INTERVIEW
However, just in the last two months, triggered, I think, by
Amflow and the war in the Middle East breaking out, there has been a decline in customer demand. Our customer numbers haven’t softened, but I think suppliers have gotten a bit panicky with the war situation, and our margins are really on the slide again, which is a worry, although the volumes are where they used to be.
So talk to us about the award. How does it feel to be the first recipient? It’s absolutely fantastic. I’d like to say a big thank you to the team, and a big thank you to all our customers who voted. It was great to see such good feelings towards the business, and I think that’s something that’s built up over the years. We’ll try to make the most of it. We’ll put it in a prominent place in the business and boost it on our socials.
You have quite a big community, evidently, of customers who voted for you. But how do you fit into your local community as a bike shop? I always understood that as a bike shop, you need to have your friends, your tribes, if you like, in different groups, so we’ve always tried to do quite a lot of shop rides and just help out where we can. That ultimately led to, in 2018, winning the tender to run the official hire centre of the forestry in Dalby Forest. We set it up as a CIC, a community interest company, and Big Bear Bikes is a supplier to that with their bikes and brands. We have a fleet of adapted bikes; we’ve not done as much promotion around that as recently, but the bikes are still there, and that’s something to know. A lot of these things depend on staff as well, and for our
director at the time, community cycling was his absolute passion. He retired, so I’m looking for someone else to pick that up. What we also do with the forestry is we run quite a lot of training courses on the weekends. Learn to ride is super popular, people come from far and wide for that - approximately 400 people a year come on the training courses. Again, it’s a nice thing to do. It’s not necessarily a commercial thing for the business; it’s just making friends of the business, making friends with customers. And to us, it’s all about, as I say, the democracy of cycling.
It’s not elite; it’s not just customers buying a lovely high-end bike. It’s great to have a mix, kids starting on their cycle journey in the business with their parents, and developing those relationships so they become customers for life.
28 | July 2026
www.bikebiz.com
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