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BikeBiz catches up with Jos and Vanessa Ruiterman, founders of Megmeister
Can you give us a little background on Megmeister?
Megmeister was created five years ago with a very simple premise in mind: to create the best performance sportswear available. We started in our mission with the creation of baselayers. We defined ‘being the best’ across three key areas. Namely, comfort, fit and performance. As such, our DRYNAMO baselayers are completely seamfree and created out of one piece of material making them extremely comfortable to wear.
We create our baselayers using a special yarn that does not trap bacteria so that our garments don’t need to be washed after every use. Through advanced knitting techniques, we are also able to create ventilation zones in all the right places to ensure that sweat gets pushed from the inside of the garment to the outside while keeping the skin dry, which stops the wearer from getting cold.
The majority of other baselayers cannot achieve the level of breathability that we are able to with our DRYNAMO yarn as many other fibres don’t allow the body to breathe properly, blocking the body’s normal perspiration process altogether or, at best, allowing it to function for a limited period only.
Megmeister recently partnered with adidas Outdoor – how did this come about?
Adidas approached us last year with the request for a collaboration which was a really exciting proposition. The brand had tested our baselayers for themselves along with a lot of other baselayers from various brands. Our baselayers and yarn technologies and innovative design impressed the team and they asked if we would be interested in producing baselayers featuring our DRYNAMO technology for them, which we agreed to.
We suggested that we could take our partnership a step further and asked if they were interested in collaborating on an innovative sustainable performance baselayer. This was the beginning of an exciting journey that has so far resulted in the creation of the DRYNAMO Merino Eco LS Crew Baselayer which won a gold award at ISPO award this year.
What industry innovations are exciting you at the moment?
Through the adidas collaboration, we were able to take our baselayer creation to the next level. adidas and Megmeister were very keen to raise the bar and create what we called an ‘Uber green’ baselayer which is 96% biodegradable at the end of life. We hope it will become the sustainability benchmark for the whole industry in due course.
We wanted to create a baselayer that was extremely high-performance but also a super sustainable one. Through our partnership with adidas, we were able to connect with yarn specialists from around the world and we identified an exciting new yarn that would make our garment 96% biodegradable. Why not 100% you might wonder? We have not been able to find biodegradable elastane but we have used regenerated elastan which is special in its own right and does not use virgin material. We believe we all have a responsibility to stop landfill and our new baselayer marks a very big step in principle towards that goal.
What are your plans for 2021 and beyond?
We will continue on our sustainability path, there are so many opportunities to create sustainable performance sportswear. While initially our sustainability initiatives were hampered by large production quantities, the collaboration with adidas has meant that we are now able to meet these production minimum quantities which allows us to create what is right, not just what is financially possible.
2021 is an exciting year for us and we plan to launch a new bib short pad technology, named 3D WAS system which has been developed in-house by the research and development team at Megmeister over the past two years. Initially, 3D WAS system will feature in a range of new bib shorts to be launched this summer and all the intensive athlete and scientific testing to date suggest it will be a comfort game-changer for cyclists.
