“It’s a huge, crushing wave of relief”: David Millar says CHPT3’s revival was “unexpected” as cycling clothing brand rescued by Factor CEO after “gutting failure” of liquidation

CHPT3, the cycling clothing brand founded by former pro racer David Millar, has been revived, after Factor CEO Rob Gitelis stepped in to save the company from liquidation, a move Millar has described as a “huge, crushing wave of relief”.

In December, it was reported that CHPT3, founded in 2015 by former Garmin rider Millar following his retirement from professional cycling the previous year, had entered voluntary liquidation and ceased trading with immediate effect, a process the 48-year-old described to the road.cc Podcast in February as “death by a thousand cuts”.

The brand’s collapse came just three months after the launch of its Transit 2.0 shoe, a £200 urban commuter shoe which aimed to combine the “power of a pro cycling shoe and the comfort of a luxury sneaker” and was brought to life by ex-Adidas designer James Carnes.

Following CHPT3’s demise, at the end of January Millar was appointed as brand director of Factor, after the premium bike manufacturer’s CEO Rob Gitelis “called me up out of the blue” and offered him a role at the company’s Girona base.

And on Thursday evening, Millar announced in an email that CHPT3 is set to return, after Gitelis “stepped in and rescued” the clothing brand in February – a decision the retired British pro says was “very much done from the heart”, with little by way of a strategic business plan in place.

“It was unexpected,” Millar tells road.cc on Friday, as he reflects on his new boss’s decision to revive CHPT3, over two months on from its plunge into liquidation.

“It was a bit like when you’re doing a time trial and you refuse to admit you’re not gonna win. And that was kind of what it was like with CHPT3. It was like ‘this is done now’, and there was a tiny part of me that was like surely it can’t be done.

“But Rob hired me the moment he heard I was shutting it down, which was amazing because he literally called me up the day after and said, ‘don’t worry, I’ll hire you’, and at the time he didn’t know what for really!

“And when it came to the absolute end game of effectively losing CHPT3 through administration, he stepped in and said, ‘look, I’ll get it’. And he did it without having any great strategy or anything like that – he knows what it’s like as he’s been there with Factor and had moments and he knows how much it means to him. So I think it was, it was very much done from the heart.”

Millar admits that his current role at Factor means there is currently no fully-fledged plan for the second coming of CHPT3, which he says will focus solely on selling the Transit 2.0 shoe through Priority Athletic, the brainchild of CHPT3 collaborators James Carnes and Mikkel Rasmussen, for the foreseeable future.

The company will also be connected to Factor through both Gitelis and his own role, but will operate as a separate brand in its own right, he points out. Millar, who is set to commentate on his final Tour de France for ITV4 in July, also notes that the relationship with folding bike manufacturer Brompton remains intact, though it is also unclear what that will look like in the future.

“Now we’ll let time settle, as all my focus is now on Factor,” he says. “But it sits there now. [Gitelis stepping in to save CHPT3] wasn’t even really done to be a public thing, it was just to effectively protect it, make sure it didn’t get into anyone else’s hands, and that the brand remained mine. And then we can decide in the future what to do with it.

“We’ve got the Transit shoes which we are enormously proud of, and we still have stock of those. So, we’re just going to focus on that in the short to medium term and chip away at that.

“It seems ridiculous that we wouldn’t tap into the Factor connection at some point and do some things, but we don’t know what those are yet. There’s so much going on at Factor. Rob and I are both just flat out, as is everybody in the company. So, there’s not much bandwidth to think of anything else.”

> “A bike race is complete madness”: David Millar on why cycling is “inherently dangerous”, the demise of CHPT3, and his new Factor role

Reflecting on what appeared to be the demise of his company in December, the 48-year-old tells road.cc: “It was gutting, and you’re filled with shame and failure, and thinking you’ve screwed up so much.

“And the irony was that the final product we made, the shoes, was the best thing we ever did. And it was like, goddammit, we’ve finally got something that we can be incredibly proud of, and we’re having to close shop.

“It’s strange actually, because I’d written it off. It was over, it was done, I gotta move on and find the positives from the journey, which I did at Factor, because I walked in and realised ‘holy crap, I’ve learned so much this past decade’. It’s been a very expensive MBA!

“I took it as a real positive, it wasn’t a waste, it was part of the rich tapestry of life, that I had to go on that journey to learn all these things.

“So when Rob stepped in and said, ‘look, you have put so much into this, it shouldn’t disappear’, it was just a huge crushing wave of relief in a way, because I suddenly realised how much it meant to me. CHPT3 means a huge amount to me. And I realised how much I had accomplished with it, though it had felt like a massive failure in the end.”

> “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

He continued: “To kind of have a bit of time and distance from it, and to take the learnings that I wasn’t able to apply at the end, to be more patient, to figure it out, and to do it differently this time.

“And when that next time is, I don’t know. But I’m continuing to learn a lot, because I’ve got a proper role within the industry now, with a brand that’s just on the up and up.

“I haven’t got the bandwidth to think about it at the moment, but I’m growing my arsenal to be able to do something with it in the future.

“But we have time now, we’re in no rush, and we can be more organic with it and focus on one thing. The shoes will sit there and do their thing, and I’ll spend some time and discuss with Rob what we’ll do in the future.”