How to Design Your Own Cycling Kit
"Design your own cycling kit" is an easy sentence to type and a harder thing to actually do well. Most of what goes wrong happens before anyone opens a design file, wrong expectations about minimums, lead times, or what sublimation can and cannot hold. Here is the honest version of the process.
1. Work out your numbers first
Custom kit has a minimum of 5 units per style. Not five items total, five of each thing. Five jerseys is a run. Five jerseys plus five bib shorts is two runs. If your club has eleven people who want a jersey and three who want bibs, you have one viable style and one that is not there yet.
This is the single most common reason a custom order stalls, and it is worth resolving before any design work starts.
2. Allow the lead time honestly
Production runs 6 to 8 weeks from design sign-off. That is manufacturing time, not a queue you can jump. If you need kit for a specific event, count backwards from the event date, add a fortnight of slack for design revisions, and start from there. Clubs that come to us four weeks out are usually disappointed, and we would rather say so up front than take the order.
3. Design for sublimation, not for print
Kit is dye-sublimated: the design is bonded into the fabric rather than sitting on top of it. That has consequences worth knowing before you commit to artwork.
- Colour is effectively free. A twelve-colour design costs the same to produce as a two-colour one. There is no per-colour charge the way there is with screen printing.
- Gradients work. Fades, blends and photographic elements all reproduce well.
- Fine detail near seams does not. Panels are cut and joined, so a hairline logo crossing a side seam will not meet perfectly. Keep critical detail, a sponsor logo, a club crest, inside a panel.
- Vector artwork beats a JPEG. If your club crest only exists as a low-resolution image pulled off a website, it will look like a low-resolution image on the jersey. Getting a clean vector version made is the highest-value hour you will spend.
4. Decide which cut you are designing for
The same artwork sits differently on different garments. A race-cut Aerolite jersey has less fabric across the back and a longer drop tail than the relaxed Club Classic, so a large back-panel design gets read differently on each. Pick the cut before finalising placement, not after.
5. Sort sizing before you order, not after
Kit runs 3XS to 3XL, and cycling sizing is not street sizing, most people take a size larger in a race cut than they expect. For a club run, circulate the size charts and collect real numbers. A sizing kit for members to try is worth the delay it adds; a run of thirty jerseys where a third are the wrong size is not recoverable.
6. Consider a club portal instead of a bulk order
The traditional model is that a committee member collects sizes, fronts the money, takes delivery of a box, and then spends six weeks chasing people for payment. There is a better way: a club portal, where each member orders and pays individually from their own page, in the club's design, and we ship to them.
Nobody carries the float and nobody stores boxes. Read how club portals work.
Start a design
If you have the numbers and the timeline, the next step is a conversation about artwork. Start a custom kit enquiry, or look at what existing club kit looks like in the wild:
Deciding whether custom kit is right for your club at all? Read the full guide: what to know before you commit, including the four ways it goes wrong and when the honest answer is to wait.
