It started in the operating room.
For years, I had used other commercially available chamois creams and just assumed that they were the standard and never looked beyond the cool packaging or funny names. It can be difficult to navigate beyond the huge brands with gigantic marketing budgets to truly find great products that deliver on their promises. Money talks.
Then during the 2013 cyclocross season I developed a saddle sore.
I had gotten saddle sores before, but this one was different. No treatments were working, the promises that other creams had made about treating existing saddle sores was starting to ring false. I suffered through pre-riding courses, warming up and eventually forgot about it by the time the gun sounded, only for the pain to return post-race with a vengeance. I kept toughing it out for most of the season until I finally had to give in and call it quits in early December.
I stayed off of the bike through January hoping my saddle sore would heal, to no avail. I ended up needing to bite the bullet and go see a doctor. Within a few minutes, I was on the operating room table having a fairly large chunk of "very delicate" skin removed while having a very abrupt chat with the doctor about synthetic preservatives, parabens, and other items that are commonly contained in chamois creams that are not good for your skin.
#Lightbulb
I spent the next 3 months off of a bike since sitting on a bicycle seat for any length of time was absolutely out of the question. During that time I began to research the skin: How it behaves , what ingredients are actually going to nourish, protect, and eventually heal it the way your body is engineered to do.
With an injury ending my season right before Cincy3 CX weekend, I now had the time to devote to making my dream a reality and over the next 8 months, I developed recipe after recipe for both embrocation and chamois cream. The majority of these recipes never saw the light of day or were given away to friends and family as hand cream or dry skin creams. Eventually, I started making progress and was able to ride a bike again so every recipe began going through my testing prior to offering it up to a trusted group of riders from the Cincinnati area.
After supplying them countless batches and pouring over pages and pages of feedback, we landed on recipe #27 for embrocation, and #48 for chamois cream. The recipes only contain all natural ingredients, provided by Mother Nature herself and are carefully chosen from countless hours of research and development to be the absolute best at not only performing flawlessly while being used, but to protect, nourish and baby your skin in the process.
Our products won't train for you, they won't win races for you, and they certainly won't save your soul, but they will definitely take care of you, help you stay healthy and most importantly they will fit into your ritual and that's a pretty healthy nourishment for the soul.
Love your ritual, and love the ride.
Jon
Founder, The Ritual
