An established, award-winning, British motorcycle clothing company, arc-on want to introduce an innovative new glove design to their existing range of performance technical wear. The design is designed to be the first glove in the world to be constructed with pieces of Forcefield body armour within the glove, ensuring arc-on continues to offer class-leading performance.
Acheivements to Date
arc-on was launched by Ian Gillett to design and manufacture top quality motorcycle clothing, to sell from our website. Brand awareness and sales grew quickly as we successfully promoted our product, via PR and by direct sales at bike events around the country. Our PR continues to be strong and we have had our products (gloves, race suits and textiles) worn and endorsed by journalists from RiDE magazine, Fast Bikes magazine, Motorcycle News, Performance Bikes magazine, Two Wheels Only magazine, Bike magazine and multiple smaller publications and websites.
Key opinion formers in the industry, most notably Al Fagan from Fast Bikes and 44teeth.com, wear arc-on both when working – testing bikes all over the world – and while racing.
We have an established relationship with another award-winning UK company, Forcefield armour, who supply us with the CE approved armour for our leather suits and jackets.
In 2013 we won two important industry awards. The prestigious RiDE magazine ‘Best Buy’ for our current range topping glove, and a Fast Bikes ‘Best Buy’ for our current race suit.
The RiDE Magazine ‘Best Buy’ award was achieved by outscoring 21 other gloves for sale, in a combination test comprising 6 months of wearing the glove and the submission – of the worn pair – to the SATRA lab, to be put through the rigorous CE approval testing. Our gloves passed the CE test with ease.
The Product
We intend to CE test the new glove design ourselves, which we understand will put it in a select group of gloves that carry the CE approved tags.
Our new glove design will be constructed to the same advanced technical specification as our current award-winning glove but with a crucial addition; we have designed the glove to incorporate flexible pieces of the Forcefield body armour. To the best of our knowledge this will be a world’s first in motorcycle glove design, it will improve the performance of an already class-leading product and will aim to guarantee us another round of PR exposure.
Use of Funds
We will use the money raised to purchase stock of this product, to support its launch with an advertising campaign in print and on the web and will continue to develop other new items for the range. The R&D for this design is done and the product is ready to launch so no further money is needed for development of this glove.
Racing
Racing has been central to everything we’ve done because it is the ultimate test of the quality of our product. We entered the British Superbike championship in 2009, supporting one rider in the main class. Since then we have had 21 riders racing in arc-on suits and gloves, across all the classes on the British Superbike grid, and to the best of our knowledge over 70 race crashes with no injuries to any of the riders in our products.
We have strived to gain reputation for the outstanding quality of our kit. In addition to the new products we aim to change our business model from being direct sales only to being a mix of direct sales and wholesale to trade partners, with the aim to allow us to increase our sales volume and monetise our existing brand profile.