“I’ve rediscovered my love of cycling”: David Millar and James Carnes of CHPT3 on appealing to every cyclist and designing a commuter shoe you can wear with a suit… and down a Swiss mountain

If you’re a fan of nerdy technical chat about shoe design and the joy of riding a bike through town in a suit with a multiple grand tour stage winner, then you’re in for a treat on this special bonus episode of the road.cc Podcast.

Because, to mark the launch this week of the CHPT3’s Transit 2.0, we sat down with the brains behind the urban commuter shoe that aims to combine the “power of a pro cycling shoe and the comfort of a luxury sneaker” – pro cyclist-turned-commentator David Millar and ex-Adidas designer James Carnes – to discuss the inspiration behind the potentially revolutionary new cycling footwear, Millar’s rediscovered love for cycling, and whether you can wear the same shoe at the local nightclub, in a meeting at the office, and down a precipitous Swiss mountain.

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Finding a shoe you can cycle to work in and not click-clack around the office like Michael Flatley when you get there, or be forced to lug your civvie shoes around with you in a bag all day long, has long proven a headscratcher for commuter cyclists.

While many have tried and failed over the years to build the ultimate SPD-compatible commuter trainer – often veering towards being unwalkable off the bike or ditching the concept of clipping in altogether – the CHPT3 Transit 2.0, and its cleat-covering ‘microplate’, claims to be the “first of its kind engineered for riding in the city”… and walking comfortably around when you get there.

The shoe’s multipurpose approach stems from a broader desire to bust out of the niches the cycling industry often finds itself in, says CHPT3’s David Millar and James Carnes.

Millar, of course, was for most of his life firmly rooted in the pro cycling world, a stage winner at all three grand tours, including four at the Tour de France and five at the Vuelta a Espana, a confessed doper-turned-staunch anti-doping advocate, ITV4 commentator, and founder of cycling clothing band CHPT3, its vowel-less moniker derived from Millar’s view of retirement as the third chapter of a career previously divided into his pre and post-doping ban eras.

Carnes, meanwhile, is a self-confessed outsider to the often-closed world of cycling. A former global creative director and Head of Brand Strategy at Adidas, he used his decades worth of design experience in the world of sports to rethink the often confused, muddled world of urban cycling shoes, all the while helping a stodgy old former pro like Millar redefine what it means to be a cyclist and break out of his racing-focused bubble.

“What’s been really interesting over the past few years has been my rediscovery of my love of cycling,” Millar tells the road.cc Podcast, from an extremely Swiss-looking chalet nestled in the Alps in the middle of a family downhill mountain biking holiday – where he was testing out the new shoes in perhaps the most extreme environment possible.

“And that’s given a whole new impetus to what we want to do, which is to start to change people’s perception of all types of cycling.

“I found, and James in particular has helped me see this as he comes from outside cycling, that I was becoming blinkered from within the cycling world. It’s very easy to find yourself locked in and only think about people who are in your ‘area’.

“Whether it’s road cycling, mountain biking, or urban commuter cycling, it’s a really strange world, cycling, where every niche has its moat around it, and everyone stays very firmly within their island. And with CHPT3, we really wanted to start to bleed out of that and transfer across, not only those different ideas within cycling, but to start thinking of things outside it that we can bring in.”

James agrees: “Unlike running or football, or even yoga, cycling hadn’t really broken the barrier, through making a sport its own that’s very closed off to something everyone wants to be part of. But I kind of feel like cycling is doing that now.

“It’s exciting. Of course you get people saying it’s sacrilegious and you’re totally ruining cycling, but cycling is such an amazing thing… And for me, it’s all in. I could be riding a road bike, a Brompton, a mountain bike, or riding to work,” the American says.

“The joy of riding is something a lot of people are discovering, but there’s still not a proliferation of things you can own and wear that are really rooted in your entire daily life.”

So how did the idea for the Transit come about? And what problems did they encounter on the way while trying to design the ultimate urban commuter shoe?

A Brompton enthusiast who used the folding bike to propel himself around the Tour de France’s finish areas and to and from his hotel during his Julys in the commentary box, Millar soon became disgruntled with the downsides of cycling to work, especially when it came to his feet.

After coming to his “wit’s end” with the current urban commuter shoes on the market – including one particular popular urban shoe that gave him blisters just walking about at the Tour – Millar sent every pair of cycling shoes he owned to James, who promptly took them all apart to see what worked and what, frankly, didn’t.

“And James was looking at them and all and was like, ‘oh my God, this is so basic, what they’re doing’. And I was like ‘f*** yeah, it feels it’,” Millar says.

“I started taking all these shoes apart, with this brief – this summertime, Tour de France Brompton riding was a perfect microcosm of a brief for the bigger picture,” James adds.

“He was saying, I’m on the bike 20 per cent of the time, walking around 80 per cent of the time, I’m going up hills, I need power and to be able to go fast, but I also want to hop off my bike when I want to and I don’t want to change my shoes. Oh, and by the way, at the end of the day I might go to a press conference, where everyone is dressed up.

“And I was like, okay, no sweat, this doesn’t sound too hard!”

Faced with Millar’s extremely wide-ranging brief, Carnes noticed the same problem popping up, that cycling shoes – even ones supposedly built for urban commuting – were still too rooted in the cycling world of performance, leading him to completely reevaluate the build, design, and style of the shoe that ultimately, three years later, became the Transit 2.0.

Which leads us to the most important questions: Do they look cool? Are they suitable for cycling and walking about the office and town? How do they fare on a downhill mountain biking route in the Swiss Alps, or in the most inhospitable of British town centres? And most importantly, can you wear them with a suit?

“For me personally, the journey of watching James design and develop has been so eye opening,” Millar says. “And it’s genuinely the sneaker I could wear with a suit, or in jeans, or even downhill mountain biking – which is nuts, because that’s the dream shoe.”

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