Velocette Records

British children’s bike brand Kidvelo is celebrating double success with its awards, having won a British Business Award and a Made for Mums 2022 Toy Award.

Kidvelo, run by husband and wife Karen and Gary Wood, won an award in the Start-Up category at the British Business Awards, followed by Gold for Best Balance Bike at the Made for Mums 2022 Toy Awards.

The brand, based in Leamington Spa, specializes in making affordable, quality balance bikes designed to help children learn to ride.

Karen Wood said: “We were even honored to be on the shortlist. From concept to finished bikes in stock, we’ve had to dig deep and overcome countless challenges over the past two years.

“Winning is very exciting and a testament to our high standards of customer support, the quality and design of our bikes and I’m thrilled that our mission to get more kids riding top quality affordable bikes and well designed has been recognized by our peers.”

Kidvelo’s latest success follows a Platinum Best Buy Award, Platinum Best Ride at the Loved By Parents Awards and Gold Best Bike at the Organic Baby Awards.

Bex Barnett, Senior Director at Prize Sponsors Sage, said of Kidvelo Bikes: “This start-up turned their passion into a business just before the world shut down. The judges were very impressed with the courageous steps they took to continue developing their product and praised them for their perseverance.

“Despite uncertainty and restrictions in manufacturing and distribution, this start-up has weathered the pandemic successfully and with a product that has impacted the lives of its customers. This organization has reaped the rewards of organic marketing and commitment to their customers and got amazing feedback from their customers. So well done to get through.

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Launched in November last year, Kidvelo was created to improve the quality of children’s bikes, while ensuring they remain affordable for parents.

Karen added, “Winning the coveted gold spot for Best Balance Bike, with our first bike in production, is astounding. We knew the changes we needed to make to the design of the bikes, to make sure they were perfect for every child and lasted through years of growth and our determination to keep the bikes affordable for parents was quite a challenge.

By Gilles Guillaume

PARIS (Reuters) – All-electric and hybrid vehicles in 2022 have nearly doubled as a percentage of Renault-branded European sales over the past two years, an official said ahead of the Paris Motor Show.

“In Europe, we will be at 40% this year,” said Fabrice Cambolive, deputy general manager of the brand, during a pre-show organized in Aubervilliers (Seine-St-Denis), adding that the brand is well positioned. to successfully complete its planned shift to electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030.

In 2021, electrified models represented around a quarter of the Renault brand’s European sales and around a third in the first half of 2022. Overtaken by new entrants such as Tesla and new Chinese manufacturers, or by historic heavyweights such as Volkswagen and Stellantis, Renault has pinned its electric hopes on its new Mégane and two small iconic models – a new Renault 5 and a new Renault 4, a small SUV that echoes its 4L. She will unveil them at the Paris Motor Show.

During an investor day scheduled for November 8, the Renault group is to present its strategy for creating a unit focused on electrification and software, the core business of the automotive industry. A separate unit will specialize in its traditional business of manufacturing internal combustion engine cars.

Renault’s Cambolive said industry-wide in Europe, orders for new vehicles have fallen in recent months due to rising inflation.

“For several months now we have seen a decline in Europe-wide orders of around 20%,” he said.

Despite the drop, new vehicle registrations in Europe in 2022 are expected to be “more or less” flat compared to 2021, unless persistent supply chain problems – in particular a global shortage of semiconductor chips – do further disrupt production, Cambolive added.

This year’s Paris Motor Show is the first since 2018, when it attracted more than a million visitors. The 2020 show has been canceled due to the global coronavirus pandemic.

(Reporting by Gilles Guillaume in Paris; Writing by Nick Carey; Editing by David Gregorio)

The Sienna minivan is one of the vehicles featured in Toyota’s new brand campaign, “Never … [+] Adjust.”

Toyota

Toyota has always been a brand with an all-encompassing appeal to American consumers that isn’t necessarily tied to single nameplates like the enduring Corolla or the RAV4 that sets the SUV standard. Instead, arguably Toyota’s greatest attribute has been that it represents quality, sensitivity and a certain appeal to mainstream concepts such as value, and in an anthropomorphic sense to empathy and awareness.

That’s why the brand can release a new ad campaign that doesn’t promote any specific vehicle, but reminds American consumers why they love Toyota in the first place. “Never Settle” is a logical extension leveraging multiculturalism to build on the foundation Toyota has laid with its global brand platform over the past decade, “Let’s Go Places.” Yet the theme of its new campaign makes the brand proactive in new ways.

Just launched, the campaign began with a handful of TV ads and associated online extensions that celebrate its vehicles – and more than that, its brand – in the lives of Hispanics, Blacks and other diverse audiences.

One ad, “Training Wheels,” chronicles the life of a young black man as he learns to ride a bike, swim and even fly, encouraged along the way not to be afraid. A second spot, “Not Yet”, focuses on the ambitions and perseverance of Hispanic Americans which includes a “clip” of a future first Hispanic President of the United States. A third commercial, “A New World”, depicts a real mixed-origin family driving their baby home from the hospital in a Toyota Sienna.

“The campaign is meant to tell stories and share inspiring messages about what Toyota is about as a brand,” Lisa Materazzo, vice president of Toyota Division Marketing Group for Toyota Motor North America, told me. “It works very well in the context of ‘Let’s Go Places’.”

Toyota launched “Let’s Go Places” in 2012 “to reflect Toyota’s forward-looking and optimistic momentum in the United States,” Materazzo said, and the brand has expanded positioning across a variety of settings and campaigns ranging from the Super Bowl at the Olympics.

Interestingly, Toyota’s latest campaign kicks off without any sort of overt shift towards electrification as either a philosophy or a reality of Toyota’s fleet. After establishing an early beachhead in battery-powered cars with the introduction of its Prius hybrid 25 years ago, Toyota has since been the most notable brand to resist the lurch of the global auto industry in a devotion all-electric vehicles.

Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda echoed that lingering message the other day, telling American reporters that the company would continue to focus on hybrids as a short-term solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. using a variety of technologies to achieve carbon neutrality, including hydrogen. Powerful. In the meantime, he pointed out, Toyota does not plan to adopt mass electrification, in part because it would not meet the needs of much of its diverse customer base around the world. “We don’t want to leave anyone behind,” he said.

Materazzo explained: “Toyota has always been very focused on customer wants and needs, and in our approach to electrification, we take that very much into account. We have a lot of variety, from a manual transmission Corolla GR to a big new Tundra [pickup truck] with a hybrid option. This reflects our understanding that the unique approach [with all-electrics] won’t work for consumers right away.