Reverse Gear Blog

A creative start

If you’ve been to the Reverse Gear site, you have already met us as we cycled on screen. If you haven’t been there yet - check it out and let us know what you think. It’s not perfect - but it is “us” and it was fun producing the ’site-greeter’. However if you ask our friend David he may tell you that we had more “fun” than he did. Most of the site-greeters he has produced are done with people walking on or sitting still. Ours on the other hand was a producer’s nightmare with two moving single trikes, a tandem as long as a car, and a metal table that glittered and shone. Nonetheless, he managed very well with all of the on-screen movement and post-production removal of shadows. And since we were riding onto the scene it was also difficult to use a prompter for the script. So as to be expected we messed up the words. It took may takes and re-takes to get video that could be used. We would like to thank our friends David and Will for their patience on shoot day and applaud David at netvideomaker for making us look as good as we do - on our Reverse Gear site.

We did the site-greeter ourselves because we wanted  you to see that we are just a couple of ordinary cyclists - who wanted to “make a difference”. Len was complaining that cycling gear had not yet transformed to meet the unique needs of the growing recumbent cycling market. And I took that as a challenge!!! Anybody who knows us, knows that this is typical. I say “we can do that” and then Len is left “to do it”.

So in January over a bottle of wine, we scribbled some pictures of what cycling gear for recumbent riders could look like. In February we found Norm at Axis Gear - who agreed to help us manufacture. Several years earlier he had realized a similar dream of creating “adventure cycle clothing”. So he had already lived and learned from some of the challenges and has been extremely helpful. In April, we began manufacturing.

Simultaneously, Len was charged with creating a brand and a website so we could sell on-line. While we had built several websites in the past for Ashby Bachmann (our management consulting business) this one was more complex - with shopping cart and postage calculators and lots of photos. But Len and Pat at BlackCap Design were up for the challenges. Len came up with the name Reverse Gear, based on the fact that many of our items would be “back to front” or reverse of what traditional cyclists were wearing. And thanx to Krissy’s creativity at MouseInk we had a logo that we think says it all.

Phew -  just in time guys. We went live just one day before we left for the USA to launch the Reverse Gear product line at several bike rallies.

Thank goodness for friends

In our research of the recumbent market, we discovered hundreds of cycle dealers in North America and many great events and rallies. We narrowed our choice to three this year - PA, CA and WI. And then we hit our next challenge. We are “car-less” - so how would we get there?

Will and Yvonne to the rescue! They graciously lent us their Dodge Caravan. We loaded the boxes of new Reverse Gear clothing in the van and off on the road-trip we went. And Reverse Gear was launched…

More to come

We’ve got more stories to tell about: our travels, our friends, our supporters and dealers, our customers, our love of cycling and our values - of “making a difference”. That’s why we’ve started this blog.

We hope you will come back from time to time and share your stories about cycling and your comments about: the blog, Reverse Gear products, our dealers, and anything else relevant to the cycling community.

For now - I’m Len and I’m Judi and we are reachable through the blog comments or at Reverse Gear.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Reverse Gear Inc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.