Service Course logo, featuring the words Service Course and three federal-style stars.
The Service Course (Girona) is closing. That isn’t us.
While I’ll never celebrate the loss of a cycling business, it will be nice to share this name with one less entity. When the Service Course (Girona) opened in 2016, I’d already been using the name—with a wordmark in nearly the same typeface—for three years for a growing bicycle cleaning concern and for another 5 or so before that for the blog. I wasn’t entirely surprised when the high-end, pro-owned store launched with great fanfare. I’d already seen the weird, steady uptick in traffic from Girona on my site in the months preceding the launch. They rolled out on the .cc version of the URL for which I already held .com.
While lawyer friends (a DC-area perk) offered to contribute some strongly worded, letterhead-bedazzled assistance, I didn’t want to go that route. For one, I was outgunned, and also, the term “service course” is just part of cycling, and I wouldn’t have felt right about claiming ownership. How did it go when Specialized tried to claim far-reaching rights to “Roubaix”? Right. As far as I know, MAVIC was first to paste Service Course on a product when they used the SSC acronym for “Special Service Course” for wheels. Zipp has a Service Course line of components. It works out, but the wordmark and the URL from Spain always grated a bit.
In a weird way, though, we got along fine. At one point, Christian reached out to see about carrying our wash kits in the store, but I didn’t want to be a defacto house brand for a house I didn’t live in. I’d forward misdirected email inquiries about rental bikes to them. Mostly, though, we just forgot about each other.
As someone who’s always been into brand, it struck me as an odd approach, to have an opportunity to create something new of your own and copy off of someone else’s paper instead, especially when you’re the only one doing the grading. But whatever. For now, tariffs and economy permitting, we’re still here. We had some supply chain hiccups, but new kits are in the store now. It’s spring, for those of us in the northern hemisphere, anyway. Ride your bike in crappy weather. Clean it off afterwards. It’s fun.