Yanto Barker, founder and CEO of British cycle apparel brand Le Col.
It’s your typical rags-to-riches story: young lad brought up by a single mum on the social security payment Family Credit becomes pro athlete, creates own cycle apparel brand, crowdfunds, does well, sells equity to venture capitalists, lives happily ever after.
The reality is more complicated, but it’s still the stuff of dreams for college dropout Yanto Barker, who founded London-based Le Col in 2011.
Along the way, the 39-year-old Welshman bought the Italian clothing factory that made his first garments, and, on December 9, his company inked a supply and partnership deal with a professional cycling team that, next year, will be competing at the highest levels of the sport. After a name change, this team—which includes in its ranks multiple Tour de France stage winner Mark Cavendish—recently became Team Bahrain McLaren thanks to sponsorship from the British Formula 1 motor racing company.
Barker is well acquainted with cycling superstars, including Sir Bradley Wiggins, with whom Barker created an offshoot clothing brand, Le Col By Wiggins. (The pair were juniors together, racing for Team GB.)
And Barker is now also acquainted with high finance: last year London-headquartered Puma Private Equity pumped £5 million into Le Col. This is on top of earlier crowdfunding which raised £1 million.
“I’m one of the most driven and ambitious people I’ve ever come across,” stated Barker.
“I’ve met a few [like] me, but I’m one of the absolute highest.”
The headstrong Barker quit college at the age of 17.
“I thought I could do a better job racing my bike for a career,” he said.
“My mum was a single parent, and she brought my sisters and me up on her own. She was receiving Family Credit for me attending higher education. She made it very clear that if I stopped, then that income would stop, and therefore I would need to pick it up—it was about £30 a week. I said, fine, I’ll get a part-time job, and I’ll cover it.
“I went to college one more day, picked up my stuff, told my tutors that’s what I was doing, and from then on, I was 100% full time as a cyclist.”
At the age of 18 he won Britain’s junior road race championships and was later selected for Team GB, cosseted as part of a set-up that treated its riders “like little pops star in a bubble,” said Barker.
While his drive and ambition were never in doubt, he struggled to break through the ranks when he became a professional.
“I didn’t win the Tour de France like Bradley [Wiggins], and I’ve not won 30 stages of the Tour [de France], like [Mark Cavendish] but I don’t believe they were keener or more committed to achieving their results than I was.”
At the age of 25, Barker retired from cycle sport.
“I’m a very all-or-nothing kind of person. So when I stopped, I didn’t touch my bike for 18 months, I didn’t even do any kind of exercise—I was keen to change my focus.”
He entered the world of work but didn’t enjoy it. Entrepreneurial by nature, he didn’t take to working for others.
“I have to be self-employed; I like to look after my own time and responsibilities,” he said.
He considered setting up a sport coaching business, or perhaps a cycle travel firm—two career options popular with former pro cyclists—but settled on creating a cycle apparel brand.
In 2008 he started to research the market, contacting suppliers, sending for fabric swatches, playing with brand names, and teaching himself to design. And then the lightbulb moment: to promote his new brand—Le Col from the beginning, using the French word for mountain pass—Barker would return, three years after leaving it, to the world of professional cycling.
LeCol has signed a sponsorship deal with Team Bahrain McLaren.
He began racing again in early 2009, riding for his one-man Le Col team. Soon linking up with another squad, this team became one with eleven riders, still with Le Col as one of the sponsors. He used his training and racing to inform the designs for his putative business.
“I sponsored myself, in effect, with my brand name on the jersey. Even though we weren’t officially trading, I was setting up the foundations for the business to later begin trading.”
Barker wanted his brand to fit with his personal need to look “right,” on and off the bike.
In 2010, he told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper that “jerseys need to fit a certain way, shorts need to be a certain length, you need to match things up, so you are color-coordinated.”
He admitted he couldn’t ride with “mismatched anything.”
“Looking good is an important part of your whole facade and psyche in line with being motivated. Feeling professional, acting professional, looking professional—all those boxes need to be ticked.”
The first Le Col products became available in 2011. At the high-end, performance end of the market, Le Col was already a recognized brand, and now it had garments to sell. These first pieces were designed for “the discerning rider,” promoted the startup.
Barker didn’t personally cut and stitch his first garments, but he did almost everything else in his fledgling business.
“I trained every single morning during the week, [on rides of] up to 100 miles. In the afternoon, I’d look at spreadsheets; I’d look at designs; I’d sign off samples, I did all the things that needed to be done to make sure that the business continued.”
He was racing internationally at this point.
