Feb 02, 2013 It's about people My Grandad. When I started designing with steel I was tipping my hat to my Grandad, Eric Barnett. Mamnick is a celebration of his life as a Sheffield steel worker. Tony Sweeney. The man who introduced to me to the bike. He taught me how to pace myself on long rides, group riding etiquette, how to balance the pleasures of riding hard and taking in the view, why a bike with the right 1970s design beats a modern bike on form and function and a host of other aspects of cycling that might make you think he'd gone mad! But trust me - he's always on the money! He showed me the silent 'back-wack' roads in Derbyshire - the places where you can ride for hours and only see a handful of cars. He was the person who told the me to "do one thing at a time as beautifully as possible" (which I slightly modified). And he was the person who told me a road called Mam Nick existed. David. Our steel guy. A man who listens to me with patience when I'm excitedly rambling on in the factory about an idea I've had last night. A man who knows what can and cannot be done with steel. A man who'll spend hours getting a prototype right for me even though my cardboard model isn't to scale or doesn't even make sense. The women at the factories that manufacture my shirts. People like Marion who trims and sews our buttons and Emily who counts these same buttons and then dyes them exactly as I want them. Sharon who irons the final shirts, blows every spec of dust off them, folds and then packages them. All these people make us who we are. It's about people.
