Happy New Year!

It is that time of the year again, who knows where it goes and once again it has been a brilliant one for us, we can't really describe how good it is to just keep on getting busier and better and bigger and working with more and more great companies. 

In the latter half of this year we took on some new contracts which changed several things at the company, staff went salaried, more staff got taken on, volumes rocketed and we also got a sniff of a very big bit of news for us for next year. Something which we have been asked to be involved in which is huge for our industry and also huge for our town. 

It is a real honour to be part of something which grows to a large extent by itself on its reputation. We had our Christmas party earlier in the month and it was amazing looking at all the people and friends the company has who have their own relationships created by what we've been doing. Hell we've even had a pedicab marriage! 

So here's to next year, make some resolutions, break some resolutions and keep moving forward!

In the mean time here's some stuff from December: 

August to October stuff we've been doing!

 Time for an update form us - as per usual all of this stuff goes on to your Facebook page - www.facebook.com/HerefordPedicabsAndCargo if you head there you can see it without having to have a facebook account.


Way back in August we had the pleasure of taking Emma and Wayne to get married at the Town Hall, in hammered down all day, everyone soaking wet but we all had a great time:

After this we dispatched Tom on holiday/official GB duties as he went to compete in Serbia:

We took delivery of more recycling sacks:

And were involved in the exchange of the Royal Voluntary Services baton run.

We gave out excellent safety advice:

And got soaked again

We also spotted some excellent use of cargo bikes by DHL

And wrapped up a contract, well.. finished one bit and started another:

And this week we saw this quote from Ban Ki-moon - very appropriate. For almost 8 years we've been operating and we are aware that really other than a few hybrid cars knocking about there has been no change by the masses to embrace the biggest challenge the human race will face. 

What we've been up to recently!

If you follow our blog you'll know that a lot of our stuff gets posted up on our facebook page - www.facebook.com/HerefordPedicabsAndCargo if you don't follow us on there it might be worth thinking about, it is a really easy way for us to post things. We will keep posting here though so don't panic.


One of our riders featured in a mountain biking video which was done for National Trust Wales - well worth a watch

A customer of ours had some Brompton bikes stolen, several of which have been returned thanks to the general public doing a great job of spotting them and reporting to the police.

Things are expanding so we've been on the hunt for depot space in Hereford, we've got a few things on our radar which are really cool.

As we've been growing a bit more we've been thinking about the best type of bike for the workloads we have, we love these from Butchers & Bicycles and would love to have some on the fleet.

Prom season has been and gone and we ferried tonnes of them about this year, all great fun and excellent to be involved with such an important night for the customers.

We also helped out a sustrans project bike ride for a local school and ferried the head mistress along as she wasn't too keen on bike riding herself.

We've been up to some exciting launches this year, this one was for a new coffee shop in the Old Livestock Market development in Hereford. Well worth a look.

So that's our round up for the moment, we'll keep you posted on anything new!

Free trade waste recycling and shredding trial for inner city businesses in Hereford!

Are you an inner city business that doesn't or isn't able to recycle your waste? Are you paying a fortune to shred your paper waste? Are you inside the green circle on this map?

Why not try our inner city recycling programme free week trial!

Since the launch of our trade waste recycling scheme in 2008 we have saved thousands of tonnes of recyclable waste from going to landfill whilst saving our customers money and returning their Co2 savings to them. Now we are welcoming new inner city customers with a free trial.

We service hundreds of businesses in Hereford. We run weekly collections with no upfront costs for disposal of bags and are fully registered with the environment agency.

Our recycling programme covers the recycling and shredding of paper waste, cardboard, ink cartridges and recyclable plastic films. To engage new customers we are offering a free weeks trial of our scheme. Our prices are cheaper than the current Council trade waste scheme so hopefully it should be a straight forward way for businesses to start recycling.

Contact Hereford Pedicargo by email - info@herefordpedicargo and quote 'HPC free trial' to get the ball rolling. Alternatively if you want to have a chat give us a call - 07718320195 and we can set you up for a free weeks trial.

Current rates for our scheme are as follows:

Recycling of waste paper - £1 per 15kg bag
(bags supplied by Hereford Pedicargo)
Shredding and recycling - £1 per 15kg bag
(bags supplied by Hereford Pedicargo)
Recycling of cardboard and newspaper - £5 per cage/pro rata –
Cage is 5ft high x4ftx4ft
Recycling of plastic films - £1 per bag
(large bags supplied by Hereford Pedicargo)
Free recycling of ink cartridges if you are using our recycling schemes

www.cargobikehire.com

Very soon we're bringing cargo bike hire (www.cargobikehire.com) to Hereford. 

We've been working on the project for ages and we are in a soft launch stage at the moment. Soon we'll have some really cool technology in place so you can hire a cargo bike using your smart phone and we'll be deploying the very first one in the St James area of Hereford. The soft launch website will give you some more info. Then we'll have all the stuff up and running.

It'll give the public the chance to use the kind of bikes we use for moving about stuff to move their own stuff around. Pretty cool we think.

We are recruiting pedicab riders!

We are recruiting!

We are after a few pedicab rickshaw riders at the moment Summer is coming and we have lots planned. Festivals, proms, weddings, historical tours and of course our standard Friday and Saturday evening work.  With the new development springing up in Hereford people need our service more than ever!

We're on the hunt for some more riders. So if you want to get fit, earn some good cash, have a good laugh and be part of fun, green, honest and rapidly growing company get in touch with us. 

There's loads of good benefits, at least one free curry a year and a fancy dress party…. You need to be over 21 and have a full uk car licence and nothing nasty that'll show up on a CRB/DBS check. 

Send a c.v or and covering statement in an email to info@herefordpedicabs.com and we'll send you some more information. 

