Northbound

Most cycling brands design for the podium and sell to commuters. Northbound wanted to skip the pretence: the clothes are for a wet Tuesday and an eleven-kilometre ride to an office where you have to look normal afterwards.

Four production methods, one mark

The mark had to be embroidered, screen printed, heat transferred, and cut in reflective vinyl. Each method has a different minimum feature size, and the smallest of them governs. We drew to the embroidery limit and everything else came for free.

That is why it is a shape rather than a wordmark. A wordmark at 4mm stitched is a smudge, and a smudge on a garment is worse than no mark at all.

Reflectivity as design, not safety theatre

The visible identity in daylight is quiet — a tonal shape on the chest. At night, under a headlight, the same shape lights up along with a band across the shoulders. It is the same graphic doing two jobs, which meant one placement to develop rather than a separate safety treatment bolted on.

The system in the factory

The deliverable that mattered was a placement grid: for any garment, where the mark goes, at what size, in which method, with the tolerances the factory actually works to. It is four pages. It has removed roughly a month of back-and-forth per collection.