INTERVIEW
From warehouse to workshop
to compete with. Instead, we are open up front; we tell them we aren’t going to purchase containers of stock and hope it sells. We sit down and understand what a ‘good UK market’ means to them, and we build a plan together to achieve it. What we are doing in turn is building a more sustainable network of retailers. On the other hand, we represent (although a lot wouldn’t
know) a bunch of D2C brands that sell from our 3PL warehouse straight to the customer. Those brands have different requirements: speed, efficiency, courier service quality, packaging quality, a good returns process, and customer aftercare. 3PLs are plentiful, but 3PLs in the bike market with in-house customer service, in-house bike mechanics, and genuine product knowledge add real value. Bike-related brands in this space can put goods into our warehouse and know we will take care of the rest, from delivering the goods to managing customer service requests and any warranties.
Alongside sales representation, your model includes third-party logistics (3PL), B2B ordering platforms, and local fulfilment. How do these services operate in practice for brands that do not require an end-to-end traditional distribution setup? We’ve become quite good at 3PL in the bike space, and we’ve done that by learning from our clients’ objectives. We’ve then leveraged that to bolt on other services that relate to those goods being sold in the UK market and provided solutions to brands that make their life easier. We let them focus on doing what they do best while we focus on making sure their customers get goods on time, but even before that, we will support them: need a container at a factory and the import/ export sorting? We will take care of it all. Our business is split down the middle between companies
www.bikebiz.com
we represent for brand sales and those we manage back-end operations for. All clients are different, and we tend to operate on a ‘pick n mix’ type menu of services. Our most successful client (in terms of sales revenue) handles their own sales with their own on-the-ground team and lets us take care of everything else day-to-day. As Adaptive, we are probably best recognised for the brands we are actively selling (3T, LOOK Bikes, Rocky Mountain and UDOG). The main stockholding is from brands we do 3PL and related services for: TERN (OGA), Wethepeople, Bombtrack, Radio, SE, Title, Seido (Traffic), Megamo (Also Bikes), Levit, Rose, Cikada (Dyaco) & JetBlack. Outside of bringing brands to market for us or for others,
we also support some great companies that are using cycling to change the way people and goods move on a shared or hire basis. Our input here is to build, set up and deliver bikes across the country ready for public deployment, mainly in shared bike schemes. All our workshop services are growing fast (including mass re-works and mass warranty support), and we’ve added more mechanics and technicians to really scale with our clients’ requirements. Given it’s where we started, building bikes back in Derby feels good!
IBDs are navigating complex decisions around stockholding, cash flow, and retail margins. Are your fulfilment services structured to support everyday ordering and stock availability for IBDs? They sure are, and pressure on cash flow is felt right across the supply chain as we are still waiting for the post covid market to settle. Distributors have always supported dealers; this is what they do: they hold the stock, they offer the finance, in turn the retailer supports and pushes their brands. With the brands we represent, it is no different; the retailers we supply
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