I was riding out of town towards the trail, blissed out on the big purple-and-white Collegiate Peaks views ahead of me, when a gal in a pick-up truck pulled up alongside me.
“Hate to interrupt your ride,” she drawled, “but where’d you get them britches?”
Them britches were my swirly-patterned, multi-colored Shredly baggies. The attention they were drawing was exactly what creator Ashley Rankin had in mind when she thought up Shredly after a failed shopping attempt in 2010.
“All the mountain biking shorts out there had a terrible case of the B’s—black, boring, baggy—and to be honest, they looked like they were made for the boys,” she said.
With dual degrees in apparel design and production and business marketing, Rankin built on her idea for fun and functional riding apparel for ladies and completed a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012. That effort, coupled with the indispensable support of friends and family, allowed her to launch a line of stylish shorts, jerseys, knickers and leggings to the applause of adventurous ladies everywhere.
Although Shredly gear is engineered for mountain biking, its true beauty is that, like that the ladies who wear it, it performs just as well on-trail as it does scrambling over boulders, floating down rivers, surfing or just drinking beer by the campfire.
—Betsy Welch
