Cycling used to have different rules. It didn't matter what you wore. What mattered was whether you could hold a wheel in a crosswinds, whether you could take your jacket off at 50 km per hour, whether you could descend on roads that were slick, whether you could stand out of the saddle without throwing your bike into the guy behind you.
And you earned your spot in the group by how you rode, not how you looked. But somewhere along the way, the rules changed. And one brand, they rewrote those rules for better or worse, more than anybody else.
This is the story of Panormal Studios. how cycling's coolest brand became cycling's biggest meme and what it tells us about the sport we all love. Let's rewind for a second.
Before cycling was about $300 jerseys and the photos you took while you're having your espresso. It was a craft. It was a culture of quiet mastery.
When I was racing in France, a word that I heard over and over again was lamettier. Michael Barry has a a book by the same title, Lamemetier. The craft, the apprenticeship.
You learned how to sit on a wheel. How to pull off that rain cape midpack. How to corner without changing your line.
And what you wore, absolutely nobody cared. Nobody commented. It was the code.
It was lowkey function over form. And then came this aesthetic revolution. It was Copenhagen in 2014.
Copenhagen is a city built on simplicity, symmetry, and quiet design brilliance. It's also a city of cyclists, not just commuters, but serious road riders, guys who know what they're doing. And amongst them was Carl Oscar Olsen.
But he wasn't just another weekend warrior. He was a fashion designer co-founder of Woodwood, a Scandinavian label for minimalist cuts and high-profile collaborations. They've done stuff with Nike, Adidas, Barber.
His clothes have been worn by artists, rappers, and taste makers across society. He understood something fundamental. Design isn't decoration.
It's not an afterthought. Design is an identity. It's storytelling.
It's the first signal you send to a stranger. And cycling he realized was sending all the wrong signals. That summer Olen he was training for Lamar out in France in the Alps.
You know the one who finishes up Alpawez. It's a legendary grand fond though with I think 5,000 meters of elevation. But he wasn't worried about the suffering that he was going to endure on those alpine passes.
He was worried about something else. The kit. Everything on the market looked like a reject from Formula 1 or NASCAR.
right? Shouting logos, neon panels, technical fabrics that treated every space like an advertising space. It was all too loud.
He would later say, "I didn't want to look like a cyclist. I just wanted something normal." That word would become important.
But in cycling, normal didn't exist. So, he decided to go and create it. With his friend Peter Lang, a business strategist with a background in consumer brands.
They commissioned 50 sets of jerseys and shorts, race cut, Italianmade, no team ma name on them. No sponsors, no gody fluorescent panels, just clean lines, monochrome colors. They weren't building a brand.
They were just building something for themselves for one race for one ride. But when they showed up for Lamar in that kit, something very strange happened. Other riders started noticing them.
They started staring at them. Even they started asking questions. Some even tried apparently to buy the kit off their backs.
The two Danes hadn't meant to make a statement, but they had made a statement and now it needed a name. And they found it in one of cycling's most controversial books, The Secret Race. I've had Tyler on the podcast, Tyler Hamilton, and he's a great guy.
But in that book and in that interview, he talks about the secret code of the EPO era, the early 2000s, when doping transformed the Pelaton into this high octane performance laboratory when a rider was climbing too well or he attacked too early in a race. When he was riding almost godlike, like a machine, other riders, they didn't directly accuse him of cheating, but they looked at each other and they muttered a phrase paranormal. The French for not normal.
It was a loaded phrase, loaded with implication. It meant the writer wasn't weak. The opposite.
It meant he was too good, too fast, enhanced. Olen had it printed on a Woodward t-shirt back in the day. Now it would become the name of the brand that would flip its meaning entirely.
Panormal Studios, a name that mocked the sports illusions, that nodded to its contradictions, that made irony part of its DNA. From day one, Panormal was built on contrast. a brand that wanted to elevate cycling by rejecting its visual traditions.
A fashion label disguised as a cycling company, a minimalist revolt in a maximalist sport. They didn't launch with a marketing campaign, a complicated funnel, no hype reel, no investor pitch deck, just a kit, a name, and a philosophy. Supple, sharp, and intentional.
But within 18 months, they had a waiting list. Within two years, they had a cult following. Panormal Studios wasn't trying to win over cycling's old guard.
