It's Our Birthday - Celebrating 10 Years Of Parcours !

Ten years ago today, Parcours was launched to the world. Standing at the London Triathlon Expo, next to a banner with the logo on, it felt incredibly real.

A decade has flown by though, so before we hit another ten years, I wanted to look back at some of the moments that got us here.

The story really starts months before the launch, in the A2 wind tunnel in early 2016. I'd spent months believing the numbers should work. Believing and knowing are different things. When the data came back that day, I knew for the first time that we had something credible.

In June that year I flew to China for my first factory visit. First time in the country, and the first time in this whole venture that I felt genuinely out of my comfort zone. Everything was unfamiliar. But getting to know the team out there and building relationships was absolutely critical. A decade on, those relationships are still central to how we work, and they were the first of many friendships Parcours has built.

Next came launch day. Putting the brand out to the public and gauging the reaction. It was a busy summer, getting ready for the moment we were going to ask riders to put their trust in a new business. But the conversations we had that first weekend were invaluable, teaching me early on that listening to our riders was one of the most important things we could do.

The first real outside verdict came a few months later. I was on a plane heading off on holiday to South America, and I opened up 220 Triathlon to find our first Best Buy award. I read it more than once. When you're a small brand betting everything on an idea, that kind of thing tells you you're not mad. Honestly, that opened the floodgates and orders started rolling in thick & fast.

In 2018 we launched our technical partnership with Steve Faulkner and Nottingham Trent University Sports Engineering. It gave us proper research and rigour, the engineering foundation I'd always wanted to build out underneath the brand. That work led to the Strade in January 2020, our first fully in-house designed wheel. I was proud of that one.

The timing, it turned out, was serendipitous. We launched just weeks before lockdown.

What followed was hard. Not just for us, for the whole cycling industry. Demand spiked, shipping costs went up by a factor of five, and container capacity vanished. There were stretches where I genuinely didn't know if we'd get through it. I won't pretend otherwise. Some of the toughest days of the last ten years sit in that period, and getting past them took more resilience than I always felt I had. What carried us through, more than anything, was riders who stuck with us and waited. I haven't forgotten that.

The racing kept giving us reasons to keep going too. At the delayed 2021 Ironman World Championships in St George, I watched our wheels lead a professional championship race into T2 under Kyle Smith. In the women's race, Fenella Langridge and Laura Siddall both finished top ten. We repeated those top-ten women's finishes in Kona, our first trip there as a team.

In July 2022 we sponsored the Guildford Crits. A smaller thing, but it meant a lot. We were putting down roots in our new home in the Surrey Hills.

We also started building industry relationships, such as working with Classified, bringing their shifting technology to triathlon. It still powers pro athletes like Hanne de Vet and Lizzie Rayner today, and we were the focus of the launch at Eurobike 2023. Standing there as the centre of attention, a brand our size among the giants, I thought about how many people it had taken to get us onto that stage.

That autumn we launched Team Parcours, an ambassador community for the 2024 season. Not pros this time, but everyday riders who race, ride for the adventure, and represent the brand out in the world. It's grown into one of my favourite parts of what we do. These are the people Parcours is actually for.

Then came gravel. We entered that world properly with our FKT wheelset in 2024, and I travelled to Kansas for Unbound to support our pro Joe Laverick and see the race for myself. There's nothing else like it. FKT went on to take a UCI Gravel World Series win later that year with Maddy Nutt, proving our technology belongs at the very highest level in gravel too.

2024 just kept delivering. Youri Keulen won T100 Singapore on our wheels. And then Paris, where Dave Ellis and Luke Pollard took Paralympic gold. Gold, on wheels we built.

That autumn we were on display at Rouleur Live, surrounded by industry partners I'd once only read about. A few years earlier I'd been the outsider on a factory floor. Now we were in the room.

2025 was a year of quieter, deeper work. While much of the industry walked away from rim brakes, we launched a brand new rim brake wheel in the Grimpeur. As far as I'm aware we were one of very few brands to do that, possibly the only one. There are still plenty of riders out there on rim brake bikes who deserve good wheels, and we didn’t want to forget them. Our pro roster kept growing too, and behind the scenes we kicked off our materials development project with our partners at Lineat.

That project became VibraCORE, which we launched this year. It opens up a whole new angle on performance and sustainability. I think it's some of the best work we've done, and it feels like the right thing to be building as we head into the next ten years.

Building relationships with the cycling media has been another highlight. People whose work I’d been reading for years have gone from contacts, to in many cases friends. Clearly we value every single review or story that is published, but whilst “Best Buy” or “Editor’s Choice” write-ups count for a lot, the biggest endorsement is the number of times a reviewer has followed up asking if they can buy the wheels with their own money.

I should say something here about the people, because none of what I've written happened on my own. Parcours has never really been a one-man band, whatever the founder story suggests. There's the small team who have worked alongside me directly, on the workshop floor, in the office and behind the scenes, and the freelancers and friends of the business who have shot our photography, managed our athletes and turned up whenever we needed a hand. The photographers, the vloggers and the content creators who helped us look far bigger than we were at the time. There are the trade and industry partners who took a chance on a brand our size. The pro athletes who trusted their races to our kit. And behind all of them, the riders and customers who chose us, came back, and told their friends. Many of these people I now count as genuine friends. That, more than any wheel, is what ten years has actually built.

When I do get the (increasingly rare!) chance to ride, or when I turn up at an event, I see Parcours wheels out on the road. Not our own wheels on our own bike, but a stranger's, someone who chose us. Every single time it stops me for a second. Ten years ago those wheels only existed in my head. Now they're out there, under riders I've never met, on roads I'll never ride.

So here’s to the last ten years, and also to the next ten!