Tips

You can probably imagine that as a supplier of custom cycling clothing we get a lot of requests for charity cycling kit and we do provide kit for some of the biggest charity cycling rides, such as Help for Heroes Band of Brothers Bike Ride. We are very happy to help out in one way or another, but we can’t just give away kit to everyone who contacts us. But we have a plan to help out anyone thinking of doing a charity bike ride….

You can help us to do some advertising and in return we will help with the cost of the kit. Most charirty rides use are semi-custom cycling kit option, where you pay €90 for the design and can then order any item of cycling kit you like at our normal list prices (so €29.55+VAT for a jersey and €38.25+VAT for bib shorts for example, if you buy at least 10).

So the deal is, if you become a fan of our facebook page and write a message on our wall about the fact that you are going to do a charity ride and want to get some kit made, we will take one euro off the design fee for every different person who comments on your post to support your ride. So if you can get 90 people to sign up to be a fan of our page and then comment on your post, you get the design for fee and only pay for the kit you buy and the postage. The only conditions are that it has to be for a charity ride and you have to buy at least 5 jerseys.

What is the catch? No catch – you get money off your design fee and we get more people visiting our facebook page to see what we do.

You have to pity anyone who doesn’t understand the joy of spending a Saturday afternoon in front of the telly watching the last 100k of one of the Classics or the extra spring in your step you have in July knowing that for 3 weeks you will have the Tour de France to bring light to your life.

Anyway here are the races you simply cannot miss this year under any circumstances. You can watch most of them on Eurosport if you are prepared to part with 4 quid (5 euros) a month (if you don’t have it on you normal television). The UPT races are Pro Tour and the HIS races ‘Historic’.

Wheelworx Bike and Tri Store in Dublin have moved premises to a new store (on the Fonthill Retail Park in Liffey Valley) 12 times (!) the size of the old one in Clondalkin. That must make it just about the largest and best equiped tri and cycling store in Ireland. We have been supplying the Wheelworx shop and pro racing team with kit for years now and they have been good enough to feature one of our tri suits on their new store front!

Rob Cummins at Wheelworx is a top man who is totally passionate about his sport and you can be confident that the highly professional advice that came with staffing his shop with people who really live cycling and triathlon will be continued at the new premises. Tri and cycling kit is getting pretty confusing these days and it is just such a good idea to buy from someone who will give you honest and meaningful advice and who will give you the kind of after sales service that can be missing when you buy from non-specialist outlets.

We would just like to wish the new store and the Wheelworx race team a great 2010!

Jaakko is a triathlete from Finland attempting to break into the disturbing world of elite triathlon. We are very proud to sponsor his custom cycling and triathlon kit for racing and training and this is a podcast with him about what it is like training for Ironman and also just how bad he feels with 25kms to go on the run.

Find out more about Jaakko at his blog. Best of luck this season Jaakko!

We have a Carvalho Custom facebook page, but it is a little neglected! So we have decided to do a special offer for those ordering from us. We will give you a free cycling jersey in our new Bio-Cerâmica fabric and all you have to do is:
1. Place an order with us for some kit
2. Become a facebook fan
3. Post on our wall to say that you have ordered from us
4. Change your status to say your club has just ordered from us and include a link to our facebook page
5. Tell us that you have done the above and tell us what size jersey you require.

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Don’t try and tell me that this is not a great looking jersey! You will be the envy of everyone you ride with and it is worth €35/£30.

We have a few cyclists and triathletes round the world who we help out with custom kit in return for helping us to try out new fabrics and garments in race conditions. One of them is leading Dutch triathlete, Mirjam Weerd . It looks like she is going to have a fantastic 2010 season, so keep an eye open for her.

Well here is Mirjam going out to work this morning in full custom kit! One of the items she is trying out for us is our Drystorm winter cycling jacket, which we have recently improved to make it more stretchy for a comfortable fit, increasing the breathability by over 30% and adding a water repelant treatment to encourage water to bead of. It is a very warm jacket, as it has a microfibre insulation layer, as well as the breathable/waterproof/windproof membrane.

For the record Mirjam said the jacket kept her warm as toast! Best of luck to her this season.

We try very hard to keep all our fabrics bang up to date, but frankly with the rate of development of new fabrics it is very hard work. Not a week goes by without us receiving a new fabric to test and the pro riders we use to test them are always trying out something new for us.

A lot of the new fabrics are in fact pretty similar to the old ones, but sometimes something quite special comes along. So we have a new cycling jersey fabric, which is from the new family of bio-ceramic textiles. These are supposedly the big secret behind the clothing using by the GB Olympic cycling team, which had to be burnt after they were used so that nobody could copy them.

Bio-ceramics are natural materials consisting of a combination of mineral and ceramic oxides. This mixture is fused together at a very high temperature and the result of this is a bio-ceramic material which is capable of emitting infra-red light. The big deal about this for sport is that infra-red light is great for promoting blood flow (which is why it is used to treat injuries) and increased blood flow is just what an athlete needs, because it means more oxygen being delivered and faster recovery rates for muscles.

Our new fabric, Bio-Cerâmica is fantastically soft to the touch, is resistant to threads pulling and is stretchy for a great fit. It is not going to transform you from a back of the bunch grunter to Bradley Wiggins, but every little bit helps!

We regularly deal with the poor schmuck who has been blackmailed or otherwise bullied into organising custom kit for a cycling or triathlon club – by the time they get in touch with us, they are normally close to breakdown having spent months begging club member to VOTE ON THE NEW KIT DESIGN and to MAKE THEIR MIND UP about WHAT KIT THEY WANT and to PAY UP IMMEDIATELY etc etc.

We try our best to make the process of ordering and getting designs done as painless as possible (we can work from a crayon sketch if necessary, you can send logos in any format and we will redraft as many times as required for example), but Kit Manager has to be one of the hardest and most thankless jobs in the world of sport.

I had to share this video with you on the joys of running a cycling club:

If you would like to organise some jerseys for a charity cycling event or similar and have to take orders from many individuals and post out a load of kit, why not let us take the strain?

We can take orders from individuals taking part in your event, receive payment from them and then distribute the kit. All you have to do is decide a design and then put your feet up and put the kettle on….

Our standard charges are EUR3.50 per dispatch for one item and then EUR2.00 for each extra item added. In order to get our standard prices, we will have to ask that at least 10 of each item are ordered. If you would like to raise some money for your charity through the sale of the clothing then we can organise this too.

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With some spectacular bad timing, Nicole and Charlie who run the front end of Carvalho Custom between them, managed to have babies within a couple of months of each other. To commemorate this fact (and in the interest of promoting cycling to younger generations) we have brought out some baby size cycling jerseys in manly sky blue and girly Barbie pink.

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We managed to get Salvador to agree to model his new jersey, (although he wouldn’t extend to smiling for the photo). It is an exact replica of our full size cycling jerseys, made out of the same microfibre and with three back pockets for him to carry his gels and rain gilet. They do make an incredibly cute gift to offer a cycling made friend who has just had a baby!

These jerseys are available to buy at EUR19.50 each plus postage and we can also make custom versions if required. We sometimes sell these mini cycling jerseys for teams to hand out to sponsors and for other promotional activities so if you are interested in having some made, please get in touch.