It was building something. It was building the next generation. Panoral wasn't just attracting the new kind of cyclist.
It was attracting a entirely different type of people that didn't think of themselves as cyclists. Not in the traditional sense. The context I gave Lamemetier, they didn't know what that was.
These were designers, DJs, creatives, art directors, people who move through fashion, not just fitness. People who were learning to ride, not learning how to race or how to ride. People who didn't know how to hold a wheel, but knew exactly what to wear while they were getting dropped.
This was the shift. In the old code of cycling, your gear was earned. You started with the tools of a humble apprentice, and you got kit as you graduated.
Kit came second to ability. Style was invisible unless your legs proved you deserve to own that style. Panormal, it flipped that script completely.
You didn't need to earn that kit anymore. You just needed to be able to afford it. And for a generation fluent in visual branding, the message was irresistible.
Wearing Panormal Studios made you look like a cyclist, even if you weren't sure you were a cyclist yet. It flattened the hierarchy. Suddenly, the writer who had trained all winter, logging 20 to 30 hours every single week in brutal conditions, was indistinguishable from the creative director who bought Paranormal Studio Kit just for the aesthetic.
Nobody asked if you could descend fast. They asked where you got your jersey. Panorama Studios didn't just reject cycling culture.
It aestheticized it. It stripped away the old rituals and it left only the look. And nobody, not even the purists, could stop watching this transition.
By 2022, Panormal Studios had achieved something few cycling brands ever manage. They weren't just a brand people wore. They were a brand that people copied.
The color palettes, the typography, the photography style. It was everywhere from boutique startups to cheap knockoffs on Alibaba. Panorama Studios wasn't just influencing cycling culture.
It had become cycling fashion. But for Olen and Lang, the fashion was never the end point. They had built the brand on irony, minimalism, and this idea of outsider cool.
But now they wanted something which is a lot harder to fake. They wanted performance legitimacy. They wanted to be taken seriously not just by photographers or architects or by racers.
They wanted to infiltrate that old guard. They wanted to become part of that old establishment. So in 2022, Panorama Studios went allin.
They launched Mechanism Pro. This wasn't just new kit. It was a totally new claim.
We can hang with the world tour. Jerseys with bonded seams, super light bibs, proprietary fabrics developed in Italy, wind tunnel tested, aerrow profiling. They even went for compression mapping.
This wasn't your coffee shop kit. This was World Tour performance ready kit. The photos still looked like an art book, but the pitch it had changed.
The branding taglines were stuff like made for the hardest days on the bike. Built for speed, designed to disappear. The price was eyewatering.
It was like upwards of 350 euro for some jerseys and 400 plus for some bib shorts. It cost more than some people's front wheels. It was insane.
But the kit was actually legit. get your hands on any of that kit and there's no questioning the quality. The reviews praised its fit, its breathability, its comfort on long rides.
And on technical merit, it genuinely was good enough to be ridden in the world tour. And that's actually where Panorama Studios wanted to be. Behind the scenes, they'd made a push for the world tour.
Meetings were held, proposals were sent, contracts were even drafted. I'm led to believe the goal was clear. Get a world tour team into Panormal Kit.
not just to sell more jerseys, but to complete the story arc from outsider cool to insider elite. But unfortunately for them, the pelaton didn't bite. No team signed.
No grand tours grandpar saw Panormal Studios on the start line. And in January 2024, the brand quietly confirmed what insiders already suspected. We failed to reach an agreement.
No explanation, no apology, just silence. Panormal had tried to enter the most exclusive room in cycling and the door stayed shut. Too expensive, maybe.
Too aesthetic, possibly. Too not normal? Yeah, almost certainly.
Whatever the reason, the message from the pros was clear. Looking the part wasn't enough anymore. The world tour rejection should have been a setback.
Instead, it became something different. It became a pivot. If the paved corridors of professional cycling were closed, there was another road.
It the surface was a little bit looser. It was a little bit dirtier and it was a hell of a lot less regulated. Gravel cycling.
Gravel, if you remember, had absolutely exploded during the pandemic period. A scene that promised freedom over structure, where amateurs lined up beside pro riders at races like Unbound, where image still mattered. It was the perfect fit for Panormal Studios.
And in 2023, they announced the next move, PA Racing, a fully supported gravel team. Not a sponsorship, a full team built built from the ground up. They didn't buy their way into legitimacy with this gravel team.
