Chelsea Camarata loved mountain biking, but there was one problem.
“I couldn’t find anything I wanted to wear,” Camarata said of the mountain biking clothing she saw for sale. “It was shrink and pink versions of men’s stuff with terrible fits, terrible fabrics.”
In those days, Terry Precision Bicycles for Women was already making women’s biking apparel. The company, founded by Georgena Terry in Rochester, New York, in 1985, introduced biking apparel for women in 1991. In 2009, Elisabeth Robert, founder of Vermont Teddy Bear, acquired a majority interest. The next year, the company moved to Burlington.
Camarata said she gets asked about Terry a lot. But Terry specialized in road bikes.
Mountain biking apparel is different from road biking apparel, Camarata said. It is looser and less padded, she wrote in her blog. Mountain bikers typically wear a looser short over the padded chamois short.
“It would be like doing yoga wearing jeans; you’re just going to have a bad experience,” Camarata wrote in her blog.
When she set out to make her own mountain biking clothes in 2013, Camarata did not have a lot of sewing skills, but she did remember some things from home economics classes in high school.
With help from friends with some fashion background, she learned to make patterns and prototypes and to find fabrics.
She started by wearing the clothes she made on the trail.
She worked on patterns for four years, and then, in 2017, she raised $5,114 in a Kickstarter campaign fo fund the production of two styles of jerseys for her fledgling company, Kaden Apparel.
For the last two years, she has been working with a women-owned factory in Minnesota. She has expanded to shorts, three-quarter-sleeve jerseys, and some accessories.
It’s still a pretty small business. She is the only employee, designing and making patterns and prototypes in her home in Burlington’s Old North End. Kaden Apparel is listed by the Vermont Women’s Fund as a woman-owned business. Camarata said the business is generating less than $50,000 a year, so she has not quit her day job — marketing for a software company.
But she is exporting to Canada, and she started producing a maternity chamois short.
“That’s been really, really popular,” Camarata said. “Pregnant women that want to keep cycling, there’s really not much out there for them.”
She has received orders for the maternity chamois shorts from as far away as Switzerland and Ireland.
To help her with exports, she applied to the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development for several federal STEP grants. She used the money to attend the Outdoor Retailer trade show in Denver in 2019 and to make her website more export-friendly by allowing her to print out customs documents when she is fulfilling orders. She also used the grants for photo and video shoots and social media advertising.
She does not have her own store, but said she sells through a couple of bicycle shops so far, including Hitchhiker Bike Shop in Stowe.
“I really like that it’s a female-owned local Vermont company and I think there’s a lot of people now that are looking for that,” said George Merrill, the shop’s owner. “It does pretty well for me here.”
Merrill said women are often neglected in bike shops. He tries to offset that by offering equal amounts of clothing for men and women.
“A lot of women’s apparel is also pink or floral or, for lack of a better word, girly designs,” Merrill said. “Kaden does a nice job with more neutral colors and stuff that I think a lot of mountain bikers tend to like.”
He cited the fabric, which he said had “a nice, soft feel to it, not that scratchy, meshy jersey material we’re all used to.”
Camarata said she uses high-quality polyester and spandex blends. She has been importing chamois pads, butt pads for shorts, from Italy, and that has come with challenges.
“Shipping costs are just outrageous,” she said.
Mostly, she sells online, though she said some people pick up the clothes at her house.
“It’s really hard to get bike shops to bring on a new brand,” Camarata said.
She recently took time off from mountain biking to have a baby, but said she will get back to it “ASAP.”
