Brompton’s Will Butler-Adams: “There’s no time to be afraid… we need to create some debate”

“The cycling industry to me, means: everybody’s invited. Therefore we must be everybody.” Will Butler-Adams, CEO at Brompton Bicycles, speaks with Danielle Reiff-Jongerius in the fifth article for CIN exploring diversity in the cycling industry…

In an eight-month journey exploring women’s roles in the cycling industry, one lesson stands out: without men’s support, progress is limited. More broadly speaking: We need the majority to proactively back minorities, and this requires a shift in thinking within that said majority. This article spotlights men driving change and transformation.

I asked women in the industry to recommend men who have made a difference. The responses were fewer than expected, but a few names stood out. One such name is Will Butler-Adams, CEO of Brompton Bikes. In our candid conversation, which quickly shifted from prepared Q&A to a very open, funny and informal dialogue, Will (yes, we immediately went first name-familiar without knowing each other) shared his vision on inclusion and diversity in the world, and, oh right, the cycling industry, too.

Will Butler-Adams: Danielle, thank you for asking me to be a part of this. Of course, today, we’ll be talking about women, but it’s not about women. It’s just about humanity. And I think the general problem that we have, which I like to talk about…wait – Danielle, are you a walkist?’

Danielle Reiff-Jongerius (DR): Well, Will, I am not familiar with that term, but I have an idea of where you are going with this – and I would say, no, I am not.

Will Butler-Adams (WBA): Neither am I. I am also not a “cyclist”, are you?

DR: No, I am not a “cyclist” – but I do cycle almost every day.

WBA: Cycling is like walking. It’s like breathing. It should just be part of life. At Brompton, we don’t create products for “cyclists”. It’s not to sell bikes. It’s to create urban freedom. To make people a little bit happier. That’s what most amazing products do. You don’t buy the product for the product. You buy it because of how it changes our life. The way we’re living our lives today is not right. Most of us live in cities and the irony is, as this most intelligent animal on planet Earth, we’ve devised a world where most of us live is the most unhealthy place to live. And that is bonkers and stupid. And that’s because at some point in the 1950s, we took the wrong turn and we decided to design our cities around a square metal box called an automobile, rather than a jelly-like human being. And the human beings came second and the automobile came first. We need to turn that on its head.

DR: Bring everyone along to the party… Do we start with parents?

WBA: “So if we start from that place, then you need to change the city. You don’t need to change the middle aged white man with a six pack, because that ain’t going to do enough.

You’ve got to bring everyone along to the party. Fortunately, parents have this deep desire to teach their children how to ride a bike. And as a parent, if you don’t do that, it’s a bit like teaching your child to swim: you feel irresponsible if you don’t.

And thank God they have done that because the opportunity is not lost. Because if that had happened, if parents had felt they didn’t need to teach their children how to ride a bike, then we’d be in real trouble. But we’re not. And now, I’m in business. I want to change the world.

DR: So, then how do you have impact and drive change from the company’s perspective?

WBA: Something we introduced about 15 years ago was bringing our retailers to the factory. So, we bring shops from Japan, Singapore, the US, Spain, France, and we’ve come for a couple of days and have fun and go riding, drink warm beer, eat soggy chips. Take a picture outside of Buckingham Palace and have fun…

DR: Lots of companies do this…

WBA: Yes, but I just had this epiphany, which came when the 200 people that we brought into the factory – there were no women. What the f***? Now it’s worth saying, I have three sisters and three daughters. My wife is one of three girls too, so I’m surrounded by girls.

This got me thinking: Imagine if you wrote a business plan and you said, right, there is a market of 100%. This is a total market opportunity that we could sell to a wonderful big fat market. What we’re going to do, is we’re going to target 2% of it.

And we’re not even going to bother with the other 98%. Oh, no it’s just the 2% we are after. Anyone reading that business plan would go: f**** Are you an idiot? What are you doing? Why are you wasting your time on the two? What about all this other potential? No, we’re not interested in that.

Our Japanese dealer opened the first store 17 years ago, I think, in Kōbe in Japan. And he said he’s only going to sell Brompton. We were tiny at the time. We’re like, it’s never going to work. He was determined. Shop’s still there. It worked.

So, then we thought, well, this is kind of embarrassing, we better open our first shop. It was really important to us that we weren’t competing with other bike shops. This had to be something that supported them, that, you know, gave them confidence in who we are that raises the profile of the brand.

DR: Radical entrepreneurship: a 50-50 rule is implemented.

WBA: We knew we had to do something different from existing bike retail: You’re going to the average bike store. It’s cluttered. Well, first you’ve got to find it. It’s out of the way. You come in, it’s just totally blokey. It’s not even sort of smart. Unless you’re a total and utter cyclist, like a geek into it, part of that 2% I mentioned earlier, you’re out by now.

But that’s not how we’re going to change the world. That is not what the sector as a whole should be doing. So when we opened our store, we made it clean, added loos. A restaurant is defined by how clean the loos are. I mean, this is basic stuff: no clutter, beautiful and colourful and un-intimidating, just a nice place to just wander around and feel invited.

And now we decided to do some seriously radical innovation. We decided to make half of our staff women. Oh yes. Radical. It’s crazy rocket science. And of course we discovered some unbelievable insights: that women like to be served by women. And then we also discovered that men like to be served by women.

And we found that our female staff were some of our most successful sales reps. We then shared this insight with our retailers and we have opened more stores worldwide.
Well, we still love getting to know how to do bike retail right. And it’s different everywhere in the world.

DR: Talking about differences everywhere in the world: what is the most pressing issue for you personally, on a global scale?

