We paid Restrap’s founder a visit at his Leeds factory to talk bikepacking, British manufacturing, and why he won’t be ditching his 12-year-old VW Polo any time soon…
25th October 2025 | Interview by Joly Braime | Pictures by Joly Braime/Restrap
‘Some of the guys who work at the factory I’ve known from my BMX days. I met them at the skate park when I was thirteen or fourteen…’
When people try and tell you British manufacturing is on its uppers, you can point them towards one of our favourite brands, Restrap. Specialising in bikepacking gear and cycling accessories, their factory on Kirkstall Road in Leeds employs around 35 skilled production staff including cutters, packers and machinists, plus another 10 or so bods in the office.
The man behind the brand is 34-year-old Nathan Hughes, who started the company as a teenager in 2010. It’s a great origin story – the Yorkshire lad with a sewing machine in a back bedroom – but these days Restrap has grown well beyond a cottage outfit. The real narrative is one of canny business decisions, a love for the nuts and bolts of manufacturing, and a collective fixation on pedal-powered adventure.
Restrap founder Nathan Hughes outside the brand’s factory in Leeds.
By riders, for riders
As Nathan and his colleagues show us around the factory – from the initial laser etching through the busy machinists’ department and onto the finishing and packing teams – we realise just how many bases Restrap has to cover in order to compete with overseas manufacturers. Their production needs to be ruthlessly efficient, but the quality has to be flawless too – and fundamentally they need to be making the gear people want at a price point they can afford.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ says Nathan, ‘it gets harder and harder – but it's part of the love of the business. We like making stuff.’
It helps that many of the workforce are bike-mad themselves, regularly riding out together and putting their own products through the wringer. Working here in some capacity or other are racers, bikepackers, freelance cycling journalists, mountain bikers and everything in-between. Pinned bones, knackered knees and battle-scarred bags tell stories of adventures from local Yorkshire pub circuits to Asian epics – and that’s before you get onto the wider pool of riders who pedal thousands of miles all over the world with Restrap kit on their bikes.
‘Everyone geeks out a bit about gear,’ admits Nathan, ‘but when you’re on the trip, if it’s good gear, you don’t notice it.’
It’s all in the details: close-up of a key Restrap component, the Fidlock magnetic buckle system.
A scrappy start
Nathan’s first product – and one that the company still produces today – was pedal straps made from reclaimed seatbelt fabric.
Having fallen in love with BMX riding at 10 or 11 years old, Nathan moved into fixed-gear bikes as a teenager. He soon found himself making new friends on the Leeds fixed-gear scene – some of whom still work in the office at Restrap – and selling the pedal straps that he stitched together on a sewing machine at home.
Back then, Nathan sourced his raw materials from Bradford scrapyards, paying the scrappies 50p a seatbelt. The catch was that they made him fetch the belts himself.
The very first Restrap product - upcycled pedal straps made from car seatbelts.
‘I had to clamber up in the cars and I had a little seatbelt cutter to cut them out. They’d always be mouldy, and I’d wash them in my mum’s washing machine – which she loved, obviously.
‘I didn’t even drive at the time. I used to ring my mates and be like, I need a scrapyard run again – I had them driving me around with bin bags of seatbelts.’
As demand for pedal straps ramped up, the limitations of Nathan's wombling approach became apparent.
‘It got to a point where I was going around every week and they'd be like, “We haven’t had any new cars since you were last here”.’
Nathan’s original sewing machine.
His eventual solution was to contact a company that made seatbelts for the air industry and offer to buy up their off-cuts. Rather more convenient than monkeying around in scrapyards with a Stanley knife – not to mention safer.
‘Luckily I’ve still got my thumbs. Almost came off one time…’
Learning on the fly
Nathan’s business education has been fairly unconventional, partly because he started out so young. While other entrepreneurs might have gone to university or cut their teeth working for someone else, he set up Restrap at 18 and has run the company ever since.
'This has been my entire adult career,’ he says. ‘I spent a lot of my twenties basically emailing other factories and going, I don’t know what I’m doing – can I come and look at your factory?’
To his delight, he found other manufacturers were surprisingly supportive.
‘A lot of these people, they were maybe older, they were getting towards the end of their careers, and they were actually quite willing to show someone younger. They were like, someone's actually excited about manufacturing!’
