168. Quoc Pham: Shoes, Geraint Thomas andFar East factories

0:00As a cycling coach once told me, you train on the turbo and you race on the road. And that's a mantra I've long since stuck by. Grinding out those boring indoor Ks with the hopeful payoff, it'll be worth it, I'll be faster, I'll be better when I go and ride my bike outside. But then Ruvie came along and actually makes riding indoors, whisper it, real. That's because Ruvie is like riding your bike outside, only inside. name a climb a ride a destination Alpe d 'Huez, Sacralabra, Paris-Roubaix, Strada Bianchi, New Zealand, Vietnam and you can ride it all on Ruvie. It makes Ruvie a brilliant way to train for an event or a big trip you can climb the Stavio tackle the Ahrenberg or test your legs over the Poggio all from the comfort well that does depend on how hard you pedal of your home trainer.

0:47Ruvie also super social with loads of group rides and events and from the 12th to the 25th of October it's Ruvie Fest, a celebration of riding together with group rides like Pico del Tedi in Tenerife, Cap de Formentor in Mallorca and Lake Garda in Italy, plus a host of special guests, challenges, rewards and giveaways and the annual Ruvie Fest race which brings riders together for one huge race while keeping the vibe fun and inclusive. Right now, Cyclist Magazine podcast listeners can get a one-month free trial valid from now until the 31st of March 2027 by using the code KEEPITREALCYCLIST at the checkout.

1:26That's KEEPITREALCYCLIST, all one word, at the checkout. Offer valid for new users only.

1:37Hello and welcome back to the Cyclist Magazine podcast. I'm your host James Spender and once again is just me your host James Spender doing this so I feel quite alone which is why I'd like you I'd like you to get in touch I'd love you to get in touch with me no one has is that because no one listened to the last one of these I don't know and tell me what do you like actually do you know what if you like it if you like the podcast tell your mates and if you don't like the podcast tell me but tell me why you know be constructive with that criticism and yeah email me james.spender at metropolis.co.uk.

2:11Anyway, what should I talk to you about today? Well, obviously, we've got a guest. We can go to the guest in a minute and I'll introduce Mr. Kwok Pham, who is our guest today, Kwok of Kwok Shoe fame. However, I thought maybe I'd give you a few little musings because I went out for a ride today and a little insight into my life. My daughter, bless her, woke me up twice in the night screaming blue murder, unconsolable. I was very, very tired therefore in the morning but I dragged my bum out for a ride and it was the best thing I've done today so far other than talking to you guys of course and when you're out on the bike it's nice isn't it because you think about stuff and there's sorts of some simple things that pop into your head and one of them was the mad choices that I've made in not in life just in cycling life where I was riding a bike that's a steel bike that I made actually for cyclist magazine we are a magazine.

3:03You can buy us in shops. We're made of paper. You can also buy us online and then we'll deliver you the paper. But anyway, I made the bike on a frame building course for Cyclist Magazine. So it's a steel bike. And I remember the guy doing it. So shout out to Rob and Pete at Bicycles by Design. I think they're still going. Also Swallow Bikes, they make their own. They said, okay, so what do you want this bike to be? I was like, I want it to be a cool steel race bike. okay here's a fork and some dropouts the dropouts have got um little mounts for mud guards and i was like take them off i'll never need that why would i ever use mud guards number one it went it was raining today i've since fitted some mud guards to this bike there's a pain in the ass because i don't have the mud guard eyelets i had to use a kind of conversion kit that was a bad choice the other one was like how wide are your tires and i was at 25 mil never never going wider so I've got 25 mil tires and you can't fit 28 mil tires on the and the potholes out there man I mean it's lucky it's steel so there's some good vibration damping going on there but anyway what an idiot what an idiot I was and there's a couple of other bikes I've got where I've just really cut down the steerer tube to levels that I don't even know 25 year old me could have got down to I don't know what I was doing they're redundant aren't they in the future for me although I think you can get bonded in steerer kind of tube extenders anyway boring boring but what was lovely uh despite the rain and everything else was there's this point where i was just cycling up a hill and that's kind of what you do isn't it that's why kind of one of the reasons we cycle is to go up hills specifically and i was thinking this is really nice because i wasn't trying to go fast i was also you know riding up a hill that's never easy but it's just thinking like the simple act of climbing, so nice when you stand up out of your saddle and you rock side to side and you've got like a, you're on top of your gear and so it's not a massive effort.

4:54It's almost like you're just dropping your weight into the pedal on either side and you're just slowly going up and it's really blissful. It's just such a lovely thing. So anyway, I thought about those things today on my ride. Anyway, I've definitely said too much. We should move on with the customary introduction to today's show. And that is as follows. Now, I've written this out. Can anyone tell that I'm reading it? Who knows? See what my intonation is like. So my guest today is Kwok Pham. Kwok is the founder of the eponymous, now there's another great word, cycling shoe brand, which he established in 2009.

5:31Before cycling, Kwok worked in fashion and he ran his own label. There, easy for me to say. Ran his own label, but turned his attention to making shoes in that a classic way that people do when they make new stuff. It's the, I'm doing the thing, I'm riding around London on my fixed gear bike commuting and the shoes I'm wearing, they're just not good enough. They're either functionally fine, but ugly, or they were good looking, nice shoes, but they just fell apart when you're wearing toe clips. So Croc decided to make his own and they were called the fixed. And the fixed shoes, which I do remember coming along, there were these beautiful leather shoes, no cleats, which is really odd because they're a cycling shoe, they've got no cleats they kind of look like the shoes that riders wore in the 60s and they got a really good traction i think um in the leroica sort of scene the vintagey sort of scene so that was a springboard but from then quok has gone from strength to strength and now has a range of shoes that you'd expect from any established shoe brand gravel and of course road and he even sponsored garrant thomas um in his final couple of seasons which is when you think about it is massive because this is a wonderful brand, a UK-based brand, got a champion in that.

6:39But it's not got the heritage of like a city. So to get in there, sponsor a rider like G, absolutely fantastic, amazing stuff. We talk about how he managed to do it and it's a really sweet little story actually. But something else we also talk about is just the incredibly steep learning curve of going from making clothing to making shoes. Shoes, I think, are quite technical, just ask Geppetto. and how he managed to not only do that, but then scale that up into a business where he could sell multiple pairs. That requires creating a partnership with a factory. And that is where a lot of this conversation goes.

7:13We dig really deep into the industry and how those brand and factory partnerships work and how that influences the products at the end of the day. And why is that some products are just better and other products almost never can be because you just can't get into those good factories. But Kwok can explain that and does explain that much better and more eloquently than I am, because he's seen it from, you know, he's looked behind the curtain and seen that organ grinder. Anyway, so lots of industry stuff in here. It might sound quite heavy, but it's actually really quite revealing and interesting, I think.

7:46But yeah, as I've said already, I've already said too much. So let's welcome to the show, Quok Fam.

