Travel enthusiasts, bicycle designers.
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We had the pleasure of meeting César, communication manager for Riverside travel bikes. Before being a communicator, César is above all a passionate person. He tells us the story of the development of the range, steeped in co-creation since day one!
Hello Caesar! Who are you ?
I am a fan of bicycle travel. A cycling geek in all its forms: city bike, gravel, sometimes I ride a road bike but never with car chocks! I'm not performance driven.
For me the bike is a machine of autonomy and exploration.
This passion comes originally from a bet, then followed me, I loved it and then I went further and further, longer and longer and more and more frequently.
Finally, my daily life as a bikepacker is more about going to bivouac in the Monts des Flandres or on a slag heap than going to Bolivia. So there you go, I'm a great bike traveler, and then I work at Decathlon.
How did you get here?
Basically, I wanted to go away for a year with three friends. We met the design team at a bike travel show. They were just starting to work on the project. They lent us four bikes to work on the design together. The bikes have evolved as we receive feedback, comments, etc.
That's how I said to myself that this profession was completely crazy, and that I knew that I wanted to be part of this story.
What are we talking about ?
We are talking about a complete range for travelers. There are three bikes: a first for discovering travel, a second “perfect for touring the world”, and finally a last rather for offroad adventure, capable of riding on really any terrain.
We are also talking about two ranges of bags: classic side bags, on luggage rack, and a complete bikepacking bag kit (without luggage rack, fixed directly to the frame, saddle or handlebars).
We are talking about 4 years of development, 500,000 km of tests proven by the bikes, about a hundred travelers involved throughout the development process around a team of 5 passionate decathletes.
The design team in field testing
How was the project born ?
On the one hand, the project was born of a happy coincidence: the team formed included several practitioners sharing the same passion for cycling, and began to push the subject.
On the other hand, it was born out of observation, as is done almost systematically at Decathlon. When we started the project for the new range of touring / hybrid bikes, we realized that travel was a rising trend.
What motivated you to launch it in co-creation?
You can ride the best travel bike in the world, but you can only do it with 5 people. There are plenty of ways to travel, and the richness of the project is this community. From the beginning there was this desire: “not to design this bike in Decathlon offices, but rather to do it around the world”. We have positioned ourselves as spokespersons for all travelers encountered through travel or digital interactions.
The team went everywhere (test missions, interviews, trips) but if we wanted this bike to be developed in the field, it had to be able to continue to ride when we were in the office. This is what motivated us to surround ourselves with a - brilliant - team of ambassadors.
Ambassador Olivier Peyre (En route avec Aile) in field test
What is a good travel bike?
It's a machine for making dreams come true! It's such a tough, durable, reliable and comfortable bike that it's capable of circumnavigating the globe multiple times. You just have to change the consumables, and it starts again! It's a machine in which you have to have super confidence. Which owns good loading capacity, too. We could even say that it is a bike capable of being forgotten.
The bike is just a way to travel. Most of our users travel for the trip, not for the bike! They simply realized that it was the best compromise between environmental convictions (I don't want to fly) and the number of km traveled in a given time. The bicycle is the happy medium between a motorized means and walking. It is often a rational compromise.
What is the secret for the bicycle to be forgotten?
Everyone has their recipe...
Already, you have to listen to yourself at the beginning. Everyone can travel by bike! There's no point in wanting to do 150km the first day if it's to be tired, injured the next day.
Even after all these kilometres, I sometimes do 30km days and that gives me a lot of pleasure.
By starting slowly, the body gets used to it, gets used to the effort, and everything becomes easier as the journey progresses.
The concept of comfort is paramount. For starters, the saddle is super important. It's always a good idea to test your saddle (on a daily basis, on a commute for example) before a big trip.
From a design point of view, we have worked a lot on comfort. Lots of elements come into play: the geometry, the material of the frame, the tire...
Nicolas Bordeloup on the 920 touring
What pleasant surprise did you experience with your community of co-creators?
There are plenty !
On the test missions, we invited people from the community: we met them, presented our working method... some have become ambassadors, some help us with the graphic part, for example. There are always great stories with them!
What impressed me recently was when I asked for feedback from the community on our bikepacking bags. We got complete, qualitative, relevant feedback… This is the strength of our community, on Instagram in particular. We are not very numerous, but we are passionate and very committed!
Our engineers, designers and product managers are nourished by this feedback and it drives them forward... power 1000!
But we went even further, by inviting a dozen partners to share with us their 10-year vision of this sport. We are co-creating our vision!
What motivates co-creators?
People who have been there for a while realize that they are really co-designers of this range since the feedback they give us has a real, visible impact.
It's palpable. We need their feedback and they know that we take it into account since they find the products later in the store!
What were the main stages of the project?
1. Listening. Do interviews, rather long, face-to-face with travelers. About a hundred interviews of this type were carried out. This allows us to identify the motivations, the obstacles to practice, the sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction for example... All this leads to the emergence of a first set of specifications.
2. Benchmarking. We identify what our competitors are doing, we test their equipment.
3. Design & first test. We design a first frame, receive the first prototype, and go on a test mission. This test mission makes it possible to accelerate the aging of the bike, to make it withstand a maximum of constraints.
4. Test ambassadors. Once the first prototypes have been tested, we refurbish them and send them to our testers. Every 3 weeks, they give us feedback on what happened. We ask them to tell us everything they have been able to observe, feel. Contact with them is permanent, thanks to digital technology.
5. Finally, after 4 years of development and having reproduced this design/test cycle many times, our range is complete and best meets the needs of our travellers!
What is the longest distance traveled / greatest journey made by a co-creator?
The biggest is a world tour, which unfortunately was not completed because of the covid… It had already been running for 2 years! This is the Cyclean trip project, with the mission of picking up litter found on the road. He has since embarked on a tour of France collecting… surgical masks. His name is Florian, he's a great guy, super committed… (he finished this tour on October 29)
There is a sum of great individual adventures around this project that allows us to have these 500,000 kms traveled in the process of co-creation.
Ambassador Olivier Peyre (En route avec Aile) in field test
And you César, what is your best memory with this bike?
Last winter, I took 3 months of unpaid leave to go riding. It's important for me to continue to travel, even when we have a job. I dreamed of Morocco. A friend joined me in Fez, then we headed for the Atlas. We had a preconceived idea of what we were going to see: very ocher, brown, very rocky tones. While in reality, it was ultra varied! Every day new colors, new images… we were super isolated. We were following in the footsteps of the Atlas Mountain Race, and one evening when we had known a lot, we bivouacked above a canyon… setting sun, violet light: it was incredible!
Thanks to this bike, the Riverside Touring 920, we were able to cross real desert, dunes… I remember that we also pushed the bikes a lot!
They allow to seek a completely grandiose depopulation...
We invite you to consult Riverside's Instagram full of great stories! The bikes will be available for sale by the end of the year.
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