Rapha joins ETI as a foundation member

Headquartered in London, Rapha was established in 2004 as an online retail company with a mission to inspire the world to live life by bike. We do this by creating the world’s best cycling apparel, inspirational content and connecting our customers to build a like-minded community. Our cycling apparel and accessories are produced together with our global supplier partners to the highest possible quality and the most technically advanced production methods.

As a community-led brand, we pride ourselves on our physical retail spaces known as Clubhouses, which can be found in 21 vibrant cycling locations around the world. We have also created the Rapha Cycling Club – a global community of over 20,000 passionate cyclists that come together to share in their love of cycling.

In 2019 Rapha created the Rapha Foundation, which has provided over $4 million in grants to organisations around the world committed to inspiring, empowering and supporting the next generation of riders and racers. Since 2021, 60% of these grants have been allocated to groups under-represented in cycling - women, and people of colour.

During 2020, we published our first social and environmental Impact Commitments, detailing our progress on our Impact and Sustainability webpage. Our commitments include ensuring the wellbeing and long-term development of all people in our global company and supply chain.

To achieve this, we identified the need for transparency; we published our tier 1 supplier list during 2021. We committed to understanding salient risks within our supply chain by assessing social and labour performance through the Higg Index Facility Social and Labour Module (FSLM). We have rolled this out at tier 1 and 2 so far, and use it to analyse compliance to our Code of Conduct, which is based on the ETI Base Code.

We recognise that supply chain transparency and social and labour assessments are only a starting point for conducting meaningful ethical trade within our supply chain. Together with the ETI, we hope to identify and act upon salient risks, whilst improving and building upon our existing processes and policies.

We also identified the need for industry-wide collaboration to facilitate forward movement in ethical trade. Joining ETI will help connect Rapha to sources of expertise and build key partnerships through ETI’s tripartite network of brands, NGOs and trade unions.

During the pandemic, supply chain disruption and rapidly changing demand for cycling apparel, highlighted the importance of having clearly defined purchasing practices. In response, we built new processes to evaluate our performance, which we aim to expand upon with ETI’s guidance.

Rapha recognises ETI as the leading organisation to support Rapha on our ethical trade journey. Membership will give us measurable progress and accountability to improve our performance, and we are excited to commence our membership.