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PERFORMANCE-DRIVEN F


Daniel Blackham visits Handsling’s headquarters to learn about recent challenges and an exciting future


ounded by Simon Whiten as a media publishing company in 2010, Handsling started life with the sponsorship of the London-based Handsling Race


Team. Once the team’s bike sponsorship expired in 2014, Whiten started looking at manufacturing his own frames and got in touch with a leading carbon manufacturer. The resulting frames were a success and secured multiple race victories for the team. When other riders started to request replica frames, it led to the formation of Handsling Bikes as a limited company.


Overcoming adversity In 2018, Handsling relocated from London to Hampshire and investment allowed the brand to design its own frames and purchase the moulds used to make them. This led to the release of the A1R0evo for road, the TR3evo on the track and CEXevo for cyclocross and gravel.


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Just as the brand was scaling its production to fulfil more orders, the Covid pandemic hit and the implications of Brexit also started to take effect. “We had a tricky start to the Covid period,” said Whiten. “And then when the lockdowns finished it became a supply chain issue. We had the frames as we managed to get our stock in, but we couldn’t get the parts to put on them. “And that was a real nightmare for us.” That testimonial will be familiar to almost everyone in the industry who faced the same problem as Shimano, SRAM and many other groupset manufacturers ran out of stock. “We were buying groupsets from all over the place for ridiculous money, just to keep the business going,” said Whiten


“But we had to do it, we had to just take a hit and buy from whoever we could get them from.” One of the benefits Handsling had in this period over


June 2023 | 15


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