Re:
Steve 100's history of early Muddy Fox is mostly correct.
In about 1982, S&G (Security & General Finance) was originally a two man finance company - Ari Hadjipetrou, a Greek Cypriot accountant and Drew Lawson, a Scottish Art Director. They'd met while working in Dubai and returned to London together.
Drew and Ari in Dubai
They helped Manufrance - as has been said - makers of shotguns, sewing machines and bicycles - with finance. Ari offered to be the UK distributor for their products and for a time they did distribute all 3 products. They realised that bikes were the least troublesome to market and then focussed on the bikes.
Manufrance was partly owned or at least supported by the French Government but that support was withdrawn and Manufrance went bust so S&G Distributors, having got a foothold in the bike trade looked for another supplier. In Japan they found Araya- the rim maker and brought over a batch of their bikes.
S&G New Cavendish Street London - The offices were in the 1st floor.
Amongst the Araya range - were a few Mountain Bikes and Ari and Drew, encouraged by Greg Oxenham, who was co-owner of Bike UK, the London bike shop, made the decision to drop all the other lines and concentrate on Mountain Bikes in the hope that they'd be first and leaders in what they foresaw as a burgeoning market.
So they ordered a batch more of The Araya Mountain Bikes, initially marketing them as S&G Cycles - made by Araya and Ari promised them that they'd make Araya Bikes famous in the UK. Araya panicked at this as their major business was rims and they didn't want to lose Raleigh etc. who'd be less likely to buy from a bike competitor.
They had to come up with a new name and realised that this new market warranted a grungier name than S&G Cycles. The Araya Bikes were named as 'Fun Picnic' and other such tosh but one was called "Muddy Fox" so they picked that as their name - it sat nicely with off-road biking.
The first 1984 bikes had decals with the S&G logo and were called "S&G Cycles Muddy Fox". The Explorer, Pathfinder etc didn't actually have those names written on the bikes - there were codes instead - e.g. MB MF 26SDX (i.e. Pathfinder) - but were marketed using their arbitrary names.
Till this point the advertising comprised mostly of 1/4 page black and white ads but with the new name they went into overdrive with full colour full page ads and the marketing campaign kicked off in earnest.
Missing toes on the first Muddy Fox ad. - a teaser
1/4 page ad rewriting the dictionary
The Crossword ad
Early ads had included the paw print but someone pointed out a toe was missing so they borrowed an Old English Sheepdog, stepped it in a puddle and then a piece of paper. The logo was born.
Flyer for The Pathfinder - including the new logo
I'll stop here as I've stuff to do - if anyone's interested I can continue the story later.
P.S. Hi Steve
