Customers Literally Move a Bike Shop… By Bike!

Omafiets is a large bike shop that was located for about six years at 17 George St Redfern, just south of the Sydney CBD.

In January 2020 it was time to move to a new premises about two kilometres further south of the city at 278-282 Mitchell Road on the corner of Mitchell Rd and Maddox St, Alexandria.

Being quite a large shop, even after having a moving sale to sell down as much stock as possible, there were still a lot of bikes, parts, tools and fittings to be moved.

So owner/manager Chris Moore took the novel approach of contacting their 3,000 plus customers who were connected via social media and seeing if they’d like to help.

He soon had dozens of volunteers, who would ride the stock bikes from the old shop to the new. Others would carry as many items as they could fit on their bikes, with the short distance meaning that multiple round trips were quite feasible.

“It went really well,” Chris said. “I was a bit nervous because we had to reschedule at the last minute due to the weather forecast. But we still had a great turnout with about 60 customers coming along.

“It was a very relaxed, low key event because it’s a relatively short ride between the old and new premises along quit back streets. It was nice to have our community get together.”