“I was taking part in World Tour races like Tour de Dubai, Tour of Poland, Kuurne–Brussels–Kuurne. And on the team bus between stages, I was trying to check emails. I did accounts; I did design. I did branding; I did website building. I did the planning; I did forecasting; I did finances. I did investment—I did every single job in this business before I hired the person that now looks after that department or that specific role.”
Le Col now employs 30 people, including eight in the Italian clothing factory he acquired. This factory— situated in Castelfranco, near Treviso, heart of the Italian cycling industry—made Le Col’s garments from the start.
When quality standards started slipping, Barker demanded changes but was told none could be made thanks to managerial disagreements. Instead, Barker was invited to buy the company. He found investors to back him, took out a bank loan, threw in some savings, and raised enough capital to buy the factory.
“I bought an order book; I bought a management team and contacts,” said Barker.
“And I bought all of the facilities I needed to service my product.”
But it was touch-and-go, he remembered:
“I had no idea just how big a deal it was to incorporate an overseas manufacturing facility into quite a small U.K. cycling clothing brand. [The factory was] turning over more than I was turning over in the U.K.. [But] I made it work, [although] it was very, very close for a long time, and quite stressful.”
By 2016, Barker and his new management team were in full control of Le Col’s production pipeline, sales were strong, but cashflow remained tight. The decision was made to open up to crowdsourced equity—the company, late in the year, launched a campaign on Crowdcube.
By the close of the campaign in January 2017, 344 micro investors had pledged over £1+ million in return for 21% equity. Barker said the two-month process had been “intense.”
“My wife gave birth to our first daughter in the middle [of the campaign], and there I was in the hospital corridor, taking phone calls for a £250 investment, a £1,000 investment, a £10,000 investment, all while we were learning about breastfeeding.”
The crowdfunding cash was spent on marketing and new hires. Ex-Sky marketing director Simon Creasey—who had been responsible for building up NOW TV and the Sky Store—was appointed as Le Col’s chief marketing officer, saying at the time that he “could see the foundations [of the company] were extremely solid and there was a great platform for accelerated growth.”
Barker wasn’t awed by the amount he had raised on Crowdcube:
“A million pounds it isn’t that much, [but] everything moves a lot faster with investment. You have to understand what that means for the economics of the business, your income versus outgoings, your salary bill each month, your income targets. If [the targets] don’t get met, then you have to be really clear about what you’re doing about it, and responsive to making sure that you have the answers.”
He adds: “You have to be very, very on top of your numbers; very, very on top of your expenses, and ready to make some [bold] decisions very quickly.”
And one of those decisions was to use the crowdfunding success as a springboard to raise even more funding, this time from private equity.
“My job as [company] founder and CEO is to make sure that I source the resources that this business needs to deliver its targets. And one of those [resources] is money,” said Barker.
“I could see the trajectory that we were going on, and it was likely that we were going to need more money so I kept [the financial consultants from the Crowdcube campaign] on board.”
This fresh investment—from Puma Private Equity of London—was used to ramp up sales.
“It shouldn’t be seen as a negative that we needed more money. I’m very black and white that what we do has to deliver growth in turnover,” stressed Barker.
“We started talking to [Puma] in March 2018. After they completed their first tranche [of £2.35 million], they committed [a further £2.5 million] in October 2018.”
However, the rosy picture of a booming bicycle market painted by Le Col—the company is now valued at north of £10 million—didn’t pan out. The global bicycle industry has probably yet to reach the bottom of its current trough, and many companies have struggled to stay afloat.
High-end cycle apparel is somewhat immune to the squeezing of a contracting market, but even British cycle clothing brand Rapha faltered in 2018. Bought the previous year for £200 million by Steuart and Tom Walton—two of the heirs to the $159 billion Wal-mart fortune—Rapha had to shed staff to cope with reduced demand.
Barker sees the downturn as an opportunity:
“When there’s excitement in the market, and it’s growing, there are a lot of [companies] trying to service that excitement. [The market] gets fragmented and you end up competing with lots of very small brands trying to get a foothold in the market by turning over £100,000 [worth of product] to their friends, which, [admittedly] is what I did at the very beginning.”
Le Col is growing, said Barker, partly by taking market share from its rivals, such as Castelli of Italy, Assos of Switzerland, and Rapha.
“We’ve grown 150% between last year and this year, and 200% between the year before and 2018. We’ve proven with those turnover performances that we can achieve very strong growth in what might be described as a deceleration [in the market]. I just need to win a little bit, gain just a few percent of customers [from rival brands] and we [will] grow another 150 to 200% next year.”
The sponsorship of Team Bahrain McLaren is a chance for Barker to again raise brand-awareness through cycle sport, but this time on a much larger scale.
“I am brave,” he offered, “almost a little bit too brave sometimes, but I’m determined, and I do love a challenge.”
