Reducing friction on the road to innovation: Eskenazi student launches Aero Bib

In the 1979 film “Breaking Away,” the curmudgeonly dad is blindsided when he discovers his son shaving his legs before a bike race. Nearly 50 years after Indiana University Bloomington’s Little 500 got the Hollywood treatment, the lengths to which competitive cyclists go to be streamlined come as no surprise. Sleek legs are de rigueur, not to mention technical apparel and electronic shifting.

Amid the sport’s trend toward aerodynamism, however, the persistence of one stubborn source of friction did surprise IU senior Gage Pratt: those paper number bibs that cyclists—and runners—have been pinning to their jerseys for decades.

“They drag,” says Pratt. “They’re basically a parachute.”

A major hindrance when you are aspiring to lift off. Not to mention the hassle of having to attach the bib at each corner to your jersey with a safety pin, damaging the garment and possibly sticking your finger in the process.  

The comprehensive design major in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design in the IU College of Arts and Sciences knows a lot about going fast. He’d been recruited from his hometown of Fishers, Indiana to run track at IU. Pratt ran the 100- and 200-meter events for his first two years before transitioning to cycling. Around the same time he started riding for Cutters—a non-Greek student team—he switched majors from sports marketing and management to comp design.

“I needed to find something that used my creative abilities more,” says Pratt. “I love a project that solves a real-life problem. Something I could put that energy into.”

Comp design offered a perfect outlet for Pratt’s need for hands-on problem solving. In his Design Capstone course (W400/450) last fall, Lecturer Max Fertik prompted students in the product design section to consider tackling issues from their daily life. Pratt’s issue had been at the front of his mind as long as he'd been pinning numbers to the front of his chest. But he needed to widen his sample size. Having learned in his courses that the generative force of human-centered design comes from the user, Pratt interviewed his fellow athletes.

“There were a lot of consistent views about the paper bibs,” he says. “I don’t know anybody that enjoys this system. It’s a total inconvenience for the athletes.”

Yet pinned paper bibs persist, from collegiate cycling and track and field to the Olympics, where they continue to elicit frustration and provoke cognitive dissonance from competitors hoping to reduce friction in every other way. Innovations involving magnets and clips as fasteners are available on the market. But Pratt was equally dissatisfied with the material of the tag itself.

“I remember when I was running track thinking, ‘Why are they paper?’ Paper doesn’t stick to your body very well or form to your clothing. That has to change. These need to stick to your body. They need to stay. So, I started thinking about fabrics.”

As part of his research, Pratt connected with a local furniture maker who introduced him to an array of fabrics and taught him how to use his sewing machine. Pratt’s iterative process extended to considerations of the tag’s shape and the adhesive used to stick the bib to the athlete’s jersey. He landed on a rectangular bib with rounded edges (less likely than a right-angled corner to peel off) made from a thin fabric backed with an adhesive gel, strong enough to withstand rain but light enough to be unpeeled after the event without leaving residue. And the Aero Bib was born.

The exact materials are, of course, proprietary information. With support from IU Innovates, and in consultation with a patent lawyer, Pratt is protecting his invention and establishing his business. Having purchased the Aero Bib domain name earlier in the spring, Pratt launched the website the week of March 30.

Since debuting the Aero Bib in his capstone exhibition in December, Pratt’s been handling fabrication himself, with help from a local fabric printer. Since early March, things have ramped up. After Cutters riders sported the Aero Bib at the Candy Stripe Criterium race in Bloomington and Brown County, he’s been receiving inquiries from out-of-state teams.  Anticipating demand, he’s in talks with a manufacturer in California.

“I’m really working on getting this out,” Pratt says. “I need to run. I need to go.”

The need for speed comes naturally to the student athlete. Though poised to go big with his business, however, Pratt won’t be competing in the 75^th running of the Little 500, taking place April 24 and 25. While training with his team in Texas last month, he crashed and tore his meniscus and PCL.

Being able to come back from a setback is a regular part of being an athlete, Pratt avers, one that transfers to entrepreneurship:

“We go out every day and put ourselves through so much pain, just learning the techniques of the sports, and having that drive and that hunger to learn and get better. You have to take that exact same mindset and work ethic and copy and paste it into a project like this. Just like a sport, there have been ups and downs with this project. You have to keep believing in it, not giving up on the idea. You have to train yourself; you have to train the product too, constantly upgrading it.”

He’s walking with a knee brace for now, though he should be cleared to ride again in a few weeks. No Little 500 rider wants to be sidelined in March, but responding to his injury with mental nimbleness has been critical to Aero Bib’s launch. “It’s kind of been a blessing in disguise,” Pratt speculates, “because it’s allowed me to put so much more time into the Aero Bib. OK, let’s pivot and work on something else.”

In the meantime, his teammates have been beta-testing the Aero Bib since its debut at Candy Stripe. Cutters and other teams will don the tag at the Little 500 Individual Time Trials March 31 and April 1.  

In developing the product, Pratt says, the comprehensive design program has been an effective incubator. “The critiques are great. I love presenting in front of a board and taking all that feedback, good or bad. The program lets you express all of your creativity, and your profs and your classmates help guide it and develop it. You might have a great idea but don’t know how to get it out there.”

As he works to get Aero Bib “out there,” Pratt has at least one specific destination in mind: “A major goal is getting this in the Little 500 for next year’s race. That would be such a great thing. To give back to the program. That would mean a lot.”

For more information please contact

Yaël Ksander
Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design
(812) 855-5512
yksander@iu.edu