Performance. Commitment.

There's a handful of bike industry companies out there that take these words to heart. They invest in their ideas. They invest in the quantification of these ideas. They move past mere invention with this quantification step and deliver innovation. Sure, they might make some mistakes along the way, but the commitment piece will eventually overcome these missteps - that's how science and a dialed in process works.

Lots of companies get lazy and figure invention is good enough. Well, invention isn't "good enough" when a company takes performance and commitment seriously.

What's the difference between invention and innovation? Innovation is applied invention. A good idea with no applicability in the real world isn't worth much, eh?. Innovation is where it's at.

One way to think about how a company might conduct business on a day to day basis is to think of it as a three step process (lifted from "e-myth revisited"):

Innovation
Quantification
Orchestration

Really, the only way to know if your innovation is truly an innovation is to quantify it's effects on the system - in this case, does it make a bike racer go faster, feel better, more comfortable, whatever the goal was??? The last step is to pull it off in the marketplace, ya know, orchestrate/execute things so that the customer is ultimately satisfied.

Anyway, one company that continues to demonstrate that it is committed to performance (and always has an eye on emotion/feel/"design") is Castelli. As I was walking the floor at Eurobike, I saw my buddy from Castelli, Soren (and Steve too! -> those guys are awesome, they were going to ride their bikes back to Italy from Friedrichshafen after the show, which is pretty cool if you ask me!).

Soren gave me something that they were working on for this coming year and also shared a little story about David Millar and his high praise for their new skinsuits of last year (which they custom made/developed based on his feedback). Well, Castelli is working on coming out with a lightweight jersey this year - it's pretty sick, actually (and that's not "sick" as in "bad" that'd be "sick" as in "gen-x sick"...)

Well, from a caveman perspective, the easiest way to make a light jersey is to take a page out of Faris Al-Sutan's (Former Ironman World Champion) book and go with the MAN-BRA:

yeah, using half as much material will definitely get you a lighter jersey, but then, yeah you'd have to wear something that made you look like this:

So, the guys at Castelli, in their ultimate wisdom, made a jersey that had the same coverage as a regular jersey - you know, kind of like this:

I'm sponsored by Castelli, to some extent, as the team I raced for this year (Jamba Juice/TaylorMade Golf) got a killer deal thanks to my teammate Dave at Castelli Custom here in the USA:

So, comparing size mediums for both of these light and standard weight jerseys, my scale said that Castelli saved around 70 grams with their lightweight construction. The std one weighed 154 grams, the lightweight one weighed 84 grams. This lightweight jersey fit a bit tighter than the std one, as you can see in the side shots above - not as many poofy wrinkles - this jersey isn't for the faint of heart (your "curves" will show through the thin material).

This jersey makes sense - I dont' know about you, but I'd rather save 70 grams on my jersey than my stem.

In the shots above, I have a vest and my cell phone in the back pockets - you can see some different sag going on back there, eh? The light jersey definitely had some "bounce" to the back pockets...

I think this is a real good demonstration by a company of going after some low-hanging fruit in the performance department. No other clothing company is going after road jersey design from both a weight and aerodynamics perspective withe the fervor of Castelli.

Good on ya, Castelli, for demonstrating:

Performance. Commitment.