If you've followed EC in the past, you know we enjoy our cycling support vehicles, and I've made several of them over the years.  Classic cars from our favorite races and events, as well as, cars that we wish existed. Here is just a brief snapshot of a few that we've made for both the EC line and for friends of ours over the past few years...most of these are still available here at our online store.

Like we said, we love our support cars.  And, it appears that our friends and supporters enjoy them too. Sometimes, a graphic can take on a life of its own within a brand and not even we can predict where things will lead. One of our all-time favorite brands in the cycling world is Silca. I've had a Silca pump in my garage since...well, hell since forever.  In 2013, Silca, the oldest family owned business in all of cycling, sold to a friend of mine from my days of racing on the pro triathlon circuit, former Technical Director at Zipp Speed Weaponry, Josh Poertner. Since that time, Josh has returned Silca to its glory and its been a joy to behold. 

So, I was completely stoked when Josh reached out in 2016 and asked about our creating a couple of cool graphics for t-shirts and merchandise for the Silca brand. We went straight to work.  For a brand that has been a witness to practically the entire history of cycling, we wanted to share their history and brand recognition with their customers and fans. Odds are that at some point most cyclists have had a Silca pump in their garage or mounted on their bike.  So we wanted to convey that in our graphic.

The Silca BMW became an instant hit with the Silca crowd and sold out quickly. Not only did we immediately go to reprint, but Josh felt that we weren't done with the design. Over the past few years we've done a multitude of versions of the graphic with different paint jobs and we've found additional uses for the graphic. We've come up with so many colorful iterations that we ended up commemorating the popularity of the design with a poster last year, and Silca, a brand known for creating amazing cycling pumps, tools and accessories, now had a successful apparel brand in its infancy.

But, that's not the end of the story! The life of this graphic has continued to grow and inspire others over the years. Two such notable cycling aficionados from Memphis, Will Tucker and Jackson Hutchison, founded the Latting Speedshop, offering custom one-off paint jobs, vinyl decals, ground-up custom builds, and general bike maintenance for their customers. These entrepreneurs took their appreciation of the graphic to a whole new level in support of their business, creating a visual spectacle that is hard to forget for anyone who sees it...

I love it when life imitates art, and I couldn't be more stoked about these amazing brands that we get to help bring to life and share in their adventures and successes.  

But, it doesn't end there...The boys from Latting Speedshop reached out and said they wanted an EC original for their new brick-n-mortar shop, which opens this June in Tennessee. And, lo and behold, they thought a car graphic would really close the circle on the whole thing. So, we went to work creating something amazing for the Latting Speedshop - serving bikes & coffee to cyclists in the Memphis area.

Embracing our love of everything old and retro, we started looking at old muscle car graphics from the 1970's and 80's - the crazy art of Ed Roth and Rat Fink, those old Plymouth and Dodge ads and Car-Toons posters...

and from there, well, the rest of it really drew itself! 

Coming soon to a t-shirt and poster near you...in the Memphis, Tenn. area. Best of luck to the Latting Speedshop gang down south and we can't wait to see where this crazy ride takes us next.