7:56mainly this is just to kind of talk about shoes about quok but also about the industry both from a sort of manufacturing point of view as well as a tech and a fashion point of view because i think you're really uniquely placed in that because i would say you were part of the newer guard that's now looking a bit like the older guard of cycling so we started cyclist magazine this is obviously the podcast in 2012, which was around about the same time that you were starting to bring shoes to market. And that felt to me like I was looking around and seeing all these new brands with this whole cool new aesthetic popping up and doing kind of mad things like releasing a shoe that didn't have a cleat on it.

8:41And then people were buying it. So talk me through those sort of early days and how you saw yourself at that moment in time did you feel like you were a disruptor did you look at the market and go hey there's this gap and i need to do a thing here because no one else is doing it and do you feel like that elder statesman now uh yes and he has evolved a lot since then james in the beginning it was a pain point for myself i was an average cyclist you know around town to and fro everything i did it was on my bike um during that time 2008 9 you know red hook crit single speed you know um you know it's not just a sport it's a lifestyle you know people hanging bikes on their wall the shoes i was wearing it was just like really nice beautiful i love handmade leather shoes but single speed steel bike toe case and strap it was destroying my shoes and you know i want something elegant i didn't want to look like too much like a cyclist you know i wanted to wear functionality but look good at the same time kind of thing and you know i of a few shops and nothing kind of really exists to my taste and I it was just just a pain point I wanted something I like to wear and coming from a brief stint in the fashion world have some understanding of how to communicate with manufacturing but still completely naive and so inexperienced and I thought I'd just give it to go myself and design something I would like to wear and it started out with a simple pen to paper simple upper with a rubber sole and it started from that really and i was trying to bring the fashion world you know into the in the cyclist together this merging of i'm one of the person who i love participating in sport i love playing football but i don't like to talk about it i don't like to watch it you know like i i understand all the tours and you know but i'm not really geek out about you know like the pro side of it yeah the pro side or the name i know i know some players but i'm not really into that i mean to just getting out there and just going for a ride so that fashion side of it you sort of saw that as kind of lacking in cycling in a way at that time yeah you know the clothing i was designing at centrist martin or the thing i was into really nice quality fabric and on the shop floor was like you know high vis lycra synthetic and the syntech back then i think wasn't advanced enough you know it was like it just it just feels tacky of course now synthetic you know it's really come a long way and it's really amazing material but back then i couldn't i just couldn't relate to it and i want something more beautiful nicer um that i can merge this two worlds together which is fashion and cycling so how do you make a shoe i know it sounds it's a very big broad question but having that kernel of an idea feeling that you're drawn into executing that idea there's a big gap in between, which is how do you actually do it?

11:40I know you said put pen to paper. I can sort of envisage that, you know, sketching away in the wee hours, having a really great idea, getting that down. But then who do you then talk to next that goes, hey, Quok, I can make a shoe for you, a prototype. And then who do you talk to after that that goes, hey, I can make you a load of shoes so you can start supplying shops and selling them yourself? I did exactly that. I got, you know this simple sketch um at that time i somehow um my girlfriend was living in taiwan at that time and i flew to taiwan and just stone cold called a lot of factories uh to show my design and plead with them and only one factory come back to us and you know the next day i took a train down in taichung and visit them show my design and they asked i didn't know nothing about footwear and design or the whole industry and say okay what was your last you know come back to the fashion when i had my own label i was doing shoes and the one thing the most important thing about footwear is the last is that plastic mold that comes inside which is the shoe shape right that's the shoe shape yeah your derby your brogues everything has that aesthetic has that beautiful toe shape and it's already turned by this this this this lass and it started out with i had this lass from uk it's just a simple brogue i made a derby shape just classic round toe shoes but dress shoe lass is not the same as psychic shoe lass because when you're on the pedal your feet's different so i had this lass and they asked me okay you know um we have to modify this last little bit to to accommodate for you know injection rubber you know molding etc so the factory advised me a lot of what's the next step to do um and then have to pick the leather etc so i learned on the go i learned from the factory how to shoe how she made yeah so is this this is a specific shoemaking factory and they're doing just cycling shoes or are they doing sort of other sports like football or are they doing high-end luxury fashion shoes as well they um they're a really big factory they make sketches oh yeah and within their mother company they also have a sub brand with its beautiful dress shoes uh leather handmade shoes and i approach of course the big factory will not take us on because we're small and nowhere but because they want to launch this brand they're just getting themselves out there you know um they see me as an opportunity to like enter the european market or you know an external kind of like forum you know brand i'm not sure but they decided to take me on and it was just like the sub-brand within this massive factory uh empire um making beautiful dress shoes and you know they decided to work with us so how does can you sort of unpack a bit how the kind of relationship to factories works and the role of factories because I think this is applicable to you know bikes themselves and loads of other aspects of um you know it's cycling kit where for example you've got a big American brand saying hey we design all this stuff in California and then you know it says somewhere made in the far east on like the bottom of the down tube or whatever it is but the implication is it's sort of they've all done it and they've gone somewhere else and someone's just put it all together.

15:06But that isn't the case so much that I've been, you know, led to believe over years and having visited some factories in Taiwan and done lots of chats with people about the fabrication. There's a lot of expertise that come from the factories, right? Not all factories are born equal. There's a hierarchy too. And it's, am I right in saying as a, you know, let's say a kind of a newbie, it's harder to get in the door of perhaps the more experienced bigger factories because just the reasons of, you know, one of them kind of being respect and one of them being a bit of like, well, who are you? We don't just deal with anyone off the street.

15:44It's not as simple as saying, I've got some money. Can you make a thing for me? Yeah, there's good factory and there's bad factory. And like you say, good factory, they don't need more clients because their waiting list is huge, you know. And good factory don't take on newbies, you know, with 100 frames or whatever, or maybe less. So, yeah, they, so you, in the beginning, you know, when I first started, you have to kind of like, bigger company choosers, you know, if they say yes, you just have to work what you have. And in the beginning, because your orders are so small, you have to go for the corner of working with like, not a subpar kind of factory.

16:20There's so many things that you have to work around just to make the product work or get what you want. It's only when you get to a certain level, you have volume, then you can approach a bigger factory because then you have more buying power. but a lot of time you know brand will send out a tech pack and then you it's that kind of push and prove between you and a factory of trying to commercialize the product uh you know they have to make sure that it's inefficient for their production line to make it work otherwise it's going to be huge waste of wastage or takes too long and then the product be too expensive so there's a lot of like back and forth uh so if you're young in the beginning you just have to like lay down and listen to your partner and some factory if they're open-minded they can listen to your ideas and go out the box and do something different that's where maybe innovation will come in you know but all the time the innovation is between you and your partner just like pushing and arguing and you know pushing further and sometime your idea will take a week for them to sit and think about it to marinate before they're oh yeah maybe we can do that the kind of thing you know like like getting them out of their comfort zone but yeah it's a lot of back and forth and now when i say partner it's literally that you have to work with your partner it's not like here's my design make it you know maybe you're specialized because you know exactly what you're doing because you have experience you know the size of your children material but if you don't know or half know something it's better to listen to your partner your factory so did it take you a sort of number of years to kind of go through the the ranks as it were and start with that factory which maybe wouldn't be the one that you would choose if you could choose anyone but then make the next step of the next step like how long does that process take and how many partner factories you go through until you get to the one where you're like okay this is where i want to be at yeah i over 10 years i went through a gauntlet of mama's and papa's factory right i went to a big factory where they make, you know, really cheap product, but make a mass scale.

