INTERVIEW
Adding more bike brands is something new for Big Bear Bikes, isn’t it? So with that automotive background with Ford, I was quite happy with the dealership one brand approach. We’ve always had one or two others, but we’ve added more now as the market’s gotten more diverse. So, as well as having Trek, which we’ve had since the
start, initially we added Haibike and Raleigh. Raleigh has been a good brand, especially for that older, mature e-bike customer, just with the nameplate recognition. And then we added Frog Bikes, and more recently, Santa Cruz and Orbea, which is a fantastic bike shop brand. And then this year, we’ve added Marin.
Have you always been in this location? No, the old shop is 50 yards up the road. It was an antique collectables centre, but it closed, and we put our logo over the antique centre logo, and started with two downstairs rooms, of about 600 square feet. In comparison, the current showroom is 5000 square feet, and we have a 3000 square foot warehouse and 3000 square feet at Dalby as well. In 2017, this unit became available, and it was just so much easier to manage rather than going upstairs and downstairs with bikes, but bizarrely, we had the same number of bikes in two and a half converted terraced houses, as we do in this showroom now.
Amazing. So, you cover all life stages of cycling, really. We try to, that’s right. There may be another brand or two to come on the roadside. And we have got a plan to expand, but it’s very much a balance. We’re not a business that just grabs brands.
In the ranges that we do, we try and have most sizes, most colours and most models, and maybe we don’t always have the small or the extra-large, but we’ll start with the medium and the large, because then you can get the other sizes, and you have two colours and two sizes, and then that gives you a really good starting point.
And having them here so people can actually see the bikes must make a big difference. Absolutely, so we moved into here in April 2018, and then in March 2020, the COVID situation arose, so one of the things that really helped us was that we actually took all our display bikes out of stock, so the sales guys couldn’t sell the display bikes.
I hid them all on the system, and so many people were coming in saying, “Oh, you’ve got bikes,” because a lot of people, I feel, made the mistake of selling all their bikes, because they were so happy just to have all that money coming in, but then they ended up being like a website, with no bikes.
www.bikebiz.com Trek were very good with that, and although the lead times
were really extended, we gave people an accurate estimated time, kept them informed, and pretty much delivered on it, and so that really helped drive the business and drive the customer base of the business.
How has the business done since the COVID boom? It sounds like you managed it quite pragmatically. Times are really tight at the moment, and I think the industry had the clichéd mindset of ‘survive to ‘25’ and then ‘fix in ‘26’. But we saw a distinct return to margin in April last year, and had a much better year in a sustainable, survivable position, which we weren’t, to be frank, in the previous two years. I mean, the initial hit was a lack of stock value, because the prices went down, so all our stock was then devalued. And when brands used to go on sale, if they dropped the price of something, they would give you the difference. They don’t do that anymore. So, you’re very vulnerable if you carry stock, because you can have 5, 10, 20% of margin missing. And a business like this that can carry £1 million of stock,
it’s £10,000s. So that margin came back last April, and our numbers have sort of steadily improved. We are significantly bigger as a business than we were at the height of COVID, so we’ve kept that going, which I’m really pleased about.
July 2026 | 27
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