They designed their way into it. PA Racing wasn't an Instagram collective. This was a serious team, a serious roster, and it included real hitters like Amity Rockwell.
She was a former Unbound gravel winner and Carol Minion, a rising force in the European gravel circuit. Support staff included swanurs, mechanics, logistics managers, the race day service. It rivaled world tour teams with a fleet of custom cars, BMWs, I think they were to prove it at Unbound, Tracka, Gravel Worlds.
They weren't just showing up, they were winning. In 2024, Minion won both Tracka and Unbound, two of the biggest races in the gravel calendar. The image and the results were finally in sync.
For the first time, Panormal Studios had done what no meme could dismiss. They'd earned their spot on the top step of the podium. And yet, something still felt off.
The brand entered gravel to prove it was serious. But its reputation followed it. Panoral racing kits were absolutely pristine, sometimes too pristine.
Photoshoots blurred the line between camp and campaign launch. more of that kind of horizon staring than the head down suffering we're accustomed to from road cycling. The image was still perfect and maybe that was the problem.
Maybe it was too perfect in a discipline that prided itself on messiness that was countercultural. Panoral still looked like it was a dress rehearsal for a gallery opening. Even the race winds couldn't fully shake this image because gravel cycling it's not about performance.
It's about culture and culture notices intent. And here's the irony. While Panormal was finally building credibility in gravel, its original customer base, the roadies, the style conscious weekend warriors had already started to drift away.
The very people who built the brand's customer base, who wore that first generation charcoal kit in silence, were watching their once underground signal becoming obvious. Worn by everyone, mocked by many, sold in more and more cities across the world. What started out as a kit that kind of whispered to you now seemed like it was shouting and cycling as always was looking for the next quiet thing.
It didn't happen overnight. There was no big scandal as we've seen with other brands. There was no product recall.
There was no offensive tweet. Just a shift. It was supple at first then unmistakable.
Panorama Studios once the height of cycling cool had become something else entirely. It become the punchline. It started online.
Like if you scan the Reddit forums, you'll see some of this stuff. Like there was long threads on how do you ride in paranormal kit without looking like a poser. Then came the Tik Toks skits showing riders waking up sipping oat milk lattes from overpriced coffee machines pulling on 400 kits for a 20 kometer coffee spin where they're stopping taking selfies on the way.
Instagram meme accounts had also began stitched together parody campaigns like this moody black and white photos with captions that were like so cheesy like in the silence between suffering and espresso we find ourselves the style that Panormal had perfected the distant gazes the halfzip jerseys the writers alone in misty forests that was now been copy pasted but with complete irony. The mood boards had now become meme boards. It wasn't just internet culture turning.
It was also real riders turning because at coffee shops when you stopped for a brew mid ride, the jokes I noticed started to land a little bit closer to home. Guys will be like, "Nice kit. Do you race?
" And the response might be something like, "Uh, no, but at least I look cool when I'm getting dropped." A quick word from today's sponsor. A few years ago, I came out of my local coffee shop after a long winter spin to find my cafe lock on the ground, sliced clean in half.
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All that information is in the description below. The kit still looked amazing. Too good almost.
The aesthetic had become so polished, so stylized that it demanded the kind of performance that most people couldn't back up. And that was the new tension that we seen. Panorama Studios made you look like a pro.
But if you didn't ride like one, it showed. Cyclists who once wore the kit proudly now started to feel self-conscious wearing the kit. Because the joke wasn't just about the brand anymore.
The joke was about you. The brand didn't help this case. Rather than adapt, it doubled down.
Campaigns got even more abstract to the point I'd be scratching my head looking at them some days. Photos with no bikes, just shadows and cheekbones. And the product names, they were like a French philosopher came up with them.
Solitude, escapism, mechanism pro. Each sounding less cycling gear and more like a conceptual art piece. The copy became almost poetic as well, like in the space between motion and stillness, we find clarity.
The cycling forums, typically sharp, just rip this nonsense apart and replied with, "In the space between my wallet and bankruptcy, I find paranormal studios." Even the loyalists began to wonder, "Was this brand still about riding or had it drifted into something totally different, something disconnected from the sport?" And this is the part of the hype cycle that nobody likes to talk about.
