South African apparel brand Ciovita has been making waves in its home market for eight years. Owning its Cape Town-based manufacturing facilities sets the brand apart from many of its competitors in the cycling apparel space.
The brand has a long-standing partnership with the Epic Global MTB Series, part of the Ironman group, providing leaders jerseys worn by the likes of Nino Schurter and Annika Langvad. With a strong and growing footprint with selected retail partners across Europe, the brand is now making innovative moves here in the UK.
To find out more, Simon Cox sat down for a conversation with the newly appointed UK chief of sales, Dave Marshall.
Dave, you’re coming into the cycling industry from the world of IT and consumer electronics. How does this shape your view of doing business?
My working background saw me manage the distribution channels across Europe and Latin America for Jabra and Plantronics. It really gives you a data-driven approach. One of the things that you really look for is transparency of information flow from the distribution chain, through the retailers, to go into your systems.
This ensures that, at any one time, you can see exactly what’s happening across the landscape of your market: Who your top resellers are. Who’s growing fast? Who’s not growing? Who’s engaging in your partner portal? How many people have completed the training? All basic information to get a rich picture of the market. We’d structure our programmes based on the sales data.
My feeling is that as we see new investors funding cycling brands, professionalisation will take hold. Knowing your sell-out data (what your retail partners have sold, when, and for how much) is critical business information.
How will Ciovita shape its business here in the UK?
From a sales data point of view, the UK is a blank piece of paper as far as Ciovita is concerned. Dean Norman has done a great job with opening conversations, establishing partnerships, making relationships across the events, and identifying people to become Brand Champions.
As a new market entrant, a challenger brand, we are executing a plan which has a Brand Champion programme as one of the founding elements.
What is a Ciovita Brand Champion?
Many things to be honest. In the context of the business, Brand Champions represent that way we will showcase Ciovita in the UK.
First and foremost, they will be active cyclists, in clubs and groups, active on social media, be driven by charitable interests and, of course, be happy to wear our kit on all their rides.
Driving business to www.ciovita.com for retail and custom kit designs for clubs and charities. We are not ruling out a select number of retailers, but right now the focus is on the Brand Champion. In time we can foresee having retail stores aligned to a Brand Champion for local synergy. This way we can build retailer partnerships which are valued and supported.
Can you give some insight into how you’ve identified and interviewed your Brand Champions?
Sure. What we’ve looked for are people who organically post about their cycling, so enthusiastic cyclists who post regularly. At this stage in our UK journey, we want to build a fan base, which our Brand Champions are critical for. To also make it clear, we’re not looking for those with big social media follower stats at this point.
There is a crossover for sure, a tipping point where the content creation becomes professional and it becomes a business. We want regular people with a passion.
We definitely do see social media – LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Strava – as a prime means to engage with cyclists, forming connections with a community that our Brand Champions have organically built.
Why not a big audience, professional content creator?
As just one example, chatting with athletes of any level it becomes clear they will post content, but training is, understandably, the primary focus. Getting involved in community building and sales enablement isn’t high on the priority list for many. We will still work with athletes of course, but in a slightly different way.
Right now, we are not focused on paid content creation or advertising. Yes, it has its place, but our investment is in the Brand Champions at this point.
Ciovita Brand Champions are people who cycle with friends, social groups, and cycling clubs. Offering a promo code will be something that Brand Champions can do organically, via these friendship circles. I’d call this a ‘friends of Ciovita’ approach, which is the right method for us as a new market entrant in the UK.
We’ve already interviewed several high-quality business people, with good networks, and are active on social media with their cycling escapades, and strong local audience.
So far, we have recruited 14 absolutely stellar Brand Champions – spanning the country from the Moray Firth in Scotland, right down to the Surrey Hills and west as far as Pembrokeshire.
So, your Brand Champions could be described as ‘local legends’?
That captures much of what we’re looking for in our Brand Champions. Critically, they’ll likely have a professional work-life which isn’t bicycle industry-centred. Having a wider view is an integral part. Being engaged with charities is high on our list of desirable qualities.
You mentioned local retail partnerships. How do these develop over the coming 12 to 24 months?
As our starting point, we see the Brand Champion being an effective way of having a showroom (online and in person) which in turn supports the brand when identifying and then supporting future local retail partners. We want our Brand Champions to have strong relationships with those retailers, having “skin in the game” to identify the right partners for our brand.
From this, you can likely see that Ciovita Brand Champions are part of a longer, more natural and authentic, journey.
Before we started you mentioned “doing good things which make a difference” – can you expand on that for us?
For sure. Ciovita has a strong charitable element to the business. In Cape Town, we make a difference for our employees and engage in wider social causes in South Africa and beyond. We recently sponsored a ride in Amsterdam, with the Aidsfonds charity.
As part of the interview process for Brand Champions, we have deliberately hired people with charity causes behind them, so we know already our champions will help further expose Ciovita to new causes to make a difference. Charitable cycling events are a visible part of our Brand Champion activity.
Hopefully, as the Brand Champion programme beds, it will bring significant growth to our sales results in the UK, which in turn will fuel further investment from us.
