Overnight Success Wade Wallace

Bowhead is a business that’s only about 5 years old, but it’s been twenty years in the making. It’s a brand many of you probably haven’t heard of before, and despite this I truly hope that you do listen to this episode, because this one is one of the most inspiring stories that I’ve come across while making this podcast. 
Christian Bagg has been a lifelong adrenaline junkie who loved mountain biking and snowboarding. Christian broke his back in 1996 while snowboarding. His life changed forever because of this, but that didn’t hold him back from living his life to the fullest. He quickly adapted by racing wheelchairs, cross country and downhill skiing.
A machinist by trade, Christian couldn’t help thinking about how his adaptive equipment for these sports that he loved kept failing him and how he could make it better. 
Jump ahead to now, 2023, Christian’s company Bowhead has the most innovative adaptive mountain bikes the world has ever seen and has given other people with disabilities a new level of passion they couldn’t enjoy before. 


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This month we’ve got a different episode for you. For a long time now I've been asked to share the origin story of CyclingTips in this podcast, but I always knew there was more to come in this journey. But now that the story is complete, I figured this is a good time to tell it.
Instead of this being a monologue, I asked Mitch Docker (from the Life in the Peloton podcast) to host this episode. Mitch's journey with Life in the Peloton is similar to my own in many ways, and I'm enjoying seeing him take his own path and making a success out of it.
It's hard to say if CyclingTips was a success or not. It depends on how you measure it. Like countless other media brands, CyclingTips is no longer in existence. But at one time it was a daily destination for cycling enthusiasts around the globe, and had a strong place within the cycling community that we were proud of.
The version of CyclingTips that died a quick death was a very popular one. Each year millions of people visited the site. There were thousands of paying members. We ran events. We supported local events whenever we could. We contributed to charitable and social causes. We tried to give a voice to those who didn’t have one. We weren’t the biggest, but we liked to think that we made an impact in our little corner of the world.
From the outside it might have looked like a straightforward path, but as you'll hear it was anything but...

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Over the past decade, MAAP has risen to become one of the most successful and highly regarded apparel brands in the market. Born in the age of Instagram brands in 2014, there was an explosion of these micro-brands with a design-led ethos popping up all over the place. Cycling apparel was going through a big change at this time. People were loving untraditional and playful kits and they were beginning to become a fashion statement just as much as they were a technical product. The barrier to entry for apparel was getting fairly low at this time as custom kit were accessible to anyone, and social media was a new way of gaining a following and building a brand. 
I’ve known the co-founders of MAAP, Jarrad Lawrie and Ollie Cousins since before the inception of the brand. Since their early days we’ve done many kit collaborations together and I’ve had enormous respect and admiration for what they’ve built.
While all of us reside in the city of Melbourne, Australia and see each other from time to time and we have many mutual friends, I actually don’t know their founding story in detail until now. 
I've wanted to do this episode for a long time now and I’m glad I finally got the chance to sit down with Jarrad and Ollie to share their remarkable journey.  

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