How’s Business? – September 2024

Welcome to How’s Business, brought to you by our sponsor Dirt Works Australia, where right now, you can get Sunringle wheelsets for HALF PRICE.

It seems that for most of the stores I called this month, this year’s winter season ended almost with a flick of a switch from very cold wet weather to a warm early spring.

With the warmer weather has come a welcome boost to trading after some very tough months for some. More by coincidence than intention, four of the stores we called this month have a particularly strong mountain bike orientation and the warmer weather has also be useful for drying out their local trails.

I’ve been hearing some stories about bike shop theft recently, so for this month’s follow up question I asked, “Has your store ever been robbed either via break in or during trading hours? What are your best security measures?”

It unlocked some very good stories!

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Sean Lee from Empire Cycles, Beckenham which is an outer eastern suburb of Perth, WA, said:

Business is good. For us it’s mountain bike season, so that’s our busiest time of year. We’ve got a great mountain bike scene in Western Australia – lots of gravity and cross country mountain biking.

Mountain bike season runs from March to November. It’s more of a winter sport here. It gets brutally hot in summer.

We have a heavy workshop focus in the shop, with our suspension service centre. We’ve got three full time mechanics at the moment.

We’re probably the best equipped suspension service centre in WA. We’ve got two full time suspension techs, working in a dedicated suspension lab in the shop.

The reason we do that is to avoid sending stuff over east. Because we’re so isolated over here, generally any suspension work is at least a week or two turnaround, if you were to send it somewhere over east. So we’ve invested heavily into our mechanics, our tooling, to make sure we can get the job done here in Perth.

It’s a physically separate room to our regular workshop. It’s definitely a clean room. It’s behind a glass window. We’ve got two wet benches for suspension work. We keep any contaminants from the main workshop out of the suspension lab.

This year we’ve got a gravity race team. It’s a development team so we’ve got four elite athletes and four junior athletes. The idea is to bring up these junior athletes and give them some support and some mentorship. Teach them a bit about race craft and about being a pro.

We are about 90% mountain bike, both in sales and servicing and in our event support as well.

The price point for our bikes would be between three to 20 grand. I think it’s changing a little bit with e-(mountain) bikes becoming more prevalent. Obviously the (price) barrier to entry with e-bikes is higher. The most common e-bikes we sell would be between eight and 15 grand.

Kevin Excell from Brooks Cycle Depot in Murray Bridge about 80 kilometres south east of Adelaide, SA said:

It’s okay for the winter. It’s normal but that’s ok. It might have been a bit above a normal winter I reckon. I have no idea why! (laughs) I don’t try to analyse it.

It’s mainly mountain biking and commuting cycling around here. Our most popular bike is a mid-range hard tail. Like a Giant Talon level.

Giant’s my main brand but I also do Apollo, Fuji and Radius.

Our workshop has been good. It’s quiet today, but it’s been good up to now. You get a day off every now and then. I do it all myself.

Have you ever been robbed?

Both. We’ve been broken into a long while ago now. Since we’ve had cameras, we haven’t had a problem. They’ve been good. We don’t have a screen where people can see themselves on camera. I’ve just got it in my office where I can see four cameras on the split screen.

We’ve lost a bit of stock during the day. Not much though. Only a couple of times. Scooters mainly. I caught up with them once. I got the stuff back and down the track I got a letter of apology, which I thought was good.

I thought, “Next time you want something, just come and talk to me!” (laughs)

Bevan Mason from Bike Fix Townsville in far north Queensland said:

It’s not too bad mate. Basic bike general sales have dropped off a fair bit. We’re still selling quite a bit of high end road stuff with Pinarello and bits and pieces.

We’re still doing quite a few high end mountain bikes as well. It’s just the middle of the road stuff that’s dropped off. We go down to $600 in our shop. Both that level and the mid $1,000’s have dropped off. The people that used to be buying those kinds of bikes either aren’t buying bikes at all I guess, or they’re buying bikes from Kmart, I’m not too sure.

I always try to help out the road club from time to time and the mountain bike club from time to time and then the tri club as well. I do a little bit with each an don’t go too overboard with any of them, because they just keep on putting their hand out, the more they get sponsored.

P&A and repairs are going really good. Repairs are always flat out – I’m always booked two weeks in advance – because I’m still working solo – it’s always busy.

