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I had the opportunity to do a day of cycling out of Geneva the other day, and we chose the Col de la Colombière. It is a typical alpine climb, 16.3 kms at an average of 6.8%, with a kick in the teeth at the end with 3 kms at over 10%.

It was pretty embarassing to get my backside whipped by my brother, but was made up for by the sight of another guy who was riding with us when he hit the top. Jake was not in the best of shape, but through brute will power he charged to the top and suffered like a dog, in the best tradition of amateur cycling. Pictured here at the top!

If you’ve got a summit photo of someone looking worse off than this, please send it in and we will publish it here (especially if you are wearing Fernando Carvalho kit!).

It is pretty impressive for anyone to ride the Marmotte, so well done to Tom Aikens for completing the course. You can read about it here http://www.menshealth.co.uk/Fitness-&-muscle/active-cycle-challenge/v3.

He was riding with Wyndymilla, which is a new cycling team/cycling coaching outfit, run by ex elite rider Henry Furniss and his gorgeous wife Nasima. They help everyone from complete novices to established cyclists get the most out of riding a bike, with none of the hassle. See their site at www.wyndymilla.com.

Given that they demand only the very best quality cycling clothing and equipment for their members, we are very pleased to supply them, having supplied Henry’s Bike and Run team when he was an elite rider.

We are really happy to be working with AtoZ Adventures who work with us to run cycling holidays in Portugal. They have an outstanding range of moutain bike, road and hybrid holidays on offer and they are fantastic guys as well! They can do guided tours and self-guided tours with GPS or old-fashioned maps, so they have something for everyone.

We used to do a lot more work on running cycling holidays, but our cycling and triathlon custom clothing business has grown so much that we can no longer spend the time required on cycling holidays so we had to hand this side of the business over to a partner company.

We miss out on a lot of sales because potential clients think that we can’t possibly supply pro quality kit at such reasonable prices, so how do we do it?

Our business was set up in 2001 and from the start we were determined to keep our costs down to an absolute minimum. Now that we sell half a million euros of kit a year, the rules are still the same. That means:

* no advertising (word-of-mouth is free!)
* no brochures (the internet is almost free!)
* no free sponsored clothing for high profile teams
* no buying stock on credit and no offering of credit to clients
* no company cars (or company bikes!)
* distributing directly from our factory in Portugal (rather than through agents taking a 30% cut)
* cycling to meetings where possible and videoconferencing even better to avoid travel costs
* setting up long terms deals with suppliers where we guarantee them business if they can guarantee rock bottom prices

Then we have an obsession with 2 things to keep clients coming back:

* First the quality of the kit, so that we can be confident that our kit will sit quite happily next to anything pro athletes use (no cost cutting when it comes to quality!)
* Second a devotion to customer service so that we can be confident no competitor will look after clients better than us (we aim to anwswer emails within two hours of receiving them, but never let them go unanswered more than 24 hours for example).

So that is the secret! We run a business in one of Europe’s lowest cost economies and obsess with keeping our costs down. Then we obsess with delivering pro quality and unbeatable customer service. No secrets there….