18:21So it was just a trial and error. You know, like, you know, I got excited one time where we moved into this new factory and they were like, oh, we make Rafferty, we make Duraly Shirt. It was like, wow, yeah, you know, I respect this brand. But what they can do for them is not exactly, not the same what they can do for your brand. You know, it's a completely different thing. Is that because they sort of won't do it for you because they need to preserve a level of exclusivity with their other brands or something to do with something else like, I don't know, you don't have enough volume at that moment to be able to ask them to make a soul in a specific way.

18:59Why would they not do for you what they do for the others? That's a big question, Jeremy. It's to do with volume. It's to do with, in the factory, there's many development teams. Each team handle a case of this brand and sometimes maybe you don't get the best development team to handle your case. or sometimes this team is inexperienced so you have to work a lot more with this. So, you know, they reserve their best player to the biggest client, right, of course. Yeah, yeah. And at the same time, back then, it depends on the factories. Like, you know, the way it works is like each worker gets paid for how many pieces they finish.

19:33So if you are a printer, you print a label on each tongue or the upper, you finish 100 units, you get paid for 100 units in a day. So they didn't charge you per complete unit. they charge you how many each station get paid so it's like at the end of the day it's like when it comes there's any imperfection you know the fact you really don't want to destroy the shoe because they lose the whole you know the whole cycle of that product um so yeah it's so it's so tricky but now it's uh now since you have more buying power the game is completely different you have you have more arguing you have you know you get what you want more but at the same time you're more experienced so you don't want to you don't you won't be asking silly requests anymore so that's mad does that mean you have to kind of you have to factor all of that in for example you've got a shoe and you want to put this little detail on it that you ultimately know won't actually make that shoe a better cycling shoe for cycling in but it's just a nice little piece of you know aesthetic charming whatever but then you go it's just not cost effective because now i've got to factor in the person who's going to stamp that thing on that tongue a hundred times a day and now i've got to pay for that as well and then put the margin on top of that and it suddenly makes not doesn't make financial sense is that a sort of fair assessment would that happen yeah it does and the shoe is get broken down so many steps and like you say one of the things we really love on our shoe is the logo they get printed and then they get embossed so you get really nice beautiful like it feels a bit more premium and to take that emboss out you save one dollar you know it's like one dollar is a big saving yeah um so it's a fine balance you know like um you know if you take it out sometimes it can feel cheap but there's a way you can do where this depends on the material it depends on the color you put on it could feel premium so it's like issues it's the design it depends and looking back across your kind of shoe archive as it were and what you're currently making, can you think of specific elements or specific shoes where you have got that factory to push itself out of its comfort zone and do something it didn't think it could do and it's worked out really well?

21:48Or a situation where you've had that idea, you've drawn it, you've got it, you've conceptualised it and you've just had to say, we can't make it work? No.

22:01we open our own tooling so everything we do is 100 % original to us so the last belong to us uniquely shaped to us so that's why when you wear our shoes it fits like no other shoes the material we use the older bottom tooling the injection molding we invest we don't go to a factory buy existing product and put a logo in it we do 100 % original even that you still have restraint of what can and can't be done with a product yeah you know shoemaking is still quite traditional for cycling forward in a way for running shoes different as you see on running there's a new you know spray painting on the shoe and that's much more that's something you have to invent and develop from scratch and that's something that the factory come back down because like you got the money you're willing to invest in it and this is up to you but if you don't have that you kind of have to listen to the factory period if you look at other other sports what what would you like to bring into cycling then because you say cycling shoes are sort of relatively traditionally made still probably not quite you know kind of geppetto in those little cobbler's shop with a hammer and some nails although i'm sure some some shoes are made like that even so but traditional in one sense looking across at you know like you said running footwear or football boots, the boots that people are wearing at the World Cup this year.

23:22And you're like, what would you kind of want to bring in to cycling from another sport? There's not much. I understand footwear across the full broad. And there's not really much technology you can't bring in because it's so specific cycling footwear. You can't use that spray on or having this upper too soft because the shoe, you need to be locked into the shoes and then attached to the pedal. So it's really very limited what kind of material you can use. So something like work on running shoes, there's lots of mesh, there's a lot of light fabric, but that light fabric is not strong enough to hold you for a couple hundred kilometers, or it won't last as long.

23:59So you need something that's really durable. Maybe the thing that's transcended across, cross-pollinated a little bit is like skiing boots, motorcycle boots that cross over, but the material is about the same. there's not much i can bring in to other from other footwear industry but what i see coming is like different worlds now you know like now we're not just cyclists we are cyclists we are trail runners we're road runners so where i see what i'd like to bring more into what i see for us going future is like it's not just cycling it's a world that we build in so in for us there'll be like maybe some nice t-shirts or something that you know or nice beautiful sneaker that you wear off bike so we bring in this world so our customer like is like i said yourself myself we don't just cycle we run you know we do other sport we climb as well so this is this is what i see the future's head in sorry kind of like off your question a little bit yes no no does that does that mean that uh in in the future there'll be kind of companion running shoes trail shoes height you You obviously are doing gravel shoes, you're doing road shoes, kind of cross-country, but would you go into making one day?

25:16Here's the Vaporfly collab with Kwok. I don't know, maybe. For me, when I started this company, I designed something I want to wear. And to be authentic to ourselves, we still need to stick to that. Design a product we like to use. you know our marketing team writes or release the thing what we say is true to us so any product with the design in future is something that our whole team use so maybe if that's travel on the issue then yes it will be but at the same time there's so many products out there james you know there's so many running there's so many big brand hawker you know like on and on um you know nord you know so many so competitive as well you know if we were to release a product we need to be careful and know something that's true to us and what quok's about.

26:11As a cycling coach once told me, you train on the turbo and you race on the road. And that's a mantra I've long since stuck by, grinding out those boring indoor Ks with the hopeful payoff, it'll be worth it, I'll be faster, I'll be better when I go and ride my bike outside. But then Ruvie came along and actually makes riding indoors whisper it real. That's because Ruvie is like riding your bike outside, only inside. Name a climb, a ride, a destination, Outdues, Sacralabra, Paris-Roubaix, Strada Bianchi, New Zealand, Vietnam, and you can ride it all on Ruvie. It makes Ruvie a brilliant way to train for an event or a big trip.