Where so many companies now design in the UK then manufacture in Asia, it’s not an idea that’s ever appealed to Nathan.
‘It’s the making of stuff that’s really our passion. Being on the shop floor, making products… I don’t want to just sit there in an office all day. The factory is where all the exciting stuff happens.’
“Where all the exciting stuff happens…” the sewing department on the shop floor at Restrap HQ in Leeds.
Moving into bikepacking
These days Restrap is best known for bikepacking gear – and to some extent their product lines have evolved with Nathan’s own riding. The company might have been born out of the fixed-gear scene, but Nathan confesses wistfully that his knees can’t keep up with fixed-gear riding these days.
‘Like most hobbies, it progresses, doesn’t it? I go through stages, so I’ll have a year or two on the road bike and I’m super excited about that, then I get a bit bored of riding on the same road and I’ll go onto the gravel bike for a bit and then the mountain bike… and before I know it, I’ve sort of looped back around.’
The company’s first foray into bikepacking kit was a case in point. At the time, Restrap was already making messenger bags and backpacks, and Nathan and his colleagues started to think about luggage options that would attach to the bike itself.
‘I’d bought a mountain bike maybe six months earlier and me and a few mates Googled “the hardest mountain bike route in Europe” – which it said was the Tour de Mont Blanc. And because we’d been mountain biking for a whole six months, we obviously thought we were experts.’
Nathan produced an experimental set of bikepacking bags, and they set out to put the gear – and themselves – through their paces.
‘It was probably the hardest five days of my life. Basically just hike-a-biking about 90% of the trip and sleeping in a bivy bag.’
Finishing and packing one of the brand’s bikepacking bags.
Testing, testing…
The friends did at least return from the Alps with plenty of ideas about how to refine the bag designs. And in fact, this kind of rigorous testing is central to the way they work at Restrap. From the ‘design dungeon’ where product designers Danny and Finn tinker with new products and run up prototypes, anything new will be tested way beyond the limits of its intended use.
‘A lot of the products here, we’re sending them out with people doing ultras every week,’ explains Nathan. ‘That’s thousands of miles. Most customers aren’t doing that, but that’s our guarantee.’
It means they can place a huge amount of confidence in their kit.
‘Our return rate is insanely small – we’re like 0.2 of a per cent. I don’t know another company that has such low returns. We’ve got distributors that sell three- to five-thousand products and they have ten items at the end of the year that they need warranty on.’
A well-used Restrap bag in for repair.
A versatile workforce
A quirk of the Restrap factory is that the machinists aren’t pieceworkers doing the same task over and over again. Anyone joining the company will eventually learn to make pretty much any product. Working in teams of three to four people, they decide among themselves who does what, varying the jobs to keep it interesting.
‘We sit here and design the products,’ explains Nathan, ‘but they have to make hundreds and sometimes thousands of them – the hard bit is to come in and do that every day.’
Restrap machinist at work.
Before a product gets shipped out, the person who’s made it attaches a little card with their name on it – and machinists sometimes get personal feedback from customers.
‘I think the big thing for us is having ownership over your work,’ says Nathan, gesturing towards the factory floor. ‘It’s a nice thing for the customer, but I think it’s nicer for those guys in there. They see a picture on Instagram and it’s their name on the products.’
Working smarter
Just as feedback from riders refines the products, so feedback from the workforce refines the processes. As production manager Chris tells us during our tour of the factory,
‘If we can knock seconds off something, over 3,000 bags that adds up.’
Restrap production manager, Chris.
Tweaks like these are how Restrap stays in the game. Individual machinists optimise their own workstations (‘It’s almost like a bike’, observes one staff member), and the company has to invest in the best equipment to keep ahead. Four years ago, for example, they brought in new laser cutters that helped the cutting department work three times faster.
‘We have the latest machines’, says Nathan. ‘We have automation where there can be automation because that’s the only way we can compete. Labour is relatively expensive in the UK but the guys are very clever at figuring out a way where instead of that product taking ten hours, it takes six.’
Cutting edge - sophisticated laser cutting machines have helped Restrap’s cutting department work up to three times faster.
The durability conundrum
The trouble with designing such bombproof products is that people don’t need to replace them – especially since Restrap offers an excellent repair service. Nathan’s refreshingly honest about one of the big contradictions of the outdoor industry.
