HIGH&OVER — A premium cycling apparel and accessories brand from Stockholm, Sweden. In short, we're involved in every aspect of this brand's activities. How so? Well, it's an in-house project...

It started as an idea and an Instagram account. Danny, H&O's founder (and mid—air's CEO), had recently moved to Sweden and, while looking for work and finding his feet, started toying with the idea of creating a cycling apparel brand. A keen cyclist for many years, this project also appealed as it'd be a way to "practice what we preach" in terms of design and technical expertise. What better way to learn and evolve these kinds of skills than by practicing them for real?

The following on Instagram started growing and before long people were asking when they could buy the products. This lead to a search for manufacturers, developing samples, starting the business accounts and so on.

HIGH&OVER is now an in-house project for mid—air studio. We continue to evolve the brand in terms of product design, communication, putting on events and making more and more friends in Sweden and beyond.

The creative freedom a project like this provides is invaluable — Got an idea for a video shoot? Let's do it! Weather is perfect for a photoshoot? Let's suit up and go! Got some new tech to try out? Get it launched.

A boutique brand, H&O remains pretty small by industry standards — that said, there are now H&O products on every continent. Our goal is to keep it growing organically and see where it goes.

A big part of the HIGH&OVER project has been carrying out photoshoots — live action and in the studio. We've worked with some fantastic photographers as well as arranging our own in-house shoots. Over time we've built up our own photography studio set-up to acheive nice consistent results and keep everything on-brand.

The experience gained on these shoots now means it's a service we're confident enough to offer to our clients and partners. Having control of the imagery of a project means we can really deliver on our vision as a whole.

HIGH&OVER is a brand that very much lives online. Initially we used Instagram as the main marketing channel and, as things got real, we built the website and seriously started creating content.

We needed to move fast and keep monhtly costs low — after assesing a few platforms it made most sense to use Wordpress & WooCommerce for the site. Since we already have our own hosting servers we were able to keep things lean and launch a full e-commerce site to sell H&O's wares all over the world.

An e-commerce project at its core, we've used tools such as Google Tag Manager/Google Analytics, HotJar and Mouseflow to gain insights on how people interact with the site on various devices and inform UX & UI design updates.

Contrary to common belief, it's very much possible to make Wordpress sites to load quickly and achieve high Core Web Vitals scores — we invested time and effort into ensuring this was the case for H&O's website and it paid off nicely.

2021 brought something we were not expecting. A friend reached out saying they'd been chatting to someone from Flames — a cycling team based in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone in West Africa. They got talking and the conversation lead to the difficultly Flames have when it comes to keeping their bikes and riders on the road. Essentially, kit and equipment is extremely tricky to come by for them.

And so our "Parts for the People" initiaive was born. A dropbox was set up at a cafe in the Stockholm and we asked people to donate anything they could spare that Flames might find useful. The response was fantastic and before long we had a huge box full of stuff to ship to Flames. The lovely people at Ryska Posten even assisted with the shipping.

Through 2022 we stayed in close contact with Flames, continuing to support them where we could. Via Instagram we got chatting to someone at Heart Aerospace and they kindly offered to help the Flames cause. A team of riders from Heart took part in a 330km bike ride called "Vätternrundan" — the sponsorship money they raised has gone directly towards kit & eqipment for the team in Freetown.

We continue to talk to Flames on a weekly basis on WhatsApp and it's great to see them out training in H&O kit as they prepare for the Tour de Lunsar (Sierra Leone's biggest bike race). Our dream is to be there on the roadside cheering them on in Lunsar — until then we'll continue to do what we can for them from Sweden.

Our expertise in managing design and development projects has proven to be pretty transferable when it comes to organising real-life cycling events. For a few years now HIGH&OVER has run the "Sumemr send-off" event — taking place on gravel roads through beautiful forests somewhere around Stockholm — it's proven to be a hit with the local cycling community and a nice excuse to get together, talk nonsense and toast the end of the summer.

The centrepiece of the Swedish winter cycling calendar is Basemile Snowdown — we inherited this event from it's creator and, after Covid cancelled it twice, we finally got to host it in January 2023. You can see more about Basemiles on its website (a mid—air production). We came up with a new brand identity for the event and got to work getting sponsors on board, promoting the event and making sure we sold out all the tickets.