26:50You can climb the Stavio, tackle the Ahrenberg, or test your legs over the Poggio, all from the comfort. Well, that does depend on how hard you pedal of your home trainer. Ruvie's also super social with loads of group rides and events and from the 12th to the 25th of October it's Ruvie Fest, a celebration of riding together with group rides like Pico Del Tade in Tenerife, Cap de Formentor in Mallorca and Lake Garda in Italy, plus a host of special guests, challenges, rewards and giveaways and the annual Ruvie Fest race which brings riders together for one huge race while keeping the vibe fun and inclusive.

27:26Right now, Cyclist Magazine podcast listeners can get a one month free trial valid from now until the 31st of March, 2027 by using the code keepitrealcyclist at the checkout. That's keepitrealcyclist, all one word, at the checkout. Offer valid for new users only.

27:49And switching attention back to the factory situation, because something that occurred to when we're just talking then it's like because you're talking about doing your own tooling which for listeners ostensibly kind of means you create the things that help create the shoot so you've got a last that only quok has and you've made that and you've got some patterns that only you have and you've made the tooling to be able to create those patterns so you're not going to someone and saying hey i like what you make in your catalog can i stick my name on it it's as far away from that as possible but yet not i'm not so sure about your shoes per se but in generally just in cycling you can go on alibaba and you can you can find so many what look to be almost identical but they're copies of things whether it's bike frames whether it's a garmin whether it's a pair of shoes or whether it's a crank set how is that possible is it that the factory that makes for example that crank set makes them a bunch of crank sets without the branding on that it sells separately in its kind of lunch break as it were or after hours so it's actually the same thing it's just not got the branding or are people just the factory is just insanely good at copying stuff and if it's the latter that just absolutely blows my mind because you think of you know the intricacies of of copying yeah kind of a sports watch like an apple watch or something like that and you just think wow how can you copy it so well sell it for so little and that can be a viable business model i think on the surface you know what you say is amazing you know how can you have amazing product for half the price of the original brand or even less but when you start using it that's where you understand why it's so cheap you know i did it myself i went to alibaba and I bought e-brakes yeah and they come I have some as well yeah yeah and when I receive it and I the material I was like oh like would I install this on my bike no I didn't I just like I didn't use it because like it just somehow just feel too cheap and too unsafe somehow it's something about the product where this is my life I need a stopping power you know I'm not going to risk this and install this same thing with you know bikes you know like frames and shoe as well it's like one of my tick in the early days is like you know why cheap shoes are so uncomfortable and so nasty it's simply because they use really you know entry-level materials and it's no well i would say no considerate but the consideration is more about profit than the rider itself itself you know like i can make this shoot at that price point for 60 pound you know we can get it looks so great but when you start using it after you know certain miles you'll have pain in your knees or foot whatever it's not worth it's not worth yeah no and i totally agree and matt yeah in a strange twist of fate i too have those very brakes maybe not the very brakes because there are multiple versions of them and again for listeners that might not have seen them they were initially they're called e-brakes with two e's and they were initially made by a kind of guy in his shed to be super light and they're all these very intricate like many small machined aluminium parts that go together to make you know what we now call old school rim brakes and they were mad money weren't they i think they're like four five hundred quid a caliper or something like that when they came out insanely you can buy them and the picture online looks very very similar for you know 100 euros 100 bucks or something like that yeah and i totally agree with you you take them out the box you're like yeah are these is there is a sort of quality issue here and like you say if they're going to slow you down that's a serious like yeah maybe i won't use these because there is a point where you can't just take form over function they do look quite nice but point being i was blown away by the boxes look like that i'm assuming the boxes would look like the instructions look like the instructions should look like there's little stickers in there which you tend to get little stickers for brands don't you when you buy like a pair of shoes and tires whatever like the detail like printed the kind of polythene bags it comes in are printed with the logos the detail in the forgery because ostensibly it is a forgery is insane and I just kind of can't get my head around and I don't expect you to actually know the answer to this question really i'm just now blathering on but how it's even possible to begin to do all that and then sell it wildly cheaply irrespective of yes the quality is is where you can cut corners it just seems mad to me that you can that anyone would bother doing that and can do it to that degree and you kind of think guys make something really you know solid because you've clearly got like the expertise somewhere in there you're not just i don't know it's not just like some thoughtlessly cheap ripoff.

32:50It's very considered, but yes, the quality isn't there. How does that happen? I just can't get my head around it. There's two things. There's material and there's labor. Yeah. And that's where it is. For me, it's also a race to the bottom as well. You know, like in China, when Elon Musk opened the open source for his Tesla, now there's over 200 of electric cars and everyone's discounting or everyone doing the lowest price. It's the race to the bottom. So it's the same thing with shoes. The big brand, they'll just out-compete you by having the cheaper product. And that's something that we don't get involved with because we can never compete with the big brands on that because they'll just beat us night and day.

33:36We lean towards our strength and work on that. And the people who appreciate your product, you can grow from that. but i would say there is the race to the bottom absolutely and there's certain things in cycling which yeah fulfill that kind of brief and i think maybe for a while there was a point where some kit as in cycling clothing was a sort of a bit of a race to the bottom there suddenly loads of kit brands and kit was quite cheap wheels carbon fiber wheels did a similar thing once upon a time thousands of pounds to get a pair of carbon fiber wheels and then suddenly you could get ones for like 900 quid and it sort of kept on going down and now it's kind of come back up again but looking at shoes to my my well from what i've seen shoes have done that so much but what does seem very prevalent now is the kind of the rise we've talked about this amongst my colleagues at work the rise of the 400 pound shoe which once upon a time was just like what 400 pounds for a pair of cycling shoes i remember my first pair of cycling shoes pair of dhb which is a wiggle brand and they were in a sale, whatever.

34:43But they were like 60 quid, and that was a fair while ago. And now you can happily spend£450 on a pair of shoes that isn't even like a kind of custom fit, like, say, Bont used to do with the moulded carbon fibre or doesn't have these mad exotic materials. I mean, they're exotic, but sure. But what's going on there? Do you sort of look at those brands and go, guys, come on, you're having a laugh. And I'll point out here that you are not in that bracket. You have shoes across a good solid range of price points and you go towards the top end, but I don't think you're knocking the door 450 quid, 500 pounds yet.

