27 Aug 2007

During post-race chats with Brett and Erin last week, the guys informed me that they had been approached at the races buy people saying “Hey, nice write-up in Australian Mountain Bike magazine”, which left me to ponder….”What write-up?”

Granted, I had sent news of our new Ether model to about a dozen print and online publications in the hope of free press, but I never expected anything to result from it. Not from lack of trying - in 5 years we’ve had four free bits of press - so when you send a dozen e-mails off every few months, after a while you just automatically expect a ‘dear John’ or ‘Keep up the good work!’ reply. In this day and age (or maybe I’m naive and it’s always been like that) if you want ‘advertorial’, you get lumped with a suggestion of ‘perhaps you might like to buy some advertising?’. It’s thinly veiled ‘cash for comment’, sure, but I understand that advertising pays for magazines and without it, well, there’d be no magazine, so I begrudgingly accept it in my own special unaccepting way. Of course, as a company with no advertising budget (a great Aussie tradition), it makes entry into the ‘big boy’ arena a tad difficult.

So of the 12 or so publications I sent into, only one - Australian Mountain Bike - showed any interest of note. Credit where credit is due though - Dirt Rag wanted us to send one in for testing, but the 500 bucks of airfreight plus the fact they wanted it for six months left that option at this stage a little undoable. After swapping a few e-mails with Derek from AMB, lo and behold with no notification or editing we get a little sidebar report -

Aside from the fact that I seem a little smug and sacrastic in the first paragraph, beggars not being choosers and all that, it’s a good piece, and more importantly, the price was right! While I’m fundamentally against cash for comment, I applaude Derek and the guys at AMB for at least having space for the ‘little guy’ who doesn’t cash to splash on extravagant advertising, and I applaude them for seeing that things can actually be news worthy (Whatever constitutes a ‘news service’ these days) without any other strings attached. When Aussie magazines say to me ‘We’re pro the local industry’, I’m talking about companies that actually design and sell their own product, not wholesalers who sell someone elses product.

There’s about 12 of those sorts of companies in the whole of Australia. Certainly there’s room in local print and online publications to actually support local industry, but perhaps more importantly, actually publish ‘news’ that is clearly newsworthy and of interest to their readers, rather than having thinly veiled ‘news’ that is essentially, an advertisement.

Kudos to Derek and AMB for getting behind our efforts!

Posted by warwick @ 5:31 am

18 Aug 2007

Some of you might not know that before I was obsessed with Orange being the official colour of Team Thylacine, I had a big thing for all things coppery. Guess I still do, because I still like warm metallic colours and when someone else does one in copper or brass or bronze, I always give it a second look. Classic example is this copper plated number from GroundUp Designs :

For those of you not familiar (okay, I actually just like looking at it), behold Thylacine 0001 :

Why am I bringing this up? Good old fashioned nostalgia basically, because due to some unknown and strange reason, until yesterday this has been the only copper Thylacine, despite it being the ‘Team’ colour for the first couple of years. So, some six years later, the old girl is no longer the only copper Thylacine and has finally been joined by this fine example, soon to be on it’s way to sunny Pennsylvania :

Posted by warwick @ 10:34 am