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Business: Iva Jean Owner: Ann DeOtte Industry: Clothing Seattle can be an intimidating place to start bike commuting. There are safe routes to find, weather and geographical elements to deal with, and then there’s the gear. Oh, the gear. In Seattle there seems to be an abundance of black spandex and neo-green jackets, expensive road bikes, and all season-equipped road warriors. [caption id="attachment_18386" align="alignright" width="400" caption="Courtesy of Ann DeOtte"] [/caption] So when Ann DeOtte first decided to start bike commuting she was intimidated. “It was 2007. The Bike Master Plan was being created and at Berger Partnership Landscape Architecture and Urban Design , bicycling was a topic we talked about every day. I started to get an interest in the bike culture, but more from a civic and sustainability standpoint. It seemed so romantic,” DeOtte recalled. She did the math and decided to trade in her car for a $100 vintage Motobecane. “I realized I didn’t need my car -- I could bike and bus. And I wanted to live on Capitol Hill and not pay an extra $500 for parking. So it was also a financial decision. It just made sense, it wasn’t some grand gesture,” DeOtte said. But just getting on a bike to ride to work was harder said than done. “When I started to bike, I thought I needed a fancy bike and all this bike gear. But I didn’t want to wear it because I am an aesthetically conscious female,” DeOtte said. “I wanted to be able to ride my bike to meet my friends and not be the only one in head-to-toe spandex.” “At some point, I realized that this is Seattle; most people don’t have to dress up all that much to go to work. So I started biking in normal clothes,” she said. “Today, I’m a fair-weather, normal-clothes, no-shame-putting-my-bike-on-the-bus kind of biker.” In 2009, DeOtte went on a trip to Europe, visiting Copenhagen, London and Berlin. “I spent a month in Europe taking in the bike culture. It was really empowering to see women, men and families of all ages riding their bikes in everyday clothes. It was a real aha-moment for me,” she said. Inspired by the European bike culture, DeOtte decided to bring that lifestyle back with her to Seattle and share it with others. Then one day, DeOtte got caught in a rain shower. While this is not unusual in Seattle, she realized that a Gore-Tex jacket simply wasn’t enough. “I thought, ‘If only I could just cover more than my torso’,” DeOtte recalled. She did some research online and found that none of the existing rain jackets and ponchos worked for her. “I couldn’t find any well-designed ponchos that weren’t so big and made from nasty nylon. The designs I found wasn’t anything I wanted to wear. I wanted more function and a product that wasn’t just for biking,” she said. From there, she got together with some local designers and started to develop the first product in her Iva Jean clothing line: the Rain Cape. “I started Iva Jean to provide products and resources that encourage women to incorporate biking into their everyday lives,” DeOtte stated. “There are so many women who need one more nudge and one less barrier to get on a bike. I’m doing this because I want more women to bike and this is one way to do it.”