Petaluma cycling apparel company riding mountain of enthusiasm

For the first 10 minutes David Billstrom is riding his bike, he feels like a 9-year-old kid again.

The CEO of Kitsbow, a premium mountain bike apparel company based in Petaluma, described the sensation as a flow state cyclists reach once they’ve surrendered to the moment and every other care has subsided.

It’s a type of euphoria that can only be reached in a few endeavors, and Billstrom said allowing their customers to reach that point where concerns about clothing comfort disappear is precisely how Kitsbow defines a victory.

“It’s just this freedom,” he said. “There’s this speed - you’re going faster than walking. You’re rolling, the wind’s in your face. That has nothing to do with technical ability or fitness. That’s just the experience of riding a bike.

“It’s pretty universal. We believe it’s universal. So we’re going to worry about the details and also try to make it all disappear.”

Over the past seven years, Kitsbow has charted an innovative path, redefining what’s possible in a sector of the cycling apparel industry where no other company had been successful.

Founded by Zander Nosler out of his Occidental home in 2012, Kitsbow has seen annual revenue growth of 50% like clockwork, Billstrom said, credited in part to the region’s sizable market of bike riders willing to invest in premium garb that costs hundreds of dollars per item.

The company has stationed its headquarters and domestic production facility in Petaluma for the last four years, now boasting over 30 employees.

“Petaluma, the region - Marin County and Sonoma County - a lot of the early customers live right here because they ride their mountain bikes once or twice or three times a week right here,” said Billstrom, who was an early investor and has been on the board of directors since the start. “In that sense, it’s been a great place to launch from.”

Kitsbow is a direct-to-consumer brand that sells all of its merchandise online, offering an array of clothing that caters to every aspect of the mountain biker lifestyle - from performance garments to jackets and shirts that break the mold for traditional cycling wear.

The most popular piece is a $220 flannel shirt created with world-renowned Pendleton wool from Portland, which Billstrom said accounts for a third of the company’s sales.

Many customers have commented that it’s too nice to wear when thrashing through the mountain brush on a bike, but it’s built for it, he said, featuring the specialized shoulder and elbow padding found on several of Kitsbow’s products.

“There was this need for bike clothes that just didn’t exist,” said store manager Storm Glover, a longtime Petaluma resident. “Everyone was riding their bikes in spandex. Even myself when I started, I was like, ‘Aw man, if I want to ride my bike I have to wear that?’”

Like a tech company, Kitsbow takes an aggressive approach to innovation. Its most popular shorts, for example, are in its fifth iteration.

“We never let anything just lie,” Billstrom said. “As we find things that need to be improved, we improve them. We refer to that as ‘obsessive,’ and we refer to the people who wear our clothes as ‘the obsessives.’ It’s an obsessive approach to the functional design while making sure it’s classy enough to wear anywhere.”

Petaluma seems to have been an idyllic backyard for the scaling startup.

Aside from the reliable customer base and the region’s numerous cycling trails, Petaluma is a hub for shaping future mountain bikers, home to the NorCal High School Cycling League, which oversees over 1,500 athletes.

Glover coaches youth mountain bikers, and usually donates comped goods returned through Kitsbow’s generous exchange policy to his athletes as a way to encourage their commitment level and eliminate clothing waste, he said.

The apparel company’s focus on domestic production is an attribute the staff believes has been a key to its success. Currently, about 25% of its garments are sewn in Petaluma, and nearly half in the U.S. alone.

The goal is to raise that to as close to 100% as possible, Billstrom said, an effort to increase sustainability and maintain a model of lean manufacturing where the demand is in-sync with production.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 15 million tons of textile waste is generated in the U.S. each year, a number that has doubled over the last two decades. Of that amount, more than two-thirds is sent to a landfill.

“We’re not wasting it,” Glover said. “It’s a good that’s still able to be used, and we’re going to find a home for it. So as far as waste goes, the fact that we spend as many resources as we do to find a home for something that doesn’t need to be in a garbage, that’s huge - just eliminating waste.”

One of the most rewarding aspects of the company has been watching the life cycle of a product get completed in-house, said Glover.

In less than an hour, a piece of clothing can come right off the production line in the back of the office, get photographed in the conference room and then posted online where customers can buy it.

It’s that model, he said, that he believes Kitbow can continue enhancing in the years ahead.

“That does more for me than seeing the pro athletes endorse the gear, it’s seeing the workers that live down the street - I grew up here, we all grew up in the same area,” Glover said. “They’re making it and I’m taking pictures of it and putting it online. Not a lot of people get to see that full circle come to completion. That’s a big part of a small company, and being able to see that has been really cool.”

(Contact News Editor Yousef Baig at yousef.baig@arguscourier.com or 776-8461, and on Twitter ?@YousefBaig.)