It probably won’t be one you’d think to test’ was the message, and he was absolutely right.

After 3 days of disappointment at the ‘leading’ brand/pad combo’s (coupled with a dawning realisation that perhaps I just had a particularly sensitive derriere) I finally tried Will’s suggestion. And it took just 15 minutes to recognise a clear difference. I was already a bit sore from previous days in the saddle, but this pad was something else. 10k went by. 20k. 50k. This was it. The very first product eureka moment.

Of course, I still had several other shorts to test, and it was a doubly disappointing experience after the comfort I now knew was possible. How could it be that an independent manufacturer making its own pad was building a better product than specialist suppliers?

What a well-performing chamois should look like from the objective perspective of a pressure test rig

Cream tease

In the weeks that followed, I tested the pad in every way I knew how. On and off-road. Baking hot (we happened to have a heatwave in the UK at the time of testing) and the torrential rain that often follows. I did back-to-back 12-hour days in the saddle, and bought several extra pairs for a few other very experienced riders to test. Occasionally I’d switch back to other pads just to check, and every time a wave of excitement hit me that we’d potentially struck gold.

Pembrokeshire in a heatwave is as good a place as anywhere in the world to test cycling kit.

Intriguingly the chamois also featured something that addressed another big annoyance of mine - chamois cream. This is an entire post in its own right, but if you’ve dabbled in Audax or other long-distance riding you’ll probably also have the same frustrations with adding sticky cream to very sensitive areas, especially mid-ride. It’s a ‘solution’ to a problem that shouldn’t exist, and a hangover from a time when pads were literally made out of chamois leather, and needed cream to stay supple.

The pad we use has a unique nano-level infusion of Aloe, which is dry to the touch and doesn't wash out, but completely removes the need for cream in almost all cases. Sounds like marketing guff, right? I was as sceptical as anybody. But, like everything else about the chamois, it just works. And once you’ve experienced it, it’s very, very hard to go back. Our customers definitely agree.

Stretch Goals

Much of our obsession with apparel at Kostüme boils down to a deep love of fabric. And one of our biggest frustrations with cycling apparel in particular was the homogeneity of fabric choices across most brands.

The reason for this is very simple - prototyping and testing is expensive and time-consuming, so why spend countless hours searching for something new, different and (crucially) untested when you already know there is a proven solution. How different can a fabric really be anyway?

Well, the answer is that it can be so different that it becomes a differentiator. It can be so different that it can drive the success not just of a product but also of a brand. And so is the case with our bib short fabric.

Finding incredible fabrics is a full-time job at Kostüme, and we tested literally hundreds to find the half a dozen that make up our current range at the time of writing.

As with the chamois pad, this was a tip-off - in this case from the Italian owner of the factory who makes our shorts, who is a lifelong friend of the mill owner who makes this incredible material (so it often goes in the historic and traditional world of Italian apparel manufacture!) It was being apparently being used by some of the leading luxury fashion houses, but nobody had used it for cycling apparel. It was expensive, untested, and what’s what’s more, it was in short supply due to the limited availability of the raw materials for production - in this case, recycled plastic bottles.

And it was blindingly obvious immediately upon receipt, even in a stark undyed white, that it was something very special. All we needed now were some sampling lengths, and some prototype samples.

Less is More

Of course, before you make samples you need a product design, and we’d been working together with our product developer, Demi Johnson (yet another fortuitous friend introduction) on a number of concepts.

We knew we wanted the short to be as minimal as possible without sacrificing technicality (we call it engineered minimalism) and the overall aim was to create a short that totally disappeared from your mind and senses when you started riding. This also meant doing away with the traditional elastic leg grippers and moving to a raw-cut finish - something the fabric would need to be able to handle.

We were also very committed to making the perfect clipless drop-seat, to make toilet breaks easier on the go. With our experience of long-distance riding, this is something that affects all riders, especially women, and something we were determined to achieve without clips or zips.

Once we’d come up with a design we felt happy with, it was down to Demi to hand-make a first prototype.

Here it is, pictured for the very first time.

It might not look much, but this is how most new products begin. Our ideas and fabrics were now alive in 3D, and we could quickly iterate a series of tweaks and changes that got us to the first big milestone in making the actual product: The tech pack.

In part two of this article we will explore topics including how we brought the product to life with a manufacturing partner, marketing, the press and consumer response, future innovations, and why our preorder batch model made all of this possible.

Proto 01 of our Comfort Break Bib Short, hand-made (and modelled) by Demi our product development partner

To find out more about our bib shorts, including current batch availability or to place a preorder, click here.