Aldi cycling jersey
Price: £5.99 (yes you did read that right)
From: Aldi the big blue discount supermarket.

German übermarket Aldi might have more of a reputation for cheap baked beans but now they’ve recently forayed into outdoors gear and have now got into the bike kit market, applying their massive Euro-wide buying muscle to hit finished prices that other companies couldn’t even buy raw materials for. We’ll be bringing you select cuts from their complete range over the next weeks, but here’s their shirt.

Style + cut
Baggy with lightly elasticated hem and multi-panel cut for contrasting colours over the shoulders. The thick piping can chafe slightly under straps but it looks smart. The zip is relatively short (too short to get over a helmet) but it’s a decent quality YKK model. The elasticated shirt sleeves are on the tight side though.

The shirt is also available in a specific women’s cut as well as other colours / patterns. Aldi have also been smart enough to leave the jersey completely clear of any logo’s so snobs have no reason we turn their noses up.

Fabric
Soft fabric with a semi-perforated outer face that wicks sweat into the breeze well or doubles up as an underlayer. Lots of sideways stretch keeps movement easy and the overall feel is light without being flimsy. We’ve only snagged a couple of threads on bushes and they’re only noticeable on really close inspection.

Our medium was definitely more on the large size – except for the elastic in the sleeves. Must be a German thing.

Pockets
Like the Parrot jersey, there’s just one big zipped dustbin pocket at the back. It’s secure but everything gets jumbled up and bounces around whilst riding. The high zip can chafe under backpacks or against car seats unless you re-arrange it carefully.

Special features
The one stand out feature of the shirt is its phenomenally low price. I used to have a job that involved trying to lower prices on bike gear at a distributor and I can testify that the prices that other shirt manufacturers charge are generally as low as they can manage and still make them worth selling. Either this is bulk purchasing power at it’s most aggressive or someone, somewhere is getting seriously screwed to get decent quality clothing at this price, but it certainly isn’t the consumer.

The zip’s a bit short, and we’re not mad keen on that rear zipped pocket, but we really are being finicky. Basically it’s a perfectly good shirt and you’d be very hard pressed to tell this from a ‘label’ jersey five times the price which has to make it the biggest bargain we’ve ever come across.