BIG INTERVIEW
Pure made the decision to move away from retail, closing a majority of its stores
Having amassed a multi-million pound fortune early in his career through the pensions wing of Hargreaves Lansdown asset management, then helping support start- up businesses as CEO of Horatio Investments, Norris then switched to the micromobility industry in 2018, by founding Pure Scooters.
Changing tides Starting out with its own brand of electric scooter, Pure then moved into retail, opening high street stores in key locations, including Bristol, London, and Paris, and broadening its focus to include the sale of third party scooter brands and e-bikes. But earlier this year, operating under a new brand name Pure Electric, Norris and the team opted to shift away from retail, resulting in the closure of a majority of its stores, dropping the e-bike aspect of the business, and instead focusing on third-party partnerships with outside retailers. On the changing of the tide, Norris said: “We started off selling electric scooters, the company I set up was called Pure Scooters. We realised that people want to touch and feel the product so at that point, I was selling Xiaomi and Segway so that worked. We set up one store and that worked really well. A few people who came to work for me came from the bicycle industry. “The bicycle industry people were saying don’t you think scooters will be bigger than bikes one day? One particular gentleman internally decided we wanted to sell bikes. I got it, understood it. It fits in with my ethos of decarbonisation, but what I realised was, we’re right in the infancy, we have a position to really accelerate the use of
24 | November 2022
scooters across the globe. And we’re leading that, there’s a lot of very good bicycle companies - like Brompton or Specialised or Cube - there’s a lot of very good companies out there and it’s a very mature market. So filling a hole that wasn’t being done by any good scooter manufacturer felt like it would have a bigger impact than selling e-bikes. “We made a decision: we should focus on one thing, we should focus on electric scooters.” As his example, Norris looked at the Pure retail business
in France, where e-scooters are legal, and where his stores were not making money. The brand then entered into a partnership with the French electronics retailer Fnac, and immediately business was transformed overnight, as the third party sales far outstripped the sales from the Pure Electric stores in France. Following the closure of the Pure Electric stores in the
UK, the brand has now entered into a similar partnership with British high street electronics retailer Currys.
Stumbling blocks Anyone familiar with British transport legislation will notice a significant hiccup for a British business selling privately-owned e-scooters: they’re not actually legal on UK roads.
The UK lags behind its European counterparts in many
respects when it comes to urban transport, from safe infrastructure to e-bike sales, but the Government has also dragged its heels in legislating for e-scooters, despite the low-cost, zero-emission vehicles being an obvious alternative to the car and the soaring associated costs. It is currently illegal to ride privately-owned electric scooters on public roads in the UK.
www.bikebiz.com
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