The episode in detail
Setting up a cycling business as a woman
Anne-Charlotte Peridon and Laetitia Cros founded Suzon & Suzette in April 2021, in the middle of the health crisis. Before that, nothing pointed them towards the world of cycling: Laetitia was a barrister at the Lyon bar, Anne-Charlotte worked in public works for the city of Lyon. Lockdown was the trigger. Three months after the company was set up, the two co-founders became pregnant at the same time.
“As a pregnant entrepreneur, maternity leave doesn’t really exist.”
Daily life turned into a balancing act: negotiating contracts while changing a nappy, doing interviews with a baby babbling in the background, pitching to shops with a pushchair in tow. They did not apologise. They pushed forward. And the people they dealt with followed.
Fewer than 3% of women dare to raise funds
The cycling world in France remains dominated by men. When Suzon & Suzette started approaching bike shops, everyone they spoke to was male. Explaining the point of the attache-jupette, an accessory that lets women cycle in a skirt without the fabric flapping about or catching in the wheels, sometimes felt like talking past each other.
The problem goes beyond the cycling sector. Fewer than 3% of women entrepreneurs in France raise funds. That figure says everything about the place they are given in the world of business. In cycling, the bias is amplified further by the cultural link between cycling and sporting performance, a world coded as male even on shop shelves.
“When we had to convince people of the point of the attache-jupette, so that women could cycle in a skirt, we felt a bit alone.”
Cycling accessories designed by women, for everyone
Suzon & Suzette makes cycling accessories that are made in France, solidarity-based and environmentally responsible. The attache-jupette is the flagship product, but the range also addresses other practical problems: trousers wearing out, managing long hair under a helmet, carrying shopping and children on top of the commute.
Women’s cycling journeys often differ from men’s. A female bike commuter does not usually make a straight there-and-back trip between home and the office. She drops the children off, picks up bread, stops for the shopping. These needs call for suitable equipment: baskets, bags, fixing systems. Without a woman’s perspective in the design process, these uses go unnoticed.
“If we don’t put women in the cycling world, whether at policy level, development or product, we will stay in a male-dominated world.”
Laetitia and Anne-Charlotte regularly ask their community on Instagram about everyday difficulties. It is this listening that feeds the creation of new products.
Learning to cycle starts in childhood
The imbalance between women and men in cycling does not start in adulthood. The association Roues Libres has documented a little-known fact: girls learn to cycle less often, and later, than boys. This early inequality has lasting effects. The audience for cycling schools is 80% female, a sign that many adult women never learned to pedal.
Initiatives exist to close this gap. The Brussels-based association Ride Your Future, with its Elles en Selles programme, works to remove the barriers that keep women from cycling: confidence on the road, mechanical upkeep, taking up space in public. But structural change also depends on educating boys, so that women’s presence in the cycling world stops being an exception.
“Girls learn to cycle less often, and later, than boys.”
Made in France: ending the contradiction
Suzon & Suzette does not stop at the gender question. The company also holds itself to a standard of environmental consistency. Cycling to cut your carbon footprint while using accessories made thousands of kilometres away is a contradiction the two co-founders refuse to accept. All their products are made in France, in social inclusion workshops.
For Laetitia, cycling is one of the main solutions to the environmental challenge. The electric car will not be enough. Accessories that make cycling comfortable in every season, in the rain, in winter, in a skirt, help get more people on a bike. That is the mission of Suzon & Suzette: more bikes, more women on bikes, more women in the cycling world.
“Our aim is to get as many people as possible on bikes.”