35:23Maybe in the future. Yeah, until next year. But it's a valid point, James. But at the same time, I argue it's like, what is the most important contact point in cycling? It's like your shoes, your saddle and your handlebars, the things that you touch. and footwear if you have uncomfortable footwear the whole ride experience is ruined but your stem you can spend 400 bucks on the pest on a stem you know like it doesn't add much to your riding experience i don't think maybe what a few gram lighter maybe for me the somehow like i said the big boy they discount so much they make the shoe so much there's a perceived value it's like people shouldn't be paying like 300 bucks for a pair of shoes but yet you're willing to spend 300 bucks on a stem or a crank or something that's like you know it won't make you any faster but shoe will make you faster or you know like make the whole experience better because it's more comfortable because it's disappearing if your feet so it's really lopsided for me it's like there is footwear is the most important contact point it's where all your power go it's where this where propulsion happens you know but yet you want to skimp out and just put like 100 bucks on your feet yeah and then you know for me it's like if you're a new cyclist i understand like oh maybe i get this medium price point shoe to get anyone more experience i go for higher level but don't skimp out on certain things that maybe put you off cycling forever you know like if you you buy a new bike or you try and something's not quite right or because you skimp out a certain way you won't have enough experience you know when you have a good bikes or good gear the experience completely different you know when i have my first custom made bike that fits for my height of build it's a revelator it's like the best thing in the world it's like bespoke shoes it's the best thing in the world but of course you know everyone can have that but what i'm trying to say is like there's a price for everything is like how much you want enjoyment out of it consider that yeah and i totally buy into that and that goes for lots of things that same logic we can spend an awful lot in an area and then you skimp on something that's actually as important if not more so and has a potentially really positive impact on your enjoyment of say cycling i the kit that you wear uncomfortable kit doesn't matter you can be on the best bike in the world in the most beautiful mountains you'll have a crap day if your bib shorts are chafing so i totally get buy into that i just look at with a sort of canny consumer hat on look at a range of shoes and i'm absolutely not talking about quok shoes by the way i have in mind an italian brand which i just won't say because it's not about sort of talking about brands specifically but in the midpoint of their range are shoes that don't seem to differ hugely from those at the top but the price is near double and i'm sure you must look at other brands your competitors and sort of think what are they up to and i just wonder what you make of stuff like that are those four five hundred pound shoes,£400, let's say, shoes sitting there as the kind of classic halo product to make everything else look very desirable because then you can say, hey, I know these shoes are really expensive, but these shoes are very similar and they're half the price and it sort of endorses the cheaper shoe.

38:41Or do you look at those shoes and go, no, there's real value there. That is, they cost£400 because that's a£400 pair of shoes. There is the tech there. There is the manufacturing detail yeah i i don't really follow other brands i understand what's going on damn it's going to undermine my whole question but i understand how it works i mean like you can have the outsole the same but if you put more carbon material in the outsole the price of that that bottom cell is double the price yeah so it it can relate to what you see and also does that show you what your reference is it has two dial one dial you know one dial from borrow it could be like minimum 10 us dollar per dial yeah so you put you know two dials an extra two does that 20 bucks more in the cost price itself so yeah it can but sometimes it depends you know i'm saying it from us because if we were to put 30 more carbon in an outsole the price of the outsole shoe will jump up quite a lot and maybe some of the bigger brand it's just peer marketing you know just peer marketing because like there's price point for you know for every 20 or 30 bucks increment jumps because they want to cater for everybody yeah no okay i can definitely definitely see that and you just hit upon boas something i was going to ask you about boas or laces i start with laces i love it it's simplicity it's elegant it looks really great it has an advantage of course you know lightweight you can repair it yourself but a negative side is like people say oh you can't adjust it on the go and you know you can't quick release in and out of your shoes you know once you've finished your ride so at a moment in our inventory is like 20 % is lace 80 % is dial system uh we don't call it bow on our shoe because we have our own dial system yeah so for me yeah to your question i love both but at a moment 80 % lean towards dial system because for a while i feel like suddenly everyone had a lace version of their most popular dial whether it's bow or anything else shoe and particularly with gravel as well it was like laces of the future because there's no you can't get grit in a lace and prevent the lace from doing up in the same way you could get grit inside a dial that water doesn't affect it sure okay maybe they could stretch or change length slightly if they if they're wet or but it was almost like hey guys the solution to your problem has been staring you in the face all along it was the humble lace let's return to that and then now it's like full circle everything's like i swear some brands would put like nine boa dials on a shoe if they could if they weren't yeah exactly precisely yeah it's just that isn't it it's like more blades more blades is better it's like is it i don't know i feel like four blades must be better than three because four's a bigger number right so yeah now suddenly um boa dials seems and and and boa itself i mean what do you make of them as a business because that's kind of incredible to make a part and i know you guys say of you know you're on a different boat doing proprietary dials but to have a part that somebody suddenly everyone else goes we want that thing a bit like sram and its universal derailleur hanger you kind of have this solution to a problem which sounds quite kind of democratic hey we're solving a great problem for everyone and then you go and now you need to buy it from us yeah i mean well they invent the dial system and they have hundreds and hundreds of patent uh and it's a good really you know it does solve a problem you know people do want a tighter hold they want to adjust on the fly but my argument to that is that when you adjust on a fly it's a distraction for your ride you have to reach down and you know but it's great for racing but if you're doing i imagine if you're doing touring you know lace is it's great because like once after a couple of times you understand how much pressure you need to put on the outwardly then you don't need to think about you just enjoy your ride you don't start you don't need to fit around your your shoes but you know bow is a good company you know we would in the beginning we're too small they didn't want to work for us so i had to find my own way to have that dial system um and eventually now it's like we develop something that's like on on par really and we'll never yeah we believe in our system and yeah it's it's a really great system it does solve a problem yeah and speaking of development and having in that situation being forced to kind of develop something because you know out of necessity how much input and this is fast forwarding massively jumping in the quok story does a rider like geraint thomas who ended up riding quok shoes for last two seasons of his career is that right that's correct um how does he influence or did he influence design or was it a case of here's a shoe do you like it or which shoe do you like which that we make and we will supply you with them or was there a kind of collaborative effort to help develop a shoe that he would use and that you could also sell um to be honest because uh he doesn't have much time to work with us you know yeah so you couldn't really collaborate with him what we did is like with all our riders we got feedback on our shoes when we sent him our shoes you know we got feedback from him like hey can you because you know pro feet are completely different from like the other 90 percent of the riders feet their feet is like their feet is that skin and bone right like you know when we send our shoe our standard shoes we have to shrink the size in the volume we have to shrink the volume two sides down just to cater for his foot because there's like they're so slim wow and we learn a lot from him like in terms of where to cut the volume down and to make the product better but in terms of the dial system we couldn't do that because that's existing you know we can you know we can make uh you know that's something we already know where we need to improve on but working with a prototype we just get feedback where we need to dial down better in areas of like better heel cup hold better hold on uppers or more room in the toe etc that's something we work with him on the product but you know we have to with garen thomas we have to make a new lass for him.

44:51We have to literally make him take his feet measurement and then shrink the lass so he has his unique lass. So they're fully custom shoes. They're not. Yeah, he's fully custom to his feet. Wow. And how do you sort of go about is brokering the right word to making that relationship come about? Because that's a big thing. Sponsoring, arguably at that time, the UK's top rider, most famous riders, certainly, getting to sponsor his feet. Every single race is going to be wearing your shoes that's massive how did that happen um he's asian reach out to us and they also reach out to four other shoe brand as well you know he's open for a new sponsorship and and you know for us at that time we released the m3 pro it's like a top two level rod shoes and you know when you're doing that you need a big name to represent your product and at that time I, you know, so we're in this mix.