‘I think that’s the hard thing being in business. We think the designs are good enough. We don’t want to change them every year to be like, here’s a new one. But at the end of the day you are in business. You have to develop, make new stuff, there’s people to pay.’
In Restrap’s case, a big part of that is keeping an eye on trends and looking for new niches. For example, they realised that some riders were willing to pay a premium for ultralight versions of their bikepacking bags, so they developed a dedicated race range to meet this demand.
One of Restrap’s bikepacking best-sellers: the waterproof rolltop bar bag.
Similarly, they’ve been watching the rise of ‘credit card touring’ – where bikepackers cut right back on camping gear and pay more for food and accommodation along the way.
‘In some ways it’s got a little bit easier, and I suppose that’s why the trend of bikepacking has grown,’ says Nathan. ‘You can fit your kit in a saddle pack now.’
Nimble product development is where a UK-based manufacturing business like Restrap really comes into its own. They can design products fast and manufacture them in whatever quantities they need. If they try something new and it doesn’t sell, they’re not left with a shipping container’s worth of dud products.
‘We can theoretically go from design to shelves in a matter of weeks,’ explains comms manager, Tom, ‘though we try not to do it that fast!’
Growing at the right pace
Nathan might once have been the lad with a bin bag full of mouldy seatbelts in the back of his mate’s car, but that was a long time ago now. Restrap is still here – and thriving – because he’s played a shrewd game for fifteen years. He’s invested in people, technology and product development, but he’s been patient too. As one colleague tells us:
‘Nathan’s always wanted sustainable growth. We’ve never had those massive leaps with external investors – and I think that’s why we’ve survived.’
Perhaps it’s also because the team at Restrap are more bothered about getting to do something they love than they are about making stacks of money fast. There are no shiny new Defenders in the car park here, and Nathan’s 12-year-old Volkswagen Polo with its one-litre engine is among the scruffier specimens on display.
‘It’s dinted up and my wife’s like, “We really need to get a new car” – but then it’ll be too nice and I’ll have to stress about it and look after it. I like not having a lot of things.’
If the material stuff doesn’t matter so much for the gang at Restrap, then some of the other perks really do. Working in the industry, they get most of their bikes and gear at trade price or better – and more importantly they have endless excuses to ride out.
‘I've been very fortunate to travel a lot of the world with a lot of the guys in here doing bike trips and calling it work.’
Restrap branding on one of the company’s versatile and practical Musette bags.
Type-two fun
Nathan draws a distinction between ‘holidays’ and ‘adventures’. An upcoming Alpine tour with three mates, for example, is a holiday – while an adventure generally seems to carry a higher risk of suffering and calamity.
‘We were in Vietnam last year – which was pretty epic – but it did hit 47 degrees for three days. It was the only time I actually felt like I might die on the bike.’
He treasures a particular memory of a trip to Japan in his late twenties, riding from Osaka to Tokyo via the Japanese Alps.
‘It was quite eventful. There was the biggest hurricane in 25 years whilst we were in the mountains. We lost a friend for a while and had to get the police out. It sounds horrendous, but it's that sort of thing that makes the stories.
‘We were wild camping the whole time, and we realised when we got there that people don’t usually do that. You basically hire a log cabin and that’s what they call camping, but at the time we were too skint, so we just slept in a bush.’
One reason Japanese campers preferred to sleep inside turned out to be the healthy population of Asiatic black bears.
‘There was a sign with a silhouette of a bear, and someone had handwritten the number three on it, and we’re like – does that mean three bears? Or a bear was spotted three days ago or three weeks ago or three hours ago? Well, maybe we’ll just ride another ten miles. Like the bear can’t go ten miles too...’
Never get too grown-up
As we leave, Nathan is shunting a big wheelie bin around in the side alley. Developing new products is the fun bit, but there are plenty of less glamorous sides to running a business this size.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he laughs, ‘a lot of my job now is solving problems. HR is a real thing…’
UK manufacturing is never going to be an easy way to make a living, but Nathan’s not grumbling. He gets to make cool stuff and ride his bike with his mates, just as he did way back when he started out.
‘It’s funny, a few of us who are all thirties and forties have still got our BMXs and we’ll be like, should we meet up on Saturday? I’ll be honest, it’s a lot harder these days. Literally we ride for about half an hour and then someone says, should we just go for a pint instead?’
