BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
OTE Sports has announced that Raleigh UK will be its official distributor for cycling in the UK for the next three years.
The OTE range – which includes energy gels, caffeine gels, energy drinks, energy bars and recovery drinks – are all naturally flavoured, free from artificial sweeteners and colours, and have a unique pH neutral formula to aid digestion. They’ve already received praise from the likes of bikeradar.com, road.cc and triradar.com.
Launched at the start of 2013 by Peter Slater – founding director of SiS, ex-elite road cyclist Shaun Pearson and retail and brand expert Matt Harrison, OTE prides itself on having ‘brought a new mindset to the sports nutrition market’ and is dedicated to creating tasty and effective products to help boost performance.
“We are delighted to appoint Raleigh as our cycling distributor in the UK," said OTE Sports co-founder and director Matt Harrison. "Raleigh has a great heritage, and when we heard their plans for 2014 with a stated objective of working with premium top end brands, we knew they were the right partner for us. There is a new era on the way for sports nutrition and with Raleigh’s help OTE will be at the forefront of that.”
The deal sees OTE join Raleigh’s growing product portfolio aimed at elite athletes. Paul Cooke, Raleigh UK product manager, added: “OTE Sports philosophy is one of quality and innovation, and they have developed a range of great tasting, functional products that mark a new and exciting era in sports nutrition, that we are delighted to be involved with.”
Harrison took BikeBiz through the creation of the brand: "We felt that there was a real gap at the premium end of the sports nutrition market. While the market has grown, we felt that it hasn’t really developed around consumer needs – and there’s a lot of ‘me-too’ product out there.
"We’ve tried to have lots of points of differences with our range, including the packaging which we’ve kept simple while adding things like duel delivery on the gels, which riders can tear in two places. We’ve worked with a design agency used to working in the food market to create them.
"We launched with a comprehensive range of gels and drinks and this year have launched hydro tablets and a unique bar based on what the pro riders have been using for the past 18 months which their chefs have been making up for them. These Duo bars are pre cut into equal pieces, with each piece providing 20g of carbs.
"Raleigh fully understand the brand and they wanted something that stood out."
The brand will be appearing at Raleigh’s Heron house show and the London Bike Show in the next few weeks. In the meantime there’s more on the range at www.otesports.co.uk
OTE is among those backing this year’s Tour of Wessex.