The moment when a brand gets so good at branding that it can no longer be taken seriously. Panorama Studios had been built its empire on design precision. But in doing so, it had created a persona that couldn't laugh at itself.
And that's fatal in a sport where humility earned through suffering is everything. Cycling at its core is about looking rough. Salt stained faces, sweat drenched jerseys.
Like in my recent attack, I had gel exploded all over my hammerhead bike computer. Jersey pockets that are bulging stuff full of rappers and discarded banana peels. Panoras Studios is about looking perfect.
And perfection, ironically, is super easy to mock because nothing breaks faster than an image that's built on strict seriousness. In 2024, the memes didn't matter anymore. The internet could laugh, but Panormal Studios was winning an entirely different game.
Because while the cycling world debated whether the kit was too expensive, too aesthetic, or just too much, fashion world had already made its move. That spring, Panormal Studio sold a significant stake to Archive SRL, a Milanbased investment firm backed by the Rufini family, the same family behind Monontlair, a $3 billion per year luxury empire. This wasn't a cycling play.
This was a fashion acquisition, and it changed absolutely everything. The press release was clinical. We're excited to support Panormal Studios in its next phase of international growth.
But the subtext was loud. Cycling was no longer the destination. It was just the launchpad.
With the Monontlair money behind them, Panormal didn't need approval from the bike forums or cycling podcasts anymore. They had access to a far bigger, richer audience. One that didn't care about your functional threshold power or what tire pressure to ride on a gravel spin.
one that cared about look, not legitimacy. The pivot was fast and it was unmistakable. New hires came from the fashion world, not the sports world.
Retail expansion shifted from cycling cities to fashion capitals. Seasonal drops became full lookbooks. Not just jerseys, but sneakers, puffers, 300 euro cotton caps.
The photography changed. No more solo riders in the fog. now runway models in studio lighting wearing kit with no intention of ever sweating in it.
In January 2025, Panormal debuted a pity uno, the most important men's wear show in the world. They showed 30 looks. Only five were cycling kit.
The rest offra hoodies, bombers, tailored joggers, minimalist trainers, all branded with the quiet confidence of a label that knew exactly what it was doing. front row buyers from fashion houses, editors from GQ, stylists from Milan and Tokyo, absent anybody whatsoever from the cycling media. Panoral wasn't pretending anymore.
This wasn't about racing or riding. It was about lifestyle. Founder Carl Olen sums it up almost casually in an interview with Vogue.
Cycling is just one expression of our design philosophy. It was a clean break, a quiet goodbye to the culture that built them. And honestly, it made sense.
Panormal had always treated cycling like a canvas. Now they just decided to hang that canvas on a different gallery wall. But for the community, for the real riders, the early adopters, this shift, it really felt like a betrayal.
This was a brand that used to lead 7 a.m. rides that promised not to grow too fast that told you cycling was special.
Now it was selling €450 sneakers to people who didn't even own bikes. Panoral hadn't crashed. It hadn't been cancelled.
It hadn't even declined. It had simply moved on. And the group ride, the riders, we were left behind in Copenhagen, where it all began.
The Saturday ICC rides, which once drew crowds of 200 people or more, designers, racers, photographers, climbers, city guys with day jobs and shaved legs. By late 2024, maybe a dozen riders showing up at these rides. The vibe was totally different.
The energy gone. Just the sound of cleats on concrete floor and an espresso machine echoing in an empty storefront. What started as a cult was now just another brand.
International Cycling Club once the heartbeat of Panormal's community strategy. It was now a ghost. Nobody killed it.
It just drifted. The WhatsApp groups fell quiet. The Straa pages stopped updating.
The brand didn't post about rides anymore. They posted about drops. For the early adopters, it was like watching a band sell out.
and not in a cliche punk rock way, but in a quiet disappointing way that makes you realize you're just don't they don't see you anymore. They weren't talking to the writers. They were talking now to customers.
And the people who once evangelized the brand, the ones who pre-ordered that first charcoal jersey in 2015, who stood outside the store at 6:55 a.m. on a rain soaked morning to go for the group spin, who treated Panormal Studios like a secret handshake.
Well, they left. They didn't leave angrily. They just went elsewhere.
