In an unassuming room—walls painted white, fluorescent lights overhead, computers lining workstations—stands a large dresser. In this dresser hangs a jacket. This jacket is the reason we have an in-house testing lab.

What makes this jacket so special? After all, it has seen better days. It’s tattered, ripped to shreds in some areas. But the note written in Spanish, in permanent marker on the bottom left corner says it all. The rider who was wearing this jacket was in an accident, sliding across the pavement at high speed. She suffered no injuries, and after she’d walked away, body in-tact, and she sent us back her REV’IT! jacket to say “Gracias.”

Not all motorcycle clothing manufacturers have their own lab. But how could we innovate without it? How could we work on new ideas and technologies that will help improve our industry, help inspire innovation, help save riders? How could we test products to our protective standards, not just the industry standards? And how could we constantly optimize, spending each day looking for performance gains? 

The aforementioned jacket would not have been possible without our own lab. It behaved exactly how it was supposed to, winning the battle against the pavement.

Keeping our riders dry is one of our most important tests. We want to make big promises, then overdeliver. This piece of machinery pumps water onto the fabric at increasing pressure to test at what point the membrane eventually starts allowing droplets through, replicating the riding conditions in the rain from light drizzle to long and heavy downpours. 

How strong are the fabrics and seams in our products? The tensile tester pulls and tears them until they break, showing us if they can withstand the necessary forces.

Our protectors are engineered to absorb and distribute impact so that less force is exerted on our riders. To test this ability, we use a machine to drop weight on the protectors while measuring the amount of leftover force.

To test the cut resistance of our gloves, we place the material in a machine that runs a rotating circular blade back and forth until the material is cut. The number of revolutions the blade takes tells us how resistant the gloves are.

It’s crucial that in the lab we can mimic the fall and slide of motorcyclists so we can see how our products protect riders coming off their bikes. That’s exactly what this machine does. We slot in our fabrics, spin them to pre-set numbers of revolutions and drop them on a rough concrete surface. Any holes, tears, or bursts and it’s time for a rethink.

If gear shrinks or stretches when washed, the protectors might move out of place, or the fabric could be weakened. This would completely compromise their protective ability. We must make sure that doesn’t happen with our products. We use an industrial-grade machine to wash fabrics a total of five times before we test them on the other equipment.

A high-payload industrial robotic arm that mimics real-life repetitive movements, tests functionality, identifies wear and tear, and collects sensor data in the most demanding repetitive handling of our gear. Opening stash pockets, closing a zipper, grabbing handlebars, shifting gears, and walking for miles; our motorcycle gear must handle all these repetitive actions on a daily basis, sometimes even in harsh conditions.