RETAILERS
What type of consumers do you target? Where we are located there is great riding for all types of riders which has been reflected in our customer base. One of our missions is to be a shop for every rider, whatever your age, style of riding or gender we make sure that all are made to feel welcome in our shop (and that includes dogs too). The bike sales have been split 40% electric and 60% standard, with electric being equally split between full sus and touring. On the standard bikes, the gravel [market] has
definitely been proving a popular conversion for a lot of our road and MTB customers through the winter, making up 20% of our bikes. Our bike brands were carefully selected to ensure that
we catered for everyone: Cube, BMC, MiRiDER, Pivot and Mondraker.
What makes your business unique? Having a female and male balance in the leadership team with a mix of road, triathlon, gravel, cross country and enduro riders in the team means we can really tailor our products and marketing to a wide variety of riders. We both come from a business and financial background which I think is of great benefit at the moment navigating through the challenging cycling market. Our location has been a great asset to us as we get a lot of the Sports Village users passing by. We also have a fantastic space outside the shop for our customers to try bikes and also for our mechanic to car park test bikes for the workshop bikes.
It also means we have ample free parking which is of huge benefit to customers bringing their bikes in. Our genuine passion for good old fashioned customer service, we ensure that everybody is made to feel welcome (the kettle is always on), we listen to our customers and believe its so important that our customers get the right bike for them and not just because it’s a bike we want to sell.
How has business been for you since opening in November 2022? We were warned in 2022 by numerous reps and bike shops that we were opening in a particularly strange and difficult time in the cycling industry.
Knowing what we know now, we may have been tempted to wait another year to see what happened, but we had decided to follow a dream and the time was right for us as a family so we went for it and both believe in no regrets. We keep saying ‘if we can survive our first year in what people
say is possibly the worst year in the cycling trade, then we can survive anything the industry wants to throw at us now’. We have built up a great customer base in the short time
we have been open, our workshop is busy every week, we are selling bikes, we have held lots of bike events and shop rides to integrate the shop into the local cycling community. The hardest part for us as a new business has been trying
to keep up with the discount battles. We didn’t expect to be going from one bike sale to the next to get bikes out the door, but that’s been us and the rest of the industry for quite some time now.
www.bikebiz.com
May 2024 | 23
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