We look forward to hearing from you!

HUGE catch up, we are 7 I suppose.

So it has been too long since I updated this, I guess it'd because we have a company facebook account, which is really easy to update and sort of gets stuff happening on it all the time, no excuse though so for that I apologise!

Straight in with some pretty cool news.. we were 7 on April the 13th. 7 years old, it's pretty bonkers when you think about it, look back through the blog and think about all the other stuff we've done achieved, been up to, people we've moved, people we've met, waste we've recycled, awards we've won, parcels we've delivered and the 1000's of tonnes of carbon we've saved. So yeah, I guess you could say it's been pretty cool, here's to the future!

So what have we been up to...

Well, you probably know but the first bit of the year was wet... really wet.. not too cold, but basically constantly moist. Amusingly one of our cargo boys came up with this contraption:

So lots of water means lots of grease... we go through gt85 like a Bob Monkhouse went through Old Spice, we chuck pints of the stuff about.

And bad weather means broken stuff.

We've been fixing stuff like there is no tomorrow, broken chains, knackered wheels from the state of the roads, and generally constantly keeping on top of things, a few times we've had to rescue guys and deploy the rescue bike.. everyone likes a drama (in hindsight..) and every day is a school day too!

I was lucky enough to get off to Thailand for a mates wedding and saw some pretty cool contraptions.

And I guess the thing about stuff getting broken is we have to push the bikes hard, and it's good to see that couriers have been doing that since 1951!

We've got busier too, more than ever we took a couple of whipper snappers on last week: 

If you didn't know.. we are launching this - www.cargobikehire.com a little sideline to bring the stuff we use to run our business to the realms of the general public. Have a look.

And if you haven't see us on here you might have seen us in the paper:

We've also been flat out with our advertising contracts:

So things are good for us, new staff, new contracts, busier than ever, and things are really picking up for other businesses to, the cargo bike world is going through the roof, its good to be ahead of the curve but we can't wait to have a few more people up here with us!

Until next time..

End of Year recap - and what a year it has been!

2013 was a real blast and for us has to go down as one of the best years we have had, so much stuff has happened and what's more the best thing about this year is the stuff we have planned for next year. Overall one of the most pleasing things for us is there is a real feel about stuff happening in Hereford, yeah there is still a bunch of people winging about how terrible stuff is and how the world is going to end next week but most people, it seems, have been gathering themselves and building projects back up. There is a great feel of stuff that is happening and of community involvement. We think people have come to terms that the Council and the Government are no longer people dishing out money and that starting projects and businesses means having a quality product or goal and thats what will see it through as being a success. There is a lot more good quality stuff about at the moment.

We recently heard about a great community bread scheme in Hereford that has has a little bit of lottery funding, it appears to be a bunch of people who are just dead keen on getting good bread into homes in Hereford, I've seen them meeting up in a local pub, pouring over bits of paper, all smiles and not one of them bothered about making a fortune out of the project, it is great to see a community pulling together to run something like that and the gains are of course way more than a loaf of bread for everyone, there are friendships made, communities strengthened and time shared, those are the foundations for progress and it is great to see more stuff like that happening in Hereford.

It is also noted that particularly in cargo type bikes there is a real swell of interest in Europe and indeed in the UK. There is even a guy in Hereford who has bought a cargo bike for his own use! We plan in 2014 to launch our own Cargo Bike Hire project, we've had some great funding for it and have spent most of the year waiting for various permissions to be granted so we can place a bike in a local community for them to use. We are really excited about it and can't wait for other people to be using cargo bikes. If you are in Hereford and you do fancy using a cargo bike, get in touch, we can lend one to you before the project goes live. 

So in a nutshell 2013 has been great (more about it below) and we have a great feeling about 2014 and the general energy people have for communities and doing stuff in Hereford.  Here is to a great year!

2013 a recap...

We started the year with some great news about funding to enable us to develop a project to put cargo bikes in communities, we got some funding from various different pots and the CTC were one of them, they wrote this on their website.

Then things got cold, it snowed for ages and was below zero for a couple of weeks, stuff ground to a halt but not us, truth be told we had a great time:

As things brightened up we sponsored a couple of things, gave free advertising to local businesses and sponsored the equipment for a bunch of soldiers riding the length of the country for a very good cause.

Mothers day came round and we were once again out on the streets loaded with flowers spreading the good will!

As always a lot of people used us for their special days, weddings, proms, stags and hens..

 A couple of good friends got hitched and it was a pleasure to be involved.

Some Hen parties were more of a handful than others..

But our favourite has to be our very own Ben Matthews getting hitched to a girl he met whilst riding a pedicab!

 

As summer rolled on we began a set of sponsored city tours, we pedalled non stop every Saturday for 10 weekends, taking on new staff to run the project and giving hundreds of people a historical insight into Hereford and also information about the new developments and the future of what might happen.

Our parcel delivery went through the roof, thousands of parcels delivered by bike, lots of stuff ordered on the internet which travelled, by air, lorry, van and then finally by bike to the front doors of sometimes surprised customers!

Our very own Tom 'The D-burger' Donaldson escaped work for a week to represent the UK at mountain boarding, he did everyone proud and brought home a bronze, putting him 3rd in the world!

We broke some bikes

We helped other people get bikes fixed..

We featured in magazines

We got even busier! Expanding our range of postcodes covered for a number of large delivery companies.

We experienced some really rubbish weather

Bought some new bikes

Took Santa to switch the Christmas lights on

Opened a bridge

And of course got plenty of punctures

We got up to lots of other stuff too, too much to write about really. But as we mentioned, next year is the one we are looking forward to, lots of very interesting projects coming!

So from us, we wish you a Happy New Year. Make and keep some good resolutions and break the rubbish ones!