Tips

The world of sports fabrics is evolving at an incredible pace and some of the advances in recent years have really added dramatically to the performance of clothing to improve the comfort and speed of the athlete. We have made it our mission to source the very best fabrics available, so that we can offer our clients the most technically advanced performance kit around.

The latest fabric we have added to our specification list is Teflon treated lycra for our triathlon range: we already use the most technically advanced performance lycra so far developed (Power Lycra) and now we are adding Teflon treatment. As well as reducing the drag coefficient to help you to glide through the water, the Teflon is also hydrophobic, which means it repels water and causes it to bead, making the lycra super-fast drying. This of course means that in a tri race, you will dry off on the bike much faster, making for a more comfortable ride.

The focus of Carvalho Custom is to provide premium technical race kit at reasonable prices – because we are based in Portugal, we can keep our costs down compared to say northern European countries, but on the other hand we have no interest in competing with the cheap and cheerful custom cycling and triathlon kit that is now starting to come out of China.

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!

Alberto Contador just got nicked by the French police for riding through the ‘dark’ tunnels going up the Galibier without being sufficiently visible:
The Spaniard was undergoing specialist training on the descent of the Galibier pass in the Alps for the mountain stages of the Tour when a policeman brought him to a halt.
Spokesman Jacinto Vidarte said the officer told the three-times Tour winner that he was not visible enough on a road that snakes through dark tunnels.
Vidarte told Associated Press that Saxo Bank rider Contador argued that his team’s cars were lighting his way sufficiently, but was forced to give up and “put his bike in the car”.

Don’t you just love a self-important policeman? Saxobank should have come to Carvalho Custom for their kit as we can produce high visibility graphics and lettering on the backs of custom cycling jackets and even jerseys, so that you light up like a Christmas tree.

We have been supplying one of London’s leading sports therapy clinics, Bodylab, with custom cycling and triathlon kit for a few years now. As well as doing general sports therapy, they also provide individual training plans for mainly Ironman triathletes, as well as maintaining their bodies in working order.

One of their clients, David Ball, has just won the Daily Telegraph’s competition to be Britain’s fittest company director and here he is competing in the Lanzarote Ironman. Competing in Ironman events requires extreme attention to detail in terms of preparation and you really need some professional help to make sure that you are properly prepared and having an organisation like Bodylab behind you is invaluable.

Anyway, congratulations to David and to Bodylab!

We are very proud to supply kit to one of Sweden’s leading triathletes, Per Wangel. He has been helping us to launch our custom cycling and triathlon clothing brand in Sweden and he has promised us he is going to get a whole load of podium finishes this year….

Per is an outstanding athlete (cross country skiing as well as triathlon, but he is not a conventional shape, being 194cm and 77kg (6′4 and 12 stone), so we had to make him modified kit. We provide this service to anyone who doesn’t fit normal clothing – just ask about how the system works.

Anyway, have a great season Per and watch this space to see just how many podiums he gets on in 2011….

For those of you who speak Swedish, here is what Per had to say:
Årets mäktigaste triathlonkollektion är på plats i Falun i mitt hem.

Efter sommaren 2010 inledde jag ett samarbete med Carvalho Custom som tillverkar egen designade triathlon kläder från elit till motionärer.

Idag har jag fått delar av min kollektion som skall provas ut och fin justeras.

Det bästa med Carvalho Custom är att de är billiga för er klubbar som är intresserade av att göra en egen triathlonkollektion, ett exempel är att ett par cykelbyxor kostar 400 kr/styck med hur många tryck, färger och loggor som du vill ha tillskillnad mot de Nordiska företaget som tar uppemot 800-1000 kr/styck.

Jag kommer att träna varje pass i dessa kläder och tävla i deras triathlondräkt på de Svenska tävlingarna som jag kör sommaren 2011.

Jag är mycket nöjd med kläderna och kvalitén, de är de bästa cykelbyxorna jag någonsin cyklat med faktiskt.

It is a scene repeated a thousand times across the country. Your sports club is having its AGM and you have decided to turn up to show willing. You sit through the opening gambits – minutes of the last AGM that you had managed to avoid, discussion of the club budget (or lack thereof), talk of ambitious projects that will propel the club to new heights (never going to happen) etc. etc. .

Then a nervous tension starts to build. “So we need to appoint the club committee for the next season”. Nervous glances round the room.

“Who wants to be the Children’s Welfare Officer?” – a few hands go up.

“And the Treasurer?” – someone volunteers.

The tension is growing. Everyone knows what is coming next. “OK, who will be the club clothing representative” – a deafening silence. You stare furiously at your feet. Don’t catch the chairman’s eye now, don’t flinch, shrink down in your chair. “Well if nobody is going to volunteer, we will have to choose someone”. No, please God, don’t let him say my name….

Well it no longer has to be that way if you are chosen to organise your club clothing. No more receiving clothing orders from club members by email, letter, back of fag packet, text, facebook, phone call, shouted across a windy car park. No more laboriously adding everyone’s order together to make up the biannual club order. We have a solution!

Our new Club Clothing Order system will enable you to organise your club order online. The club clothing administrator for your club will just have to set up the club page (hosted on the Carvalho Custom site), where s/he will choose the parameters for the order (deadline, which items can be ordered, currency etc). Then s/he will let club members have the password to the site, and each club member will then log in to enter their personal details and their order.

Once the deadline day is reached the club clothing administrator will have automatically generated a consolidated order for the full club and a list of what everyone has ordered and the cost. This consolidated order is then sent to Carvalho Custom and we make the kit as specified and deliver it to the clothing administrator.

To find out more, please email Nicole (the world’s most friendly ex-New Yorker) and she will answer all your questions.