Les Rookies

My friend Matthieu Berthault and I love cycling. A lot.

But we felt that the industry was a little too performance-obsessed.

So in 2019, we decided to create Les Rookies. A place to share our thoughts, ideas, rides and findings, but also our failures, mistakes and unexpected clusterfucks.

We wanted to create a community gathering rookies and experienced cyclists around beautiful human adventures with one goal in mind: to inspire more people to get on bikes.

No competition. No performance. No racing. No judging. Just the simple pleasure of enjoying a bike ride. No matter what bike you ride, how fast you ride, how far you ride, or the clothes you wear.

Client
Personal project

Year
Started in 2019

Since 2019, we’ve seen our community organically grow beyond our expectations, which opened the doors to collaborations with beautiful humans and brands we admire: Strava, Komoot, Wahoo, Hutchinson Tires, Decathlon, Columbia, Julbo, Sea To Summit, Wilma, Odlo, Abus, Cycles Alex Singer, Tangente Atelier, etc.

We’ve also appeared in various press releases and talks:
Bikepacking.com, Urban Future, City Changers, or Strava.

We spend our time and energy imagining new and exciting ways to get people on bikes. Whether it’s a social ride, an inspiring weekend celebrating women in cycling, a carefully crafted film or a cheeky vlog, an interview, or simply our daily adventures shared on our Instagram.

With time, we realized how precious these projects were to our creative minds. Without anticipating it, we created a white canvas where we can play and explore creative fields we love like photography, typography, film-making, design, or even augmented reality. A veritable creative laboratory for our imagination.

See some of our projects below.

Selected projects

Urban Cycling for beginners

May 2019

Our very first project : a complete guide to anyone who would like to start commuting by bike after the lockdown. How to pick your bike, how to dress when it’s sunny, rainy or windy, how to carry things, how not to sweat, how to gear up your bike, etc. all these questions answered in our free to download 80 pages guide. Download the guide here.
Mont Ventous.tes

Since 2021

Mont Ventous.tes is a week-end co-organised with Wilma to bring people together and raise awarness about the needed evolution of inclusivity in cycling. Through this festive week-end, we organise talks, debates, projections, workshops and rides hoping to get always more women on bikes. The first edition held in June 2022 with 15 participants. The third edition held in May 2024, and the 100 spots available sold-out in an hour.
Franche-Comténentale

June 2020

Athletes ride the Transcontinental Race. Les Rookies ride La Franche-Comténentale. A bikepacking adventure that pays tribute to the infamous, long-distance race. A journey through the Vosges and Franche-Comté regions, in search for untouched nature, authentic encounters and careless fun. A journey encapsulated in a contemplative film, captured directly from our bikes. Discover the story and the film on Bikepacking.com.
Glou Glou Cycling Club

Since 2020

We want to gather cyclists together. ALL cyclists. Those who ride 6000€ carbon bikes, and those who occasionnaly commute on free-floating bikes. So we created the Glou Glou Cycling Club : a social ride gathering people for a very chill ride in Paris, before sharing beers at Pastel Cycles. In just three editions, we went from 10 people to more than 60.
AR Instagram filter

November 2020

With our community growing, we had more and more people asking us if they can buy our Les Rookies custom-made cycling cap. So while we try to earn enough YouTube-money to produce those hats for more people, we thought it would be a nice opportunity to explore the AR Instagram Filters feature. So we created an AR cycling-cap with our friend Camille Frairrot, and anyone can now at least wear our virtual cap in their Instagram stories.
Bloody Queen

April 2020

When Wilma asked us to support them for the launch of their world-first menstrual cycling-bib “Bloody Queen”, we couldn’t be more honoured and excited. Through this great yet challenging project, we imagined and produced all the launch assets, along with short films highlighting the product. Learn more here (in french).
The complete guide to bicycle tires

December 2021

700 x 23C, 650B, 127 TPI, 29”, tubeless ready, slick, grip or ETRTO 40-622. We must admit that when we buy new tires, we don’t always reeeaaaally understand the barbaric vocabulary above. So we partnered with Hutchinson to take advantage of their expertise and clarify it all for all the Rookies out there (and for us). After a visit of their factory near Montargis in France, we sat down with them and produced a complete guide downloadable for free on our website in French and in English.
Team Rookies

Since 2019

We are very grateful and excited to see that our project keeps gaining in visibility every month, resulting in increasing invitations to various events, races or trips. Unfortunately, we cannot show up to all of them, so we’ve founded Team Rookies. An informal crew made of people who accept to represent the Rookies Spirit at events we cannot attend.