. The company has its headquarters in the outdoor-sports-mad city of Bolzano, in the Italian mountain province of South Tyrol, near the Austrian frontier.Q36.5 does not have as much brand awareness as, say, Rapha, a U.S. biking sportswear and lifestyle company owned by an investment firm controlled by Steuart Walton, of the Wal-Mart retailing empire. But that seems ready to change for Q36.
The Q in Q36.5 stands for Quaerere, which means “research” in Latin. The numbers refer to the temperature, in Celsius, of a healthy human body. The name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it reflects the spirit and philosophy of the company, said co-founder and chief executive Luigi Bergamo, 53, who owns a majority stake with his wife, Sabrina Emmasi Bergamo. “We are not a traditional bike clothing company,” he said. “We like to think of ourselves more as a laboratory.
Today, the entire Q36.5 team consists of only 25 employees, a third of whom are involved in R&D. The small company is big on innovation and testing. It uses a climate chamber created by EURAC Research of Bolzano, a private research centre whose clients include the European Space Agency and various UN agencies, to replicate outdoor conditions.