45:46And I was in the factory at that time. And the team said, Gary Thomas need to have a product to wear so he can validate. He won't just sign based on a name brand. He needs to wear it to make sure the product fit his feet or he likes it at least, right? And I was in the factory and we had to get something done. So, you know, I quickly got the team to assemble a pair of shoes to his size. Luckily, I wrote on a little message on the bottom of the shoes to say, dear Mr. Karen Pomer, you know, let's do this, Mr. Quark. And we send it back to him. And I think that little message really resonates with him.

46:24You know, it's like, and also he really resonates with us as well, like for his persona, really fits our brand. And, you know, of course, we didn't have the biggest budget to support him on that. And somehow that small little message, you know, he's really loved what we do as a bride as well. and he decided the sign for us. Just pretty on luck, James. Wow. But presumably, though, somewhere in there is something that's particular to you guys, which is you're at the factory and you can say, I need this shoe to be like this now. And then that can happen. Whereas some other company would have various chains of command and processes to go through.

47:05And you might not be able to get him the shoe that he needs to validate whether or not this is going to be the brand for him in time. So you're presumably getting the product he wants to him quickest. Yeah, I mean, that's one advantage having a smaller company or a startup mindset. It's like, for me now, if any big company, the biggest thing is speed. For us, speed is above all else. If you can get to the shop floor before other run, you'll win. If you get to the finish line before other run, you'll win. you know it's so simple but like you said it's so difficult for the big company to do because they have so many layers people to sign off and i feel like for us as we grow i want to make sure that still that we still have that ability top down you know the the the person on the front line can communicate with the the the ceo directly yeah and give feedback because when you have speed I think you can beat most people.

48:05And how many shoes did G need? As fast as you can make them you were just delivering shoe, shoe, shoe, shoe, shoe you have that speed or does a rider like him, like anyone just kind of go no these are my lucky shoes now and they just have sort of one pair for a season unless they crash and they rip them. He's there now we send whatever shoe he needs we send him that would be 20 pairs a year or even more it depends he race he you know he has shoes for training he has food for racing and i imagine after a few race he'll switch out to a new pair just because you need to keep him nice and box fresh looking nice and box fresh and also the materials over time the material soften up a little bit as well there's good and bad to that of course yeah and you know i'm not expecting to divulge numbers but presumably it's it's a big undertaking because it's not just here have the product and obviously the product is is free it's you're gonna have to pay into the garen thomas kind of sponsorship fund right that's that's what athletes are doing so was that something where you kind of thought do we do this or not because i'm assuming that's a not insignificant chunk of change i love learning and we never had a caliber like that kind of us before and for us to spend some money on that it's like you know look at the value that this person potentially bring and look at how much you spend for me that this outweigh all day long yeah because for us money we can make we can make more of that but the time and the exposure the relationship i think that's a lot more important so like i said you know we learn so much for working with his team and care of themselves it's like it's invaluable yeah and thinking about what you're saying about the the size and the sort of the leanness, the literal lack of body fat probably on a pro rider's foot.

50:02What other things does a pro rider say I want in my shoe that differs from the average Jane or Joe that wants in their shoe? So for example, do they just want stiffness, stiffness, stiffness, make it stiffer, make it stiffer, make it stiffer? Stiff is, I think the hold is really important. They don't want any movement inside their feet. when they're climbing out of the saddle, they want any lateral feet movement at all. So they want the feet to be completely locked in. That's it, period. For them, it's not even aesthetic. It's all about marginal gains. And still thinking stiffness, do you look at other brands and stiffness indexes and go...

50:45And just to unpack that again for listeners, the classic thing of like, this shoe has a stiffness index rating of its sole of 13 and you kind of go on what scale and last year it was 11 so was this always out of 13 and now it's the stiffest it can be or next year there'll be 15 and how do we measure this do you look at those sorts of things and kind of go it's just marketing nonsense or is there genuinely some veracity to it that maybe behind the scenes a factory would rate it like that and that does actually genuinely mean something It does. Okay. In the beginning... I wasn't expecting you to say that.

51:23In the beginning, it was confusing. You know, everyone has their own measurements. So how do you measure it? So it is market in terms of they made up these numbers. But behind that, on the carbon cell, you can have 50 % carbon and the other percentage is glass fiber. Then you can increase the carbon to 70 % and 90%. So that's where you say like 15 % stiffness, there's 15, then there's 13, there's 10. So it's the amount of carbon they put in there. Okay. So in a sole then, a composite sole, you'd have carbon fiber and glass fiber, and resin, are those the primary kind of ingredients or is there other stuff?

52:01Yeah, so it's like composites, injection nylon. So nylon is a core base material. And then you have either 10 % glass fiber and then maybe, you know, it depends on how much you want stiffed this product. You can put in 10 % carbon fiber. You can put 5%, you can put 30 percent uh depends on the stiffness but that 30 percent extra stiffness it comes with a cost as well so injection is carbon powder that goes inside injection mixed with this nylon and helping get heated up injection through into this nozzle into this mold so a unidirectional carbon outsole is like paper so they cut the the sheets they lay it there's certain position that you lay them you can make this also stiffer yeah so unidirectional it's like carbon it's a prepaid It's like your frame.

52:45It's a pre-cut, so they have the specific way, their know-how, how to lay it to maximize its stiffness. So the more layer of carbon, of course, is more expensive. And presumably partly because of the material, but also because it just takes more time to assemble, right? You can't just stir it all up and squirt it into a mold. Yeah, full carbon outsole, like unit direction, is all handmade. It's like someone cutting that piece, laying it down. They cut another piece, laid it on top, laid it on top. Then you have one layer. then you have you know then you do another layer going it's like warp and weff kind of thing so literally someone doing by hand gotcha and other elements of shoes and for a long time have also had the carbon fiber magic kind of sprinkled on them because let's face it cyclists just love anything to do with carbon does it actually have a place on a shoe do you think other than a sole so for example you see carbon fiber uppers and they will have ostensibly what you can see visible carbon fibers in them but they'll be flexible so they won't have the same properties in the way that carbon fiber works when it's cured with resin in a bike frame but they presumably you know a carbon fiber is a different fiber to a cotton yarn or to a bit of kevlar or whatever it is does it actually work basically is what i'm trying to say or is it again and it just looks kind of nice.

54:08It's a nice thing to say your shoe's got. It does work, but you wouldn't use it for the whole upper. You know, like Mavic Comet a few years back. That's right, yeah. They did a whole hard upper, and it's just too hard, too stiff. It's uncomfortable. You know, the upper needs to be soft. It needs to be forgiving for your feet because your feet is just like, you know, it's made of a tissue, soft tissue. So if you can imagine pounding that tissue of cool carbon, it's going to be uncomfortable. So as you know, they did that for a season or so. and then just drop it because it just won't work. And if you use too much of it, it can be really expensive.