Have you ever been robbed?

I’ve had someone walk into the shop, grab a bike and try to run off with it. I tackled them and apprehended them and held them until the cops came.

The front window’s been smashed three times in the past four months. With bikes being stolen out of the front window. She’s always pretty bad around here!

The last couple of times I didn’t even bother trying to claim on insurance. I tried to get the landlords to put security shutters in, but they don’t want to spend any money. I’ve been here for nine years – they haven’t spent a dollar on the place and they’re not keen to any time soon. It’s a bit annoying.

I want some of those roll down shutters.

Aidan Mernagh from Bro Bike in Queenstown, on the South Island of New Zealand said:

We’ve had a good winter. Last summer was quieter than usual but our winter has been really good for us, just because the snow has been terrible, so everyone’s been back on the bike. So that’s been great! A quiet summer but busy winter.

We sell mountain bikes and gravel bikes, but repairs and maintenance is more our thing. For anything over a half hour job we’re probably currently booked a week out.

I’ve been over here seven years. When I was in the UK, I was a student. I came over here seven years ago and started the shop from scratch. We’ll see how we go…

When I first got to New Zealand, before I started the shop, a wholesaler sold me a bike and the guy was like, “#@*! yeah, I’ll do you a bro deal!”

So me and my mate started selling brake pads on our website and we called them “Bro Pads”. It was just a bit of fun. I didn’t expect it to stick, but my mate went back to the UK so it was just me and it’s working out alright.

I usually have a team of four and a half for summer, but we’re going to go into next summer with less, for sure. I’m going to scale it down.

Our main brands are Pivot and we’re just about to start doing Trek. We used to import Nukeproof bikes, but they went bust, so that wasn’t very good for us. They’ve got a new owner so we’ll wait and see what happens there.

Have you ever been robbed?

Never! Never been robbed. We’ve been in the business for about four years. …or if I have been robbed, I don’t know about it! (laughs).

We’ve got cameras and an alarm, but that’s mainly for insurance, to be honest with you. We don’t need rollers or bars on the windows in Queenstown. Not out here…

You could a leave a 20 grand bike for 12 hours and it would still there. This place is as safe as houses. It’s ridiculous. It takes a bit of getting used to really, coming from the UK.

I wouldn’t just leave a bike out overnight, but there’s a good chance it would still be there the next day. I remember when I first got here someone left a $12,000 bike outside a nightclub, then forgot about it.

The nightclub owner posted on Facebook the next day to say, “Your bike’s still here.” No-one had pinched it. Coming from the UK, that’s mental! In the UK people follow you home to rob you. (laughs)

The locals are all here for skiing and biking. They’re not here for robbing folks. In the UK you get your expensive areas and if they’re isolated, there’s not a lot of crime. But if you have an expensive area next to a cheaper area then the people come over and rob the rich people.

Here in Queenstown, because it’s so expensive everywhere, it kind of keeps the riff raff out, so to speak. Which is good and bad – it’s too expensive to live here, but it’s bloody safe!

Dave Tuckerman from The Bike Shack Nowra on the south coast of NSW about 160 km south of Sydney said:

It’s good since the rain stopped. The cold weather and the rain is not good for bike shops, as you know. It was on and off for a long time. We had a lot of rain. Mate, we got smashed! Going back a whole year. Then it dried up, then it came back again. On and off it was probably a six month period.

The tracks just got quite rideable since about three weeks ago now. For the past three weeks its warmed up and the tracks have dried out, so things are much better now.

We do a lot of mountain bikes – but everyone… you couldn’t even ride a road bike because it was just raining constantly. So it affected business across the board. You just had to get through winter. But things seem to be pretty good now – back to normal.

Our worst category at the moment is conventional dual suspension. Our best seller is always hard tails up to $1,000. We do everything… a lot of enquiries on e-bikes and e-bike sales but still our best sellers are bikes up to $1,500 and kids bikes.

We still sell a bit of everything. I’ll still sell a $10,000 road bike here and there and an expensive mountain bike, expensive e-bikes – we still do those.

Trek and Merida are by far our biggest brands but we still sell Norco, a bit of BMC and all the BMX bikes and kids bikes.

Our workshop is busy. Not crazy like it used to be a year ago, but always busy. I’ve got a couple of guys to help me. Mainly casuals but there’s someone here every day. Plus I’ve got a couple of juniors as well.

