Here at Carvalho Custom, we love to get involved with events that help to drive our sports of cycling and triathlon forward. So we were delighted to be contacted by the Winter Triathlon Series in Holland who wanted sponsorship for the events they were running over the 2011/2012 season. This is triathlon with a twist though – since it gets a bit chilly in Holland over the winter, they decided that Winter Triathlon should be Run-Bike-Skate, which sounds like a good idea to us! So we decided to get involved and we will have a stand at some of the events, including at Assen on the 29th of October if you would like to come and meet us and see some samples. Please come along and say hello if you get the chance.

Bij Carvalho Custom houden we ervan betrokken te zijn bij evenementen die onze favoriete sporten fietsen en triathlon verder brengen. We vinden het dan ook ontzettend leuk dat de Winter Triathlon serie ons heeft benaderd als sponsor voor de evenementen die zij organiseren in het seizoen 2011/2012. Maar de Winter Triathlons zijn geen gewone triathlons. Omdat de Nederlandse winters nogal koud zijn, heeft de organisatie gekozen voor een race in de vorm ”run-bike-skate”. Dat vinden wij een fantastisch idee! Vandaar dat wij tijdens verschillende evenementen met een stand aanwezig zullen zijn. Tijdens de race in Assen op 29 oktober zijn we er ook. Dus als je geïnteresseerd bent in onze kleding en een aantal voorbeelden zou willen zien, nodigen we je van harte uit langs te komen bij onze stand. Hopelijk zien we jullie daar!

We have spent a couple of days riding, running and swimming round Portugal taking some photos of our kit to revamp the website and also to produce a pdf brochure of our custom cycling & triathlon club kit range, which a lot of clients have been asking us for.
So here is a taste of some of the photos we have:

Here we are setting up the first shots, bright and early…

About to get wet in the pool….

Giving it some welly on the bikes.

We were very lucky to have the exceptional talents of Margarida Ramos who took the above photos and is just starting out in her career and Joana Maltez who was the main photographer for the shoot. As well as being great professionals they were just such a pleasure to work with and I think the results speak for themselves, so thank you so much to both of them.

We flew back from Ireland on Monday morning having been there for the start of the Race Around Ireland on Sunday evening, which Carvalho Custom has sponsored. And here we are on Friday afternoon and the solo riders are still racing, with over 1500 kms cycling in their legs and less than 15 hours sleep over the 5 days and still going. To think that these riders have barely got off their bikes over all this time makes you realise the enormity of their achievement.

So you might be expecting these heroes of endurance cycling to be brash or full of themselves given the fact that they are some of the most amazing athletes on the planet; but having met them at the pre-race meetings, I was really struck by how humble and down-to-earth they all seemed. It made me think, that anyone who has had to face up to the unthinkable depths of suffering that ultra endurance racing involves, is bound to be humbled by it.

Here is Nicole from Carvalho Custom presenting the RAI jersey to 2009 winner, Joe Barr:

This is not a sport for the insecure – it takes enormous strength of character to deal with the sleep deprivation, exhaustion and pain and the people who do it are giants, but they must feel so small in the face of the magnitude of their task and it makes you respect them all the more for it.

We have just come back from Navan in Ireland where we attended the start of the epic Race Around Ireland cycle race. It is an Ultra Marathon race, which means riding 2172 kms in a continuous race (so if you sleep, you lose time) and they are looking to finish in less than 5 days.

We were delighted to be given the opportunity to sponsor the custom cycling jerseys for the riders and here is Nicole and Charlie from Carvalho Custom with some of the competitors, wearing the jerseys we supplied.

And here is Charlie watching the start in his Carvalho Custom jersey and arm warmers, although he couldn’t be convinced to race this year, citing a chronic fear of suffering.

And who could forget the RAI mascot, faithfully wearing his mini Race Around Ireland jersey! Best of luck to all the competitors and congratulations to the organising team for putting on such a fantastic event and making us feel so welcome!

We keep on trying to improve things here at Carvalho Custom to make things easier for our clients, so we have brought out a new excel order form that will allow the person who puts the order together for a club to easily add together all the individual orders received from club members.

So the idea is that the club clothing administrator will receive a load of orders from club members, which s/he will input one by one into our new order form; then when this is finished, s/he presses a button and all the individual orders are added together to make a total club order, which can then be emailed to us to produce. The order form can also be used in the traditional way of just inputting a total order for a club or organisation – the system is just more user-friendly than a standard order form and it will automatically calculate the final price for you based on the total quantities ordered.

So the order form performs three roles – it provides a convenient way of recording the individual orders of club members, it saves you the hassle of having to consolidate the individual orders into a total order and it will automatically calculate the final total price and the price for each individual. You can download the new order form here (please make sure you activate the macro when you start, by clicking on the option when prompted – you will get a security warning when you do this, but it is completely safe!).

When you download the order form (it is in excel), the first thing you should do (once you have activated the macro) is to click on the instructions button, although it should be reasonably self-explanatory. You can click on the red triangles scattered round the order form for further instructions.

Essentially the way it works is that you first select the items that you intend to order, then you can choose either input the total club order in one go, or you can input all the individual orders from the club using the ‘Add Multiple Orders’ button . You then just hit the ‘Calculate Total Price’ button and the program will finish off the order form for you.

This is a new system for us and we are sure to need to make some changes, so please let us know what you think!

We are making the Race Around Ireland custom cycling jerseys that are given to anyone who actually makes it to the finish line, which considering it is 2100 kms non-stop racing, the least they deserve is a free jersey!

We are going over to Navan for the start of the race on 10th/11th of September where we will have a stand in the start area, so please come along and say hello if you are around. As we work direct from Portugal, we rarely get to meet our clients face to face, so it will be great to meet up with some of the Irish clubs we have been supplying over the years.

We sell our custom cycling and triathlon kit direct from Portugal to countries all round the world – UK, Ireland, USA, Australia, Japan, Sweden, Holland, Germany, Finland, Russia, Norway, Canada to name a few. We are often contacted by companies who want to represent our products in their country of origin, because just about all of our competitors use national distributors, but we always turn them down as it just doesn’t make sense!

If we had a distributor in every country we sold to, then they would earn 20 to 30% margin on everything we sold and then our prices would be nearly as high as our direct competitors (that is those selling high end custom cycling and triathlon kit). It would also mean that you as the client would not have a direct line of contact with the actual manufacturer so every request you made would have to go down a line of Chinese whispers, with all the mistakes and delays that this entails.

It just makes so much sense to buy your kit direct from a low cost country and cut out the middle man. Although we are in Portugal we are English/American, so there are no language barriers to worry about if you speak English and we do not have the enormous production costs that rich country producers have to shoulder, nor the wasted money and inefficiencies that national distributors bring. That is why we can offer pro quality clothing at reasonable prices, together with first class service, which is what we deliver!