We've never properly sponsored a team before, but we're now committed to the idea to the point where we've reached out to a few target teams. The place where we'd like to be is NRC/NCC-level women's teams. There's another discussion about how sponsorship squares with our fundamental philosophy, but that's not for now.
Supporting women's cycling offers a lot of advantages: the top levels of the domestic game are more accessible than they are with men's cycling, the teams are a bit smaller so it's not quite such a big bite of the apple, and there's the general tailwind that supporting women's cycling makes a good story. And it does. It's a developing sport that's got a lot going for it, with some significant obstacles. It's at a level where alleviating some of those obstacles is within our reach. Plus, while there are some really big and strong teams out there (Tibco, Optum, Pepper Palace, etc), there are also a bunch of teams that are going to be racing in top-tier events where support on the order of what we can offer would make an enormous difference.
The problem to date? We can't get a call back. We've contacted a fairly limited number of teams, and immediately excluded ones that we knew were too big for us, or had already announced a wheel sponsor for 2015, or had other conflicting sponsorship in place. But of the ones we've contacted, we haven't gotten a single response. I know we're late to the game, and maybe a week isn't enough time to give someone a chance to respond to an offer like this, but as a willing sponsor to the game I'll admit it's a bit of a turnoff.
So, here's the deal: if you've got a women's team that competes at the NRC/NCC level, that has its act together, doesn't have conflicting sponsors in place, and wants to ride awesome wheels in 2015, get in touch.
Thanks
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As long as prices don't go up, I'm good with this.
You guys have always stated that sponsoring a team costs money and the individual buyers of your equipment end up paying a little, sometimes a lot more so you can get your name out there. So how you run your business is, well, your business but I'm just wondering the change in thinking?
Dave said when talking about Deng-Fu that sponsoring a pro tour team brings legitimacy to the brand. This would be the first step.
This is great.
Mike's got more in-depth thoughts to bring in here, but this is not a first step towards sponsoring a ProTour team. That is "bought legitimacy." Someone will have a problem with me saying this, but we started at a similar time as another brand, using the same rims they used. This other nearly immediately sponsored the Johnny Hoogerland team, we didn't. Their prices have always been much higher than ours – currently they are about 30% more, they've just pursued that different track. As of now, this other brand sponsors Sunweb-Napolean Games (the cx team that Klaas and Pauwels are on), Caja Rural, Topsport, and a smaller team or two.The people who promote their wheels as somehow being something ours aren't will prove the legitimacy that sponsorship can extend to a brand. Someone will get pissed for some reason if I'd used the other brand's name, so I didn't. What we are talking about doing is not even the tip of the iceberg of what this other brand does. It would help us in a lot of ways – there is more on road testing to be done than I can do, it will allow us to closely track product versus use, it will support a side of the sport that we want to support, and there is a perception that I sometimes get at events I go to that we are somehow "dicks" for not "giving back" more. Sort of a funny deal to be held responsible for "giving back" what you didn't "take" in the first place, but the world provides lots of head scratchers like that. The headline thing is that it's well within our means to have a profound positive impact on a women's team and we'd like to do it. This will also have no direct impact on prices. If it works well, it should have the opposite effect over time.