They went to MAP, the Australian brand still rooted in performance, to Cafe Dealista, which never lost that French weirdness, to Albian, to Velocio, to Isidor, to smaller brands with slower ambitions. There was no coup, no backlash, just an exodus of taste. The kind you don't notice until the new guy shows up at the group ride wearing the Panormal kit and he gets some funny looks.
Panormal tried to fill that vacuum. They hired new ambassadors, not racers, not lifers, fashion photographers who rode on the weekends, DJs who talked about movement as medicine, models whose captions on their Instagram read like ad copy. They posted group ride photos, but they looked like campaign shots.
They tagged athletes who didn't know how to shift gears from the big ring to the small ring. The brand didn't collapse. It kept going.
They opened more stores. They dropped more collections. The numbers on paper, it all looks fine.
But something more important was gone. authenticity and in cycling. That's the one currency that you can't buy back.
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com/roadman. And I've dropped the link and the code in the show notes down below. In cycling style used to be earned.
It was silent. It was tribal. It was understood.
You didn't talk about it. You demonstrated it. The way you rode in a paseline, the way you handled the descent in the rain, the way you didn't half wheel, the way you folded your jacket back up on the fly.
You didn't show up looking pro. You became pro over years of quiet apprenticeship of getting dropped, of getting back on, of learning the code. And for decades, that was cycling's unwritten contract.
Respect the craft and you'll be welcomed. Panormal Studios broke that. Maybe not even intentionally, but undeniably because they offered something new.
the appearance of belonging without the apprenticeship. Suddenly, you could look like a lifer on day one. Buy the right jersey, shoot the right photo, caption it with the right quote, and the door was open.
It was cycling as aesthetic, cycling as a mood board, cycling as an identity, purchasable, and prepackaged. And it worked because in a world of Instagram influencers, stories, and curated Straa posts, image now is performance. Panormal didn't invent that shift, but it did embody it.
and it embodied it perfectly, dangerously, and beautifully. That's what this story is really about. Not just a brand, but a cultural moment.
Panorama Studios marked the point where cycling stopped being just a sport and started becoming a lifestyle. They were the bridge between suffering and style, between riding and looking like you could ride. And like all bridges, they now stand between two worlds.
On one side, we have the old guard who still believe you earn your place in the Pelaton. on the other this new wave of riders who see cycling as self-expression, not just self-denial. And both are real, both are valid, but they speak very different languages.
And somewhere along the way, the rules changed. Panorama Studios didn't just change the jerseys. They changed what it meant to be a cyclist.
Today, Panorama Studios is still here, bigger than ever. Stores and soul, Tokyo, Los Angeles, London, runways in Milan, investors in their corner. They've made it.
By all objective measures, they've made it. The jerseys sell out. The off bike line is expanding.
The photo shoots are sharper than ever. And on paper, the brand is thriving. But something has shifted.
They don't talk about rides as frequently anymore. They talk about collections. The vocab has changed.
They don't talk about the road. They talk about the runway. And maybe that's fine.
Maybe I'm just being romantic about this. Maybe that was always the plan. Maybe they never promised to stay in the bunch.
But for cycling, the sports, the culture, the craft. Panormal Studios will always be more than just a brand. They were a mirror.
They were reflecting a moment that everything changed. When the group ride stopped checking your legs and they started checking your kit. When suffering stopped being a badge and started being an accessory.
When cycling for better or worse became something you could buy into. Panorama Studios didn't ruin cycling. They revealed what it was becoming.
They built a brand that felt like the future and then reminded us of what we'd left behind. Because in a sport built on hardship, there's one thing you can't fake. Respect.
Panorama Studios. Panorama Studios may have changed what it means to look like a cyclist. But they've also reminded us of what it takes to be one.
And out there, past the filters, past the limited drops, past the memes, the ride still begins the exact same way as it always did. Please click silence. It's time to roll.
Thanks for watching, folks. If you haven't checked out the Rafa video which we shot last week monitoring the rise and fall of Rafa, that is a really interesting look into the brand as well. That's up here.
You should go and check it out. And if you're enjoying this type of content, let me know down below. Do you ride Panormal?
Would you ride it again? Let us know in the comments. And don't forget to subscribe to the channel.
See you next day. This episode today has been supported by Bickmo Cycle Insurance. Ensure your ride with Bickmo today and they'll donate£10 to trash free trails to support their work in protecting our planet.
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