We’ve been here for 18 years now. We’ve got a pretty good name. You get your ebbs and flows. The bike industry is affected by weather a bit more than others.

But all the tracks they’re building, like Mogo and Narooma. They’re all good for the families and kids. They’re all getting into that side of it.

We’ve got a pretty strong local club. The president of the club works in my shop, so we know what’s going on.

Have you ever been robbed?

Yes. A long time ago we got broken into, but never since. We’ve been lucky in that way. But theft in the shop during trading hours is a shocker down here.

P&A – you’ve got to watch ‘em like a hawk! Nowra’s not the best area for types of people. They’ll get anything they can get their hands on. Mainly kids going for things like grips, tools, lights, stuff they want to use themselves.

You can’t have everything behind the counter. You’ve got to have stuff hanging out in the shop. So it’s hard – they know all tricks of the trade.

We have cameras. We have everything. But these days they’re just so brazen. They don’t care. It’s got to the point in society where people get away with everything these days. I don’t know what’s gone wrong with the world.

Gary Jackson from Giant Bairnsdale on the East Gippsland coast of Victoria said:

It’s picking up, thankfully! The warmer weather… just this last two or three weeks. We’ve noticed more repairs coming in and more new bikes as well.

But May, June especially were much quieter, because it was super cold. And that’s unusual for East Gippsland. Normally our winters are mild. Not Canberra cold!

But we had this long period where we had tops of 12 and 13 degrees and very cold early mornings of zero and one degree and that kind of thing.

Our store really is a lot of recreational riders who just don’t want to ride when it’s like that.

But definitely an uptick in interest and business again, now that the weather’s getting warmer.

We’ve got the rail trail. (The East Gippsland Rail Trail which runs for 100 kilometres starting in Bairnsdale) It’s quite a good one. It seems to attract a few tourists. It’s a bit more of a wilderness experience. There’s not as many towns dotted along the way so it’s a bigger distance between towns. And some people seem to like that. It’s a bit more remote feeling, I guess.

But again, when the weather was cold, we noticed that there weren’t as many people around riding it.

Being a country store, we sell a real mixture of all kinds of bikes. We do a little bit of high end stuff, but a lot of what we do these days is still your family type bikes. Your recreation level bikes and e-bikes.

We definitely get people who come in specifically saying, “I want a bike and I’m mostly going to be riding the rail trail.” Then we go into, “Do you want a step through?” or “Do you want a hybrid bike? E-bike?” – that kind of thing. There are some people who almost exclusively ride the rail trail, because it’s traffic free.

Our workshop is just starting to get busy again. Super busy for us is booked up for three weeks. Reasonably busy is booked up for one week, which is what we’re at now. But during those colder months, you could have walked in off the street and we would have done your bike straight away! (laughs) So it’s been quite a turnaround very quickly.

It has gone from being quiet to being reasonably busy in a very short space of time and it’s completely to do with the warmer weather, I’m sure.

Have you ever been robbed?

Yes to both, but thankfully not for a very long time. We’ve been here for a long time – nearly 30 years. I’ve had one bike taken from the store during business hours. A guy just leapt on a bike and took off out the door. That’s only ever happened once.

Obviously there have been petty small items taken occasionally – a pair of gloves or pair of hand grips or something. But thankfully not too often on the small stuff as well.

I’ve had the front window broken a couple of times in attempted break ins, but they haven’t got very far. Thankfully not for a long time.

I think that’s mainly because we’re in a pretty prominent position. We’re right at the traffic lights, on the highway. Even in the middle of the night, there’s usually still traffic and we’re in quite a visible location.

I think the other thing that is of benefit is that there’s no rear access to the shop. That’s just a happy bonus that makes us a bit less attractive to thieves.

We don’t have any security on the windows and I think we can get away with that. …I hope I haven’t jinxed it! (laughs)

I know that our friends at Gippy Cycles in Traralgon, they posted security footage on their social media of a guy who basically put a chain around the door handles and pulled the doors off with his ute!

Then the ridiculous thing was, all he grabbed was two kick scooters, not even electric ones, put them on the tray of his ute and as he drove off, they fell off!

Just standard kid’s scooters! It was ridiculous. You could put Benny Hill music to it.