54:42Partially, some of it, for reinforcement, you can use it. But for me, after some experience and experimentation, you don't need carbon fabric on top of the upper material because most of the time, maybe you have one little piece that goes underneath the wire to stop the wire cutting into your feet. So that's the friction. But you don't need carbon for that. You can use another material. you know, it worked just the same. Yeah. Now, I remember those Mavic comits coming into the cyclist office and looking at those, and they had a sort of removable kind of sock liner, so it was like a kind of hard exoskeleton of carbon.

55:22And they were astronomically expensive at the time. I think they were like£900, and everyone just went, what? You can basically buy a bike for£900, or you could buy them. So, yeah, probably good that that's been consigned to the scrap heap. but what elements do you think have come along in the last sort of five years that you genuinely think have kind of changed the game for shoes and make shoes now better than shoes 10 years ago or are we just constantly reinventing the wheel and they're all kind of really the same sure but you just might have different aesthetics to them and the sole like you say could be made of different properties or have different properties of course material advance has improve and you can get you know better quality or lighter weight but like i said circular shoe is quite traditional and it's still you can't do too much of it it's like the upper and the bottom sole because the boss is so hard you just glue it together you know where you can't have of course there's a there's a brand in the u.s where he's tried 3d printing i can't remember the name but it just looks so bulky and when you do that you have to do a lot of compensation to make it work like the mavic shoe you have to put a soft sock in to make it work otherwise it's so hard we haven't come along a huge way uh james in cycling footwear because it's such a traditional method of making the footwear do you think there could be a kind of a thing that might unlock that though in the future not too distant future with things like 3d printing or just like additive manufacture any way that you can create from scratch kind of one-off things um in a way that other types a manufacturer you create multiple pieces the same thing and stick them all together where you scan a shoe sorry where you scan a foot and then you make a shoe so you don't have to make a last per person but you can do the equivalent thereof by scanning your foot take a picture on your phone send it off and then bob's your uncle there's a bespoke shoe for you is that on you know somewhere in the not too distant future do you think um maybe you know like that kind of shoe you see in like top level track racing right fully custom made the outside where they glued on the cleat and you know infuse the cleat at the bottom of the sole but there is some i've seen recently as well another shoe was freely printed you know for wide footing wide foot but you know it's just like it's just a faff of like ordering scanning your feet and waiting for like like six freeze to six month, whatever, where you can just go online.

57:58Like people want things so fast and rapid these days. Like, can you even be bothered with that? You know, it's like, I don't know. I might dig my own grave. It's like, I just don't see a future for it. You know, there's really good product out there already. You don't need to reinvent the wheels kind of thing. But in terms of free, I hope there is potentially for like 3D printing outside where we can reduce the wastage on the carbon. you know but until that becomes you can turn out like hundreds of pair per day you know that's a different story we're not quite there yet you know when i remember the 3d one of 3d some 15 years ago i bought the first ever carbon fiber 3d printer it's called the mark one and it's done by kind of mit guys and where they print carbon fiber and nylon and it just stack in layers and i bought this machine trying to bring our development prototype down but even that it's like it took me 24 hours just to bring one foot and at the end it's still not soft enough and it's still not hard enough still quite flexible and i realized you know it's great for maybe prototyping some rapid prototyping but at the same time like you can do rendering these days so much more fast you can visually see what how it looks like so it's like it you know it's still got a long way to go i feel yeah and with that prototyping process how many sort of iterations of a shoe do you have to make how many back and forths say with the factory do you do before you're like that's the finished product is it all sort of theoretical on computer screens rendered whatever and then you just know by the time you kind of hit go on the assembly on the production line that's going to work or do you have you got you know at home masses of prototypes in in the kind of garage lock up of all of the ones that have come here and there and haven't worked out and the things that you've changed yeah you go back to the last you know if you know that last is comfortable and that's work and that's your foundation after that you put anything around that around that last the shoe can will work and it's cool be comfortable and how many iteration uh four or five rounds of iteration before we say oh okay confirmation sample sign off kind of thing but before that we already know once you select your last you know that product is going to work because the last is really comfortable you know basically but but this is based from like you know historical knowledge of what we know what doesn't work but if you start from scratch it's like you know what factory does is what you can do is like buy a pair of shoes send to the factory hey can you copy the last so what they do is they fill in that shoe you know and copy the last and have some like 90 80 90 correct or similar to that last but even that you have to like go your guys oh okay you have to go with it and work with it but it takes you a few years to understand if this lasts is you know because when they copy it's not 100 original it's like you know 90 then you have to like make the product wear tested get writer's feedback after two years okay i want to improve here here here so it takes a lot cycling is like i mean it's for where it's just it's painfully slow right that's it and that's like we can't charge anything less than 150 pound because it's like so much going into yeah designing and manufacturing making a product so does that mean then that you're working on stuff now because of the slowness of that process that will be not seeing the light of day until 2028 yeah uh we sign off our 27 now we start 2028 like and even that if we were to open a new completely new house from scratch we have to think about 2029 well it takes like minimum two years because you have to put some testing involved you can't just make it and then release it because that would just be foolish does it never keep you up at night when you just think what are we going to do next what how how else can we make a better a shoe how are we gonna because you you know ostensibly you gotta keep making new shoes because people's shoes wear out and you want to get new customers and that's just the nature of you know of of manufacturing and commercial sales but i would i always sort of feel for any designer because it must be a bit of a bitter pill where you know you've made something brilliant and then tomorrow you're gonna have to redo it all again because that's you can't just have one thing because people won't put up with that.

