Cycling has been my passion since my first set of wheels: I instantly fell in love with the freedom and speed of the bike.

From the cuts and grazes crashing off home-made jumps on my old shopping bike (my parents didn't buy me a BMX), to my first solo racing bike trips in the mountains around my childhood home. For as long as I can remember it’s always been about the bike.

I grew up in Ireland when that tiny country ruled cycling through the exploits of Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche. I remember cycling 30km in 1987 when I was 13 to see Roche's Tour de France victory parade in Dublin - at 13 my bike was my ticket to freedom.

With only the occasional race shown on television, I learnt about the races, heroes and history of cycling through well-thumbed magazines and books. I read of legends - the effortless style of Coppi, the defiance of Hinault, the all-consuming talent of Merckx and the iconic arenas of the sport -Koppenberg, Madonna di Ghisallo, Galibier, Gavia, Tourmalet.

Fast forward rather too many years. I still love cycling and now marry that passion to my love of design. I want the designs I create to tell the stories I love about this sport. The characters, the rides, the races, the villains, the legends. No other sport has more. Cycling has a place alongside the most storied and mythic sports, a sport that thrives on legendary escapades, impossible suffering, panache and derring-do. We crave the great escape that shapes a race, that defies the extremes of landscape and weather that make or break a champion. A fight against nature, against gravity, against the will of the pack.

I now have a small family - Wendy, my lovely wife, helps run the shop (I work in London working in the music industry) and tolerates my bike obsession. Margot, my daughter, is too young to ride yet, but loves being ferried around on the back of her mum’s bike. And Monty, my five-year-old son, flies up the hills like a little Contador. Doubtless I am projecting my own dreams onto him. But I also see the same joy in him that the bike gave me and gives all of us.

I hope that the designs capture just a touch of the magnificence of this sport. We're trying to create something that stand out, with stories to tell and legends to create, just like the books I read as a boy.

I hope you like them as much as I enjoy creating them - there's a lifetime of passion behind them.

Neil