ES Lifestyle newsletter The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive trends and interviews from fashion, lifestyle to travel every week, by email Update newsletter preferences

Joining me at the door of Rapha HQ, the cycle clothing and accessories brand’s offices in Kentish Town, is a man delivering a crate of champagne flutes. I’m here to see the company’s chief executive, Simon Mottram, so I step into the service lift to go up to his office — together with the glassware, which is fitting, since I’m here because Mottram’s company is celebrating.

At the start of this year Rapha, a brand known for its well-made, high-end clothes, launched its first range of kit for Team Sky, the world's top road cycling team.

The company only started eight years ago and has just 70 staff. Now, having ousted the giant sportswear brand Adidas (Rapha's sales for 2012 were worth £18 million compared with £10.8 billion for Adidas), Rapha is dressing cycling megastars such as Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome in its new black and blue kit.

"I'm living in a dream. Only five or six years ago I'd be peering over a fence at a race, trying to catch a glimpse of my heroes," says Mottram. "Here I am with these amazing, best-in-the-world cyclists and they value what we do. It's incredible."

Yesterday Mottram went out cycling with the athletes. "They're a different species, basically. There's me and then there are these amazing machines."

It's an undeniable coup for the 46-year-old, whose obsession with cycling shows in his neat physique. He has five bikes, including a travel model that can fit in a suitcase so he can take it on business trips.

Mottram set up the company in 2004 not just because he couldn't find any attractive cyclewear himself, but because he wanted to inspire an interest in the sport. "It's more than clothes ... I thought: ‘This is the most beautiful, toughest sport in the world and nobody knows'," he says.

The collaboration with Team Sky is a sign his ambition is bearing fruit. Mottram — at once affable and serious — is not visibly skipping with joy, however. "It's easy with what's going on at the moment to get totally caught up in it," he says. "I have another side of my life that makes me realise what's important."

Mottram is referring to his home life where he and his wife Lucy care for their son, who suffers from autism. At nearly 18, Oscar is the eldest of their three children. Their daughter Connie is 16 and a sprint athlete and they have a younger son, Felix, aged 11.

The family live in Queen's Park. "It's too close. It means I have to cycle around the park because if I get here in 15 minutes I haven't really ridden," says Mottram. While he runs the business Lucy looks after Oscar.

Diagnosed with autism as a baby of 20 months, Oscar's developmental age is less than two and he is unable to speak. It was a diagnosis Mottram describes honestly as a "hammer blow".

"He was starved of oxygen during birth and that may have contributed, but we don't know ... Oscar did make dramatic progress, but he had chicken pox after about two years of therapy and lost everything he'd acquired."

OSCAR was diagnosed with allergy-induced autism. "It's connected to his immune system. If he is hit by a certain kind of illness, it could definitely knock him back." A host of allergies mean he has to be kept on a strict diet. "He's allergic to eggs, for example," Mottram explains. "He doesn't sleep much. He's hyperactive as well."

Until recently, Mottram had not spoken publicly about his son's condition. "I didn't think it was relevant. Why would people be interested? I hated the idea of using it. The company isn't about me it's about the sport."

In September this year, however, Rapha has organised a night-time Bordeaux to Paris charity cycling event to raise money for Ambitious about Autism, the charity behind Oscar's school, TreeHouse, in Highgate. The school, which Mottram says is "wonderful", has helped Oscar learn to ride a bicycle himself.

The charity ride is what Mottram calls a "lost classic" — a route that was popular in the Sixties but is no longer cycled.

Initially, Mottram felt uneasy. "It's quite a step to say ‘come and help' to customers. I had to think carefully before using our brand to raise money for something I have a vested interest in."

But having settled on an event he felt his customers would value, "I thought: ‘Okay, I can now be upfront and say, "This is my son. It matters to me"'. Pull the heartstrings," he jokes, "get the whole of Rapha behind it."

The aim is to raise £250,000, some of which may go towards developing provision for young adults with autism.

"Oscar is 18 in a month so he's getting quite big ... It's an interesting time for us, a very frightening time ... You do worry: ‘ What is going to happen when I get older?' I'm sure my other two kids worry about it. They don't say they do, but it must be a concern deep down."

With a successful business to run, Mottram surely has a more precarious work-life balance than most, but he says, "We do okay at home because of my wife. For me it's an easy balance. It's harder for her — she picks up the pieces."

Mottram insists that Oscar's condition has had a positive effect on his own life. "It's given me a perspective and drive that I probably wouldn't have had otherwise," he says. "If I'm going to devote myself to something it has got to be good, because I'm taking away from time helping Lucy with Oscar. I can't mess around here."

When Mottram, who grew up near Leicester, first set up Rapha, "London wasn't the obvious place to do it, because people didn't really cycle here." Yet with a name taken from an alcoholic drink that used to sponsor a team — St Raphael — in the Sixties, the former brand and marketing consultant produced an initial collection of black garments with pink accents. Pink, because it's the colour of the jersey worn by the leader in the Giro d'Italia road race and because Mottram liked to buy clothing by Sir Paul Smith, who also used a lot of the colour.

Smith, a keen cyclist himself, has since collaborated with Rapha, and in a completion of the circle has just announced that this year he will design the leader's jersey for the Giro.

"Initially I got quite a few emails from blokes, particularly in the UK, who said, ‘I really like what you do, but I can't wear anything with pink, you've got to be crazy.' That's gone away now," says Mottram, and pink has become an identifying feature of Rapha clothing — although the Team Sky kit has a blue streak.

Downstairs in the converted factory building Mottram's staff, all cyclists, work among boxes of cycle gear. Just next to a kitchenette, some 30 or so bikes hang from racks.

"Everybody cycles... I think there are two or three people in the company who don't commute at all by bike. I know who they are and I'm working on them."

The commitment to cycling is so important to Mottram that Wednesday mornings at the company are set aside for riding. This is Mottram's own chance to do a 90km bike ride that his home commitments mean he has no time for at weekends.

It's this devotion to the sport by the whole company that is surely what attracted Team Sky when they began talking to Rapha a year ago.

"We bring a passion and obsession and authenticity that is hard to beat," says Mottram. "We feel what Sky's cyclists are going through because we're as keen on it as they are. It's very hard for a bigger company to be that close."

This is why now, when Rapha has to make an alteration to a product, it could be at the request of none other than Sir Bradley Wiggins, because "he wants to show it off all the time ... some of them really do care about kit."

This may look like the pinnacle for most, yet for the dogged Mottram, there are still more hill climbs ahead.

For London, that means more cyclists on the road. "For me the road is for riding bikes on, and if you've got a car, you've got to fit in."

"We haven't really got started," he says of Rapha's impact on the sport. "When I open a newspaper there's still 18 pages of football and about two inches of cycling. When there's 10 pages of football and five pages of cycling, then I will start to think that we're starting to have an effect. We've got a long way to go."

Something tells me Mottram has the drive to get there.