1:02:26Yeah, that's it. People get bored after one year wearing the same shoes. So you have to become a new design. Yeah, but I'm glad I'm in cycling world and not fashion world. You know, fashion, there's like four collections per year. There's cruise collection. Now it's Monday, Friday. You know, like how are you going to even keep up with this fast fashion? It's a nightmare. Did you see, I forget, was it Pinarello? Pinarello and Louis Vuitton? am I right in saying it was those two brands yeah it is they produced a bike right yeah produced a bike and who was it designed by wasn't it designed by someone like Pharrell no he was just the head designer of Louis Vuitton at the time but the bike is not designed maybe some graphic work by his team what did you make of that because that's the crossover the fashion world and cycling yeah I mean Louis Vuitton on penarello for some time you know but you know what do i what do i think of it i think it's great in terms of bring more conscious you bring more awareness in the in the side you know in the fashion world um i yeah i think it's great for for spreading awareness uh in terms of bike i said would i ride a bike maybe not um but you know that's that's the question what yeah you are a man of taste that is absolutely clear um it's clearing your shoes it's clearing your presentation not just as you as a person but like everything about quok as well is super slick what do you ride what does your bike look like um i i love steel bikes okay i have with me now a stand forth it's a traditional touring but i put a lap fork on it so it was like steel frame super comfortable like brooks i have a brook saddle on there um i love steel bikes you've got a lap fork on it as in the the suspension the leaf spring suspension forks from iceland that's why i built this bike some 10 years ago yeah before you know it's the best thing ever that's what i have and in taiwan i have a steel bike but you know i still frame because it just about it absorbs vibration much better and it's just like when you're descending it's just so much more rewarding when you know you have something like i feel like if you go anything less than seven kg it may be a bit too light depends on your weight become too light and it becomes too rigid or something yeah it has to be a certain way at 70.5 to eight just below eight it's a sweet spot you know where you get like good riding quality you must be one of the few people that has a steel bike in taiwan i reckon because i say this i did the taiwan kom a few years ago and the bikes on that it's like wow people are spending you know having a pair of lightweights as in the wheels in your bike was like fairly standard everyone this is like five years ago maybe even eight years ago everyone had like oversized jockey wheels on their bikes which it was just that's just what people did so you did you go on the club ride and everyone's like dude you got a steel bike where's all your carbon fancy stuff and your electric gears yeah you know i've got a couple of young guys saying to me like what isn't that too heavy but it's like it's like less than eight kg the whole thing you know um it just it looks like that but it's pretty light and nice yeah you know in asia that's just the thing people like to have the most bling bike and i like to have the most bling footwear so i would like to finish on how do i keep because i think that at the moment white shoes are back am i am i right in saying that white shoe never left not actually never left yeah amen to that how do i keep my white shoes white and i say this because the other day much to my shame i put on a pair of shoes i looked at the weather it has been baking here in the uk but it did rain on this one and i was like i'm not i'm not wearing this pair of shoes i don't want them to get dirty yet because they will and that will be it they're really crispy at the moment but there must be a way there must be you must have some trainer tricks to keep white shoes looking white you know like just soap and water after your eye clean your mouth uh the material we use hopefully can you know you can brush the mud off quite easily you know if you want to have a white knitted shoe forget it you know once you get wet in the rain hell of ruin yeah um so i wouldn't advise to buy knitwear if you want your shoes to remain white but uh classic soap and water james okay so there's a uh sort of mini little epoch almost of people that popped up for a while he kind of restored shoes and there were some brilliant instagram stories of like people sending in like the most beat-up pair of old cities and then some person like meticulously restores them and you're like how have you made this 15 year old pair of shoes look absolutely brand new it's insane have you just painted them again is that what you've done yeah now we we sell a touch-up paint a pen you know like a white pen and that does a pretty good job for scuff on a toe etc but uh yeah there's some really good talented shoe restorer out there nice well if nothing else go and buy that pen everyone that's got a pair of white shoes i'll uh look online after this get me one of those or maybe tipex i don't know is it the same thing could tipex work no it's not the same thing all good stuff well croc thank you so much for your time that was a really interesting um chat and cheers for allowing me to pick your brains about stuff like manufacturing because i appreciate that that's not necessarily in your wheelhouse or what you thought you might be discussing today but it was really interesting nonetheless yeah thank you very much this is the first time where i went really to the detail of the manufacturing side of the business so thank you and i hope that your audience found it valuable i know they will so thank you again thank you bye-bye Quok fam ladies and gents um thank you so much again Quok for coming on the show giving up your time I think I mentioned it in there very stylish guy puts me to shame as I look I stare down the barrel of my webcam and I can see in wonderful 4k rendering that I desperately need a haircut and I'm looking tired and my t-shirt is really old and the print on it is cracking and it wasn't even a t-shirt I bought, a friend of mine gave it to me for his coffee company.

1:08:38And so it goes. But anyway, I won't complain because if I did, you wouldn't listen. Thank you very much. And I find that stuff really interesting, just how the industry sort of ticks, because there's lots of bits, right? You don't just like make a bike or draw a shoe and then send it off to someone and they send back the thing and then you sell it. And I'm sure we've all owned little pieces of kit where you look at it and you're like, that thing's not quite right. And actually you realise the reason that thing's not quite right is because it's not quite right it's because something in the the chain of kind of command got messed up and then a brand you know you i think you often see this in um particularly lots of kind of more fashion stuff but also in cycling kit where it'll be like does it fit is it true to size size up size down and there'll be occasionally just get like a garment and the whole you know even say in the blurb if you're you know we advise you to size down and that to me is like yeah because you probably messed up the pattern on that and actually got suddenly dumped 200 jackets what are you going to do what are you going to sell them but you have to sell them with the caveat um and I've got a pair of shoes not quok I won't tell you who made them and it's absolutely obvious that the tongue it turned out slipped down and so they had to probably I can just imagine all of these little workers having to stay after after work and stick in the office of the brand sticking on little bits of velcro onto the tongue and onto the shoe so that the tongue would not slip down because you look at it you're like that's not a good solution um it's a solution of sorts but it's not the one that you choose from the off i don't think but anyway there we go that's where my mind goes with stuff like that maybe i'm am i boring i'm probably boring did you like listening to that i don't tell my wife about stuff like this and i often work from home mostly work from home so i've only really got this as my sort of out put.

1:10:24So if you listened all the way to the end of the show, thank you so much because you are my only friend and I'd like to hear more from you. So like I said, do email me james.spender. By the way, that is Spender. It's not Spencer, like they call me at the doctors or at the bank. It's Spender. There's a D in there. At Metropolis. M-E-T-O-R. Hang on. M-E-T-R-O-P-O-L-I-S. That's how it's but I'm a chopper, isn't it? .co.uk. So do get in touch. Do let me hear your thoughts, know your thoughts. Try and keep it nice as in, you know, I'm thin skinned. I've been doing therapy for a good couple of years now and it is helping and I genuinely mean that.

1:11:05But I'm also like everybody. I can't take too much criticism. It's too hard. There's too much going on in my life right now for you to pile in and tell me all of this is absolute twaddle. But I don't know, maybe someone's got to tell me because maybe we need to change the whole format of this. these are the conversations that go round and round in my head is it healthy to unload it all now i just don't know but this is why i try and have will or robin with me most of the time so i don't just end up talking to myself or to anyone that will listen um so i'm gonna go i'm gonna go and do some actual work i'm proofreading our lovely magazine we are just about to put issue 180 to bed as they say in the industry it'll be out in a couple of weeks uh some banging stuff in there really great kind of photo gallery on Alpe d 'Huez and its mental fans of this year, the Tour de France.

1:11:53Big ride in Tenerife, which is the highest, I think, maybe it's not quite the highest peak, but it's one of the highest peaks in Europe, isn't it? That's where Team Sky, as was, used to go and train. There'll be some lovely reviews in there from yours truly, I suspect. Anyway, so it goes. I can put some more information in the show notes. and yeah as I say if you listen this far thank you from the bottom of my heart what a journey person you truly are in the meantime fairly well and I shall be back in two weeks