How do you build a brand and design a jersey for crit racers and weekend warriors, Olympians and first-timers, style obsessives and club stalwarts, teenagers and grandparents - all at once?

Huddersfield Star Wheelers have been asking that question since 1953. Founded in the aftermath of the war, the club has always run from complete beginners to competitive racers. That breadth was never incidental — it was the point. Cycling meant freedom. Getting into the hills above the Northern mill towns, regardless of your gender, ethnicity, or politics. The club met in Quaker meeting houses. Its founding members had ties to the Clarion movement, to the rise of the Labour Party across the industrial north. They were as interested in equality as they were in riding.

That history lives in the name. The star in Star Wheelers isn't decorative. It's the socialist star. The red and gold were chosen as a direct reference to the anti-fascist resistance of the Spanish Civil War.

So the design couldn't belong to a trend. It had to belong to the club.

The project started in the archive — history books, decades of photography, the material record of seventy years of membership. What emerged wasn't a brief for reinvention. It was a case for restoration. The stripes already existed. The colours already meant something. My job was to refine rather than replace: adjusting the red and gold to sit truer to the period, redrawing the mark in a modernist cut — the same socialist star, the same meaning, set in a grotesque drawn from the era's racing typography rather than a contemporary face.

The reference point was the golden age of road racing: the thirties through fifties. The same mid-century moment that produced Gino Bartali, whose riding became a symbol of freedom and resistance. Modernist type and road racing iconography aren't a retro pairing — they're contemporaries. That's the distinction that mattered. The system that followed — brand, digital, print — is built entirely on that foundation.

Which answers the question I started with. A jersey can't chase every rider at once. But it can carry seventy years of shared history. And that belongs to every member equally, whatever they ride, however far they've come.

- Gabe

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Interestingly, some of the Huddersfield Star Wheelers first members also started The Rough-Stuff Fellowship, who some have argued were the 'first ever' mountain bikers in thier expeditions to Alps and Scandinavia.