Bike industry veteran Drew Johnson has just become the Australian agent for a clothing brand that’s new to this market called ‘Cuore’ (pronounced ‘kwar-ay’) .
Back in our July 2013 online edition of Bicycling Trade we reported that Drew was leaving his previous role as National Sales Manager at Shimano and setting up on his own, initially to import a USA designed long distance road riding bicycle called Volagi.
This agency will continue, but now he’s also setting up the Australian and New Zealand operations of Cuore.
“Cuore is a brand that was established in the late 1980’s in Switzerland by a gentleman named Hugo Gibel,” Drew explained. “It’s not a new brand in Europe, however at the beginning of last year the two men who built Pearl Izumi globally, Juergen Eckmann and Juergen Sprich, left the Shimano Pearl Izumi fold and went across to Cuore.
From my time at Shimano I ran the Pearl Izumi side of things here in Australia so I knew what they were like to work with and suffice to say they are absolutely the best apparel men I have ever been involved with.
“When I made the decision that I was leaving Shimano, I decided that I would join up with them if it was possible. Essentially that’s how we got started.
“They have an office in Switzerland and another in Germany, which takes care of all of Europe. Juergen Eckmann runs the American office. He’s got full time staff there in Boulder, Colorado and I’m running Australia and New Zealand from here in Sydney. It’s a small but auspicious start for us, for sure.
“Hugo Gibel is a major partner still, but works in the background more these days. It’s really the two Juergens that are the driving the business now and driving the processes in terms of manufacturing and so on, which leads to the second strength or pillar of our business.
“That is that Cuore is a company in two parts. The first is the Cuore brand and the other is that ‘Outskin’, which is a manufacturing company. Outskin produces premium apparel for companies like Specialized, Rapha, Pearl Izumi and Tineli. All sorts of different companies have their product produced from this factory. Everything involved with our business is produced ‘in house’. The chamois are produced in house. We do gloves, socks and caps. Everything is in the one building in China.”
Custom Only, Not Stock Lines
Drew explained that he won’t be selling any ‘inline’ clothing, as he describes it. In other words, they want to make shop jerseys for bike shops, which will be unique to that shop, incorporating the shop’s logo and colours, but they won’t be making any generic items.
“We’re going to be offering custom print and custom built product to Australian retailers, clubs and events,” Drew said.
“We can do consumers as well with quantities starting from one. We’ll be very open and very transparent. It’s all web based. Everyone gets their own unique login and they can always see and track where their job is at, where the design process is at, where it is in production, where it is in delivery.
“The website is really powerful. One of the pieces of putting this together down here has been just waiting for the website to be ready and able to recall price correctly for people who are logging on for the first time.
“We have two structures for pricing, one for retailers that come on board and another one that’s more visible to everyone, be it a fundraising ride or whatever. We’ve already done one for the Sydney Children’s Hospital.
“We’re not doing any ‘inline’ at all. That’s not our business. We’ve got customers like Pearl Izumi who already do that business. What we see is that there is no lack of amount brands doing that well.
There are also a lot of cycle custom print brands, but very few of them actually execute on a really nice product and in a timely fashion. That’s really where our horsepower going to be, in the quality, price point and the speed of delivery.
“We definitely want to be doing business with bike shops. We know there’s a lot of guys getting stuff out there, but the quality doesn’t necessarily reflect the quality of the service that the store provides. There’s a lot of ‘me too’ stuff out there but it’s really cheap and nasty. It doesn’t fit well, doesn’t stay together for very long, so we really are targeting people who want a good quality product.
“One of the strengths of our business is that we able to offer a garment where you can modify the length of the arms and modify the length in the hem. We can send a sample range with one or two styles of jerseys and every one of those jerseys has a tag stitched into the seam of the arm and the hem so that whoever who tries it on can gauge how long or how short they would like a particular garment. We can do that for one piece or a thousand pieces, it really doesn’t matter.
“It’s exactly the same stuff that we do for IAM Cycling Team, who we’re a sponsor of in Europe. Same materials, same or similar cut and same type of chamois construction as well. It’s exactly the same item.
“I think more of my focus in the near future will be based around Cuore. I think it needs to be. When I left Shimano I always thought it would be part of what I did, but obviously it’s just taken until now to really get it going, which is almost a year later. For all of those 20 years I’ve been in the cycling industry I’ve always been involved with apparel.
“I know how to do it in terms of forecasting, ranging, marketing and distributing. There are certain traps and pitfalls that you see people get into all the time and I’m not prepared to make those mistakes myself, only because experience has taught me how to go about it the right way.”
Drew said that he has just appointed Matt Allan and his team from Cyclemotion to represent Cuore in WA. He is currently looking for sales agents for Vic/Tas, SA and Qld, preferably with previous premium cycling apparel experience.
