The Polaris
range
We’ve published some blog posts on individual products, but in this post we wanted to talk about how we ended up on the specific range of products that we have. But before we get to where we are, it’s important to look back at what we were…
A brief history of Polaris
Polaris was founded over 40 years ago, and was pretty groundbreaking at the time, laying a lot of the foundations for modern mountain and off-road biking. Polaris were championing ultra-cycling before ultra-cycling was a thing. The Polaris Challenge was the first event of its kind. A mountain bike orienteering event, participants had 48 hours to reach as many pre-determined checkpoints within a 1600km2 area, whilst giving themselves enough time to return to the starting point. These events grew in popularity and were eventually held in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, and Germany.
This type of event defined who Polaris was, and the kind of adventures they advocated for. Which in turn influenced the kinds of products that made up the Polaris range. But then things changed, as they often do. Money always tends to affect things, and soon the range of products got wider but much shallower trying to be everything to everyone, rather than staying true to who they were. Then Halfords happened, but we don’t want to talk about that…
Polaris – for the next adventure
When we took over Polaris, we wanted to take it back to its roots, in a way. We wanted to focus on the adventure and fun side of cycling. Obviously, good kit makes rides more fun, but we all enjoy a specific kind of riding, and we want our range of products to represent this.
We also think that this is an important distinction to make – when putting the range together we weren’t thinking of a specific bike type, or even a specific discipline of riding, but instead a type of ride. It’s subtle, but it matters. We want our range to be based around the adventure. This isn’t gravel specific, or mountain bike, or back country, or road, or all-road, but all of them. Or none of them. It’s a kind of ride where you’re out for the whole day with your mates with a loose plan and kind-of-a-route in mind. The kind of ride where you know you’re going to hit new trails and you just know you’ll be severely under-biked, but you go anyway. It’s the all-day summer rides where you’ve done nothing but pedal and laugh, where you’re exhausted but you still race the sun to get home so you don’t have to ride in the dark. The bike doesn’t matter, the ride does. And we want our clothing range to be used to facilitate this kind of riding.
The Polaris range
With this in mind we need our range of clothing to be cohesive, and adaptable. Where you can pull different pieces together to make up what you need for that day and it all works together. The best way to put it is that we have the basics covered. You could roughly say that we have a tight set of clothing and a loose set of clothing which you can mix and match depending on the ride, along with all the accessories you’d need to adapt to the weather. You can go full MTB with our shorts and Titan technical tee, or nice and streamlined with our tighter fitting bib shorts and Ventrix Jersey. Or, as is popular in gravel, bib shorts and Titan technical tee. Or you could be a complete maverick and mix loose shorts and tight jersey…
We’ve mentioned it previously, but want to mention it again as it does affect our range of products. But Polaris is a passion project, ran by a team of cyclists who also run another business. This means that we’re not beholden to shareholders and can develop the products we want to ride in. It does also mean that we don’t have shareholder money to play with. Up-front capital like that can be useful if you want to hit the ground running with a full range of kit straight off the bat. Unfortunately, (but also fortunately) we’re not in a place to do that so we’ll be bringing products to market as and when we can – likely in line with the seasons.
In the first instance, these are the products we’re focusing on:
- Jerseys – tight short sleeve, tight (ish) long sleeve and loose short sleeve.
- Bib Shorts – cargo bib shorts.
- Shorts / Trousers – looser fitting shorts and trousers. Typical MTB style.
- Base Layers – a long-sleeved merino base layer.
- Gilets – a thermal grid gilet, and an insulated gilet.
- Changing Robe
- Socks
- Knee Warmers
- Arm Warmers
- Gloves
- Neck Gaiter
Which, when combined should be usable for most UK riding scenarios.
