Stepping into arrivals at Alicante airport, it’s evident this is cycling territory. Elite athletes in team-branded casualwear pull executive-style luggage through the corridors. Towering bike boxes roll along in step, policed by support staff.
But Cyclist isn’t heading to the weaving climbs of the Costa Blanca or the sun loungers of Benidorm. Our destination is the town of Yecla, about an hour’s drive inland, which is home to the headquarters of Gobik, one of Spain’s fastest-growing cycling brands and kit supplier to WorldTour teams Ineos Grenadiers, Movistar and FDJ-Suez.
Established in 2010 out of the embers of the previous decade’s financial crisis, Gobik is the brainchild of an architect and a motorbike helmet designer, who between them have built a global company on the foundations of a custom kit business.
‘Getting to sponsor a WorldTour team is a bit like dating,’ Gobik’s co-founder and commercial director Jose Ramón Ortín tells Cyclist on the balmy day in December we visit. ‘We show them what we can do, how our different garments work in combination, and our experience. Finance is less important than performance to the high-budget teams.’
Gobik previously produced kit for UAE Team Emirates, which was worn by Tadej Pogačar for his Tour de France win in 2021. The Ineos relationship started in 2024.
‘Ineos was a good opportunity with one of the biggest teams in the world,’ says co-founder and former architect Alberto García, Gobik’s product manager. ‘They are the inventors of marginal gains and now know that they must adapt again to get back to where they were.’
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Ingredients and the recipe
Showing Cyclist around the facility today is Gabriel Garcia Auñon, Gobik’s UK and international area manager. He explains that having outgrown its 2,000m² factory, the company’s new premises are ten times bigger, with 40,000 additional square metres of car park to expand into.
The factory itself is an imposing rectangular structure composed of gigantic open-doored warehouse spaces alongside more contained and intimate production areas. Everything around us is white or grey and a surprising atmosphere of serenity pervades each new space we enter. In one room is a machine that looks like a space age pestle and mortar.
‘We rub two fabrics together under pressure for ten hours at a time to replicate bibshort friction on long rides,’ says Auñon. ‘We also have a washing machine in here so that we can find out how customers might unknowingly damage their kit. If the kit performs well then we move forward with those fabrics, but it takes us a year to test each one sufficiently.’
Around a million metres of fabric are stored at any one time, whether that’s from Gobik’s supplier in Italy or its insulation and foul weather partner Polartec. Multi-layered piles of fabric roll underneath a sophisticated guillotine, emerging as perfectly stencilled panel shapes. There is also a laser for specialist garments, which explains the strange scent of roasted elastane in the air. A red beam smokes its way through a sheet of black Lycra – by next week it will be part of a TT suit.
In another temperature-controlled room, rows and rows of giant Epson printers, built specifically for Gobik, churn out reams of what looks like smartly printed paper kits on gargantuan rolls of paper. These machines run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for a ten-minute maintenance break on a Saturday.
Changing colour
‘Our kit is made from pieces. It’s easy to cut and then transfer in water-based ink,’ says Auñon. ‘Every garment we produce follows the same steps. Pro kit is slightly different because of the bespoke sizing, or “variants” as we call them.’
Pro kit is made to unique specifications and so has to be cut in far smaller batches, which slows down other production processes. On another conveyor belt a giant heated mangle-like device transfers ink onto the garment. This process of sublimation occurs at a molecular level, meaning the fabric and the dye become one entity. If vinyl logos need to be applied, this is done by hand. A machine operator, helped by projected images beamed down onto the blank fabric, operates a mechanised iron the size of a square bike wheel to seal the deal.
Considering that Gobik makes one million garments annually, it’s striking how handmade and hand-machined the process is. Auñon says 90% of the garments are finished off-site (in Spain) by contractors who work exclusively for the manufacturer.
Teamwork makes the dream work
Sponsoring a pro team is not as simple as printing up a bunch of jerseys in team colours and handing them out to the riders.
‘It’s complicated,’ says García. ‘This year we’ve had to do three different fitting sessions. Every year in November we think the team’s roster is complete and then two weeks later there is a new rider. Always.’
Angel Lencina, Gobik’s development manager, liaises closely with the teams: ‘Discussions can be endless,’ he says. ‘During the season we talk once a week to review the performance. Riders often ask for things that are not possible. Once some riders wanted to integrate special bib fabric into the jersey for comfort, but that was bad for performance and impossible for production.’
For Gobik, which currently looks after three teams, the process of producing jerseys is even more complex. Each team utilises different fabrics, layups and stitching patterns. Discussions and final designs are then proprietary to that team.
‘A team like Ineos spends a great deal of time and money in the wind-tunnel,’ says Auñon, ‘and we can’t ever share that information with Movistar or FDJ-Suez.’
But how different can each team’s kit really be? After all, everyone wants featherweight and aerodynamically high-performing kit.
