Introducing our first featured shirt – the Daily Rider

If you’ve been wandering around our online store lately you probably noticed a category of shirts designated as Featured Shirts.

What we’ve done is created a place for our collaborative shirts to live. What does this mean? Well, a collaborative shirt is one that we helped build with the help of another local business that we really admire. To help kick off this series, we teamed with the wonderful cyclists over at The Bespoke Pedaler. We gave them full control over the shirt’s style and detailing.

And the result? An absolutely wonderful shirt that is truly one of a kind. Jointly, we decided to name it the Daily Rider in honor of it’s urban cyclist inspiration.

Now, you can find many of the shirt’s details on our website, but we wanted to go a bit deeper and really explain how this shirt came to be and go into more detail on the shirt’s unique styling.

Enter Emily Hogle and Rick Evans – the braintrust behind The Bespoke Pedaler, a retail shop in Denver geared towards the urban cyclist. We thought, who better to help us design a great looking business casual dress shirt that a guy can wear on his bike and then actually want to wear to the office after he arrives?

Here’s how the shirt turned out…

The fabric

Rick selected a versatile fabric that he could both dress up for the office with a great looking neck tie, but also one that he could roll the sleeves up and comfortably ease into happy hour. This chevron check is made in one of our finest cottons and comes in a medium weight. Perfect for layering under a cable knit sweater as you pedal into the office!

A subtle chambray contrast collar helps to ground the shirt and the dark buttons don’t overly call attention to themselves. It’s important that the details don’t clash with the bold red and black check pattern.

The cycling details

Firstly, you’ll notice a fun cycling contrast fabric on the cuffs. This is a real fun fabric that you’ll find nowhere else.

Secondly, Rick wanted to have a little more room in the shoulders for when he’s riding down on the drops or in an otherwise crouched position. BE founder Ron Wagner suggested an inverted box pleat to give him the room that he was seeking. And the great thing about this pleat is that it’s very subtle, especially so in this particular fabric. It almost blends in because of the check pattern. In contrast, if the fabric was a solid French blue, such a pleat would become more obvious.

Furthermore, the tail of the shirt is rounded. It’s a little subtle, but you can see in the image below that the shirt tail isn’t as pronounced, or for that matter, as long, as your typical dress shirt. Rick and Emily chose this style because Rick knew that he would often be wearing the shirt untucked and didn’t want to have a shirt tail so long that he may be sitting on it! However, we were careful to not cut the tail too short that it wouldn’t cover Rick’s back fully.

And just for good style…

Rick also had a couple other details he wanted to add to round out the shirt and ensure that it was truly one of a kind. He chose a corner cuff because of its contemporary style and side gussets on the side seams since he would be wearing the shirt untucked much of the time. It’s worth noting that these side gussets are an often overlooked aspect of many shirts. Nowadays, it’s becoming a bit of a giveaway of a custom shirt.

The contrast fabric on the collar and the placket is also a fun choice. The grey chambray really works well to complement the grey and black in the shirt fabric. A bright color, for instance, would clash with the strong red and black so a somewhat subdued grey was a great choice.

Wrap up

We had a great time designing this shirt with The Bespoke Pedaler and we couldn’t be happier with how it came out.

If you’re in the Denver area, swing by the Pedaler and see the real deal on display. And the shirt is available for purchase at the BE store (so long as the fabric is in stock!).

By Ryan Wagner