Two community focus groups, ten months of development, three prototypes, and hundreds of miles of wear-testing later, for the first time ever—we have women's racing buns.
At Bandit, we have a saying, "it takes three to get to one." In other words, oftentimes we create three unique prototypes to find the one true winner. In this case, the process looked like this:
- Host a group of women at Bandit HQ who race in buns to discuss what they like, dislike, and wish they had
- Develop three prototypes based on the insights gleaned during the feedback session
- Put the prototypes to the test in everything from long runs to interval workouts, understand what's working and what's not
- Take the unanimous winner features and perfect the fit and construction
- Put the final samples to work at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials
- And finally, make a small batch of the finished product, bring it to the world...
The three prototypes we created had different pocketing construction and unique finishing at the leg opening—one bonded, one turn-back with elastic, one fully lined like a bathing suit. Fortunately, we had a head-start on the waistband height by way of a sharp point of view from the feedback group.
One thing we continue to hear from the community is that you can never have too many pockets. In our research, we could not find a racing bun out there that had storage for four gels, despite that being the average amount of gels a marathoner consumes during a race. Each of our prototypes had a minimum of four pockets.
The first finished version is here in a limited batch and so far, so good. If you pick up a pair, we encourage you to send us any and all feedback!
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