‘It’s all about each team’s key riders,’ García explains. ‘Sprint teams will have very different discussions to GC teams. The fit is absolutely key, and a different fabric with different levels of elastane, for example, will change the fit entirely.’
And were there grumbles from Movistar and FDJ-Suez when Gobik brought in Ineos to replace UAE?
‘Not at all,’ says García. ‘Our other teams understood that it’s interesting for us to have another team with a very large budget who can provide lots of investment in performance. That said, a third men’s team would be too much.’
While Gobik won’t share how much it costs to sponsor Ineos Grenadiers, García says, ‘Commercially it’s worth it. At first it might not seem so because you have to invest so many resources. And then for something like Filippo Ganna’s Singularity TT suit, the product doesn’t even make it to the final customer. But indirectly it has a big overall impact; the teams pressure us to be better in everything we do.’
The trickle-down effect
Riding a pro-level bike may be out of reach for all but the wealthiest, but we can all wear the same kit as our WorldTour heroes. Can’t we?
‘It depends,’ says Auñon. ‘The teams’ racing kit uses different, higher-end fabrics. We have a one-year rolling agreement with each team, meaning we cannot sell the exact garment with just Gobik branding for one year. Afterwards the technology will trickle down into our collections.’
There are other considerations that separate the needs of pros and mortals: ‘UCI rules state that race kit cannot have any reflective detailing in case a camera flash obscures a sponsor’s logo,’ says Auñon. ‘And this year Ineos wanted to reverse the colour gradient of its jersey to make riders more visible to drivers when training on European roads.’
When it comes to the Singularity 2.0, the skinsuit Ganna wore to victory on a TT stage at last year’s Giro d’Italia, there are a few different processes. It needs to be cut by laser to keep stitching to a minimum, and it rattles through 36 different machines during construction, versus the 17 required for bib shorts and jerseys. Even still, the final fitting of the TT suit has a traditional edge to it.
‘We took a sample to the wind-tunnel in Pippo’s size, and once he started riding we then made adjustments by hand with needles and clips,’ says Auñon. ‘The material has been exclusively developed for us. It’s solid rather than sublimated so we apply vinyl decals on top.’
The final suit, in Italian national team colours, is a smooth fabric with a leathery feel. It’s deeply stretchy but looks far too small to cram 190cm of Ganna into.
‘It takes close to €1,000 to create each skinsuit,’ says Auñon. ‘The number each rider receives depends on how much of a TT specialist they are. Pippo has around five.’
Roll call
When Cyclist asks just how many items of kit each rider receives, Auñon disappears into a room full of laptops and comes back with an A3 sheet. In intricate detail, down to the number of shoe covers and base layers, the spreadsheet outlines how much kit each rider will receive, which races it will be needed for and where it will be sent. (There’s a yellow Post-it note reminding Gobik that Omar Fraile isn’t attending the winter training camp so the kit needs to be couriered to his home address.)
‘Just like school, each rider has names stitched into their kit. We used to print the nicknames under their sleeves, which was great as you could see it when riders celebrated on the finish line.’
The numbers are slightly different for each rider, but no one is going to go short. In total across three teams it works out to many hundreds of jerseys and bib shorts, thousands of socks and gloves. God knows the size of the box required to send it all.
Auñon shrugs with a smile: ‘Luckily, that’s not my job,’ he says.
What Pog wants, Pog gets
The tricky business of dealing with pro rider predilections
Despite being an industry led by science, data and innovation, there are times when certain voices just matter more.
‘One year we developed a new shoe cover for UAE and produced it in both white and black,’ says Gabriel Garcia Auñon, Gobik’s UK and international area manager. ‘Once Tadej had ridden them, he said that the white ones were faster. Straight away the team told us to only produce white ones. It just demonstrates how much teams sometimes trust in a rider’s feeling. For me it was a disaster because all the orders were submitted in black to the factory, so we had to rush to get it stopped.’
The trouble with winning
It might sound counterintuitive, but race victories aren’t always a good thing for jersey suppliers
All sponsors are happy to see one of their riders take the lead in a Grand Tour. But unfortunately it means that rider immediately stops wearing the sponsor’s jersey. Instead they have to pull on the coloured jersey made by whoever supplies the race leaders’ kit. The cameras may be on your sponsored rider, but devoid of your sponsor logos.
In addition to that inconvenience, Gobik also has to be prepared for a mind-boggling number of kit conundrums, thanks to the need to supply national champions’ jerseys in the event that one of its sponsored riders win.
‘If there are 30 different riders from 30 different nationalities, we have to prepare 30 different jerseys,’ says Gobik’s UK and international area manager, Gabriel Garcia Auñon.
‘And we have to do that even if there is zero chance of a rider becoming national champion. What’s more, the races happen a week before the Tour de France so, yes, it’s a quick turnaround.’
