Stick (Legs) the kettle on, it's newsletter time....

Hello everyone....welcome to our first ever newsletter! We'll hopefully be providing updates through the newsletter on a quarterly basis alongside our blog posts on the internet. Plenty of witty and mildly informative updates for you to read through. Hope you enjoy!

As our first ever newsletter, this was supposed to be a Christmas newsletter to not only welcome you to the team, but also to wish you all a merry Christmas BUT unfortunately due to the age I'm now at, my body is less robust than what it use to be and I snapped my ACL and damaged cartilage in my knee at the back end of last year. But we're back now (albeit hobbling and with one very skinny leg) to give you an update from a busy 2022 for the Stick Legs team. You may even enjoy this so much, you may think to yourself, 'I need Stick Legs in my life!'

Chapter One - Let's expand the range

So we kicked off 2022 by committing to continue building our kit offer, by expanding the range, including our first ever bib shorts and also improving the male/female jersey range we have in the offer. If you've checked out our website, you'll of noticed we don't have a huge range of kit compared to others, but as the journey is going to be a long and fruitful one, let's just take it slow and see how we go...

 for all the decisions we have nervously made over the years, some we have celebrated as successes (i.e. like when we committed to our current kit manufacturers, who are fantastic), whilst other decisions, we have had to grit our teeth, take a deep breath and realise we have dropped a clanger and try to see the funny side (i.e. our marketing idea to buy a few big crates of bottled water with Stick Legs branding on, only for the water to turn out to taste a bit worse than tap water, that we couldn't even give away at events, except to Poppy, the SL Team mascot, who'll eat or drink anything).

But all these experiences are helping us develop and learn, unless we make the same mistakes again! Its also confirmed to us that there are many, many fantastic people out there who are buying our kit and to these people (that may be you), we say thank you!

Chapter 2 - Marketing.....uh oh....

So as we're a tiny tadpole in the huge pond that is the world of cycling apparel, we have to try and market ourselves as best we can and to be completely honest, if this was a school report on our marketing to date, it'd say, 'A fair effort, but definitely room for improvement'.

We're not really big fans of social media, so you may of noticed our social media channels are pretty flimsy at best, apologies for this, but let us assure you, we'll look in to improving this in the coming months/years and you'll soon have us pinging up on all over your social media accounts, and you can look forward to seeing us doing, brilliantly choreographed dances wearing SL lycra, voice overs from classic movie lines wearing SL lycra, super imposing SL kit on famous people, a dog wearing SL kit.....you know, all those classic social media posts we all love to watch.....

With our current lack of skill/appetite for social media, our favourite way to market the brand is that old fashioned way of communicating, where you go out and speak face to face with people...how bizarre!! We chat cycling, have a laugh, talk about the brand and get honest feedback from you all. Yep, we get it, we're hitting tiny numbers of potential customers with this approach, compared to using social media and yes we know that heading to shows and other events across the country is hugely expensive in comparison to social media advertising, but we love it and it allows us to share what's behind the Stick Legs brand.....us and our enthusiastic outlook on life! Those that get it, join the community and we slowly build from there.

With this in mind, in 2022 we committed a big amount of our marketing budget to attend the two biggest cycling shows in the UK, the Cycle Show at London's Alexandra Palace in April 2022 and the National Cycling Show at Birmingham's NEC in June 2022, so we could show off what we've developed and talk to as many possible Stick Leg fans as we could. These shows were fantastic! It's great to see people now recognising the brand when they see us at shows and it's fantastic to meet those who've bought our kit previously (at shows or online) and come over to say hello and give great feedback on the kit. we love this!

Attending shows is also great for our popular pastime of people watching. As a small brand at big shows we can sometimes have quiet times when people will maybe want to avoid our fantastic sales chit chat. Being a fairly unknown brand with a weird (some would say) name, people's reactions are entertaining to see, anything from happiness, to shock, to confusion, it's great to watch!

During 2022 we also got to head out to more local events such as the Coast and Clay Sportive down here in sunny Cornwall. A great day out supporting the fantastic work undertaken locally to keep promoting cycling and it's benefits both physically and mentally.

So, the main takeaway we have from our adventures on the road this year is, if you see our stand at a show in 2023, please come and say hi to the team. We are not scary and won't force you to buy anything, unless we've had a really quiet day and we need some sales.....only joking we wouldn't do that.....maybe.

Cycling Plus Coverage

So the fantastic guys at Cycling Plus magazine gave us some further great coverage in 2022 reviewing not only our latest jersey (SL4 jersey), but also our (B1) bib shorts. This coverage was absolutely amazing and something we really appreciate, but it's something we need to continually look to achieve to give us the exposure we need to compete with the big fish in that pond I was talking about earlier.

So that was 2022.....

And that's our delayed review of 2022 in a nut shell, it was a pretty exciting and busy year and we're happy that the brand is slowly building. We just want to say thanks, we really appreciate the support we've had so far and hopefully continue to receive going forward. 2023 should be another great year, hopefully even better, but you never know, especially with the challenges we are all currently facing, but as long as we get out on our bikes, we'll be happy right?

So if you're reading this and thinking, 'yeah I like these guys', please spread the word about Stick Legs Cycling to your friends and family and tell them to join the Stick Legs community through our website or media channels.

We'll speak again soon with some further updates on what we're up to and how we're doing.

Over n Out,

Jon - The holder of the Original Sticks