WBA: Well, the fundamental principles are similar but the funny thing is, I mean, we haven’t really shifted the dial. I didn’t go to Eurobike like a year before lockdown. Remember, lockdown was this epiphany, this moment where suddenly we could see mothers, children, you know, with this just latent hunger to cycle, to have that freedom to be where people felt safe. Suddenly they just all came out and were taking back space in the city and taking back the streets. So it was this moment of realisation in my mind of what I expected.  Like the industry is going to go, oh my God. And let’s at the same time, remember, we’ve got a climate crisis that becomes so real that it’s there for all of us to see. So the opportunity for us is changing how we live.

So I went to Eurobike post lockdown last year full of excitement to think about the positioning, the engagement, the people, expecting that the images would be about lifestyle, about how we engage with everybody. But it wasn’t – it was like a complete fricking rejig of what I saw in 2019. It was all blokey, blokey, techie, techie – selling more shit to somebody
who’s already got seven bikes. They don’t need more. We’ve got a climate crisis. You don’t need to add another bike for that, you know, fetishist. We need to engage with people who
don’t even own a bike, but that know how to ride a bike because their parents were running behind them, as I do with my girls teaching them to ride a bike.

DR: Why is the cycling industry so afraid?

WBA: I think the problem is that our sector is full of enthusiasts. It is full of cyclists.  So, I’m not a cyclist. I wouldn’t know the first thing about the Tour De France. I cycle a lot, I couldn’t live without my bike and I’m everywhere with it. And I get withdrawal symptoms if I’m not on it. We have made a conscious effort in our business to not overpopulate with
cyclists, because then they will design and communicate and engage again only that 2%. And that is not the opportunity. We are being successful by engaging this wider audience.
It’s the imagery. You need to see yourself. And this makes this not just about women. It’s about everybody. It’s about class. It’s about wealth. It’s about age. It’s about religion, ethnicity. If you never see somebody who looks or feels or thinks like you, in any of the communication, you feel like you’re not invited. We just did a collaboration with a
brand called Palace, originally a skateboard brand, but that’s become a lifestyle, urban brand. We need to position our bike so that the younger, very urban, edgy community feel invited and see that this product is not just for the sort of City guy who’s in his 50s trotting off to work. But you have to work at that. And we know it works because we have
loads of customers who are in their 20s and they’ll be riding that bike for 30 years to come. Love it and cherish it. But you can’t just assume that’ll happen. You’ve got to go out there and work at it and find ways to engage and position your product in such a way that the person goes, hey, yeah, maybe that is me. Your message needs to resonate with the
community that you’re trying to excite.

The last thing we want to do is sell our bike to someone who doesn’t need one, because then it’s a waste and they will never love it because they never needed it. But there are many, many people who would really benefit from one of our bikes, they just don’t know they need it yet.

DR: From Brompton’s perspective, a global company, what have you achieved when it comes to diversity and equality?

WBA: If you truly want to be global, you need and you want to, talk to a diverse audience. You need to reflect your customer. The cycling industry should be: everybody’s invited. Therefore we must be everybody.

We are in London and that has been luck; but we also took a decision strategically not to move out of London. We moved the factory eight years ago. And if you looked at the numbers, everyone would say, well, you need to move away. London’s too expensive, but London makes us who we are because if we moved to Birmingham, we would not be anything like as diverse as we are here. London is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, and that is reflected in who we recruit. And it has given us a tremendous  competitive advantage by having that rich diversity inside our business.

DR: Any advice for the industry you’d like to share?

WBA: If you want to make more profit, then you ought to start talking to this massive opportunity that you’re not talking to. Put it in their language. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to demonstrate through our shops to other retailers. The shop in London is turning over about 1.5 million pounds only selling Bromptons. So take some learning.
We’ll give you all the information you need. We can give you all the data. We can tell you everything, take some of what we’ve succeeded with, and put a bit of that into your store and learn from what we’ve learned. And if we try something, we fail, we’ll similarly tell you – don’t do this. We can experiment in our stores. We can take risks, and then we can de-risk the retailer.

It’s so entrenched, this cyclist’s sort of mindset and we need to open up. We had the recent mayoral elections for London, and the conservative candidate wants to get rid of cycle lanes, get rid of low traffic neighbourhoods, get rid of, you know, emission charges lost, because people want safer streets, cleaner and more active living and, and culture for their children.

DR: So the quiet majority is being heard, even though a loud minority are making lots of noise.

WBA: I think our sector will change. You’ve said that the bigger companies are bringing their token women in. Well, at least they’re bringing token women in, because those token women get more and more and they will have a louder and louder voice, and they will have a bigger and bigger impact, and then it will create its own momentum.

DR: Final thoughts?

WBA: Actually, it’s great Cycling Industry News commissioned you to do this as a series, because I do think some of the bodies representing cycling are part of the problem. And that they need more leadership. I’m afraid we don’t have time to be afraid. We’re going to be dead in a minute. So stand up for something, be more true leaders and create some debate. Debate comes with friction and comes with, you know, not being aligned and taking a safe route.

Take an example of what Anne Hidalgo did in Paris, she stood up and led and challenged the status quo. And everybody said she was going to fail. ‘’She’s so unpopular.’’ But guess what? She’s voted in for a second term. Now there are more people cycling in Paris than there are driving. It will never go back now. The majority is becoming louder by the minute and we will get there.’’

DR: Editing this pleasant conversation without trying to cut the openness out, I came to see Will Butler-Adams as a warm, caring, and sensible businessman who understands his responsibilities as a CEO. He knows that his business thrives on inclusion, and living and breathing that is common sense. As he put it, it’s about humanity, not bikes.

DANIELLE REIFF-JONGERIUS

Growing up in Utrecht, one of the cycling capitals of the world, Danielle Reiff-Jongerius has used her bike to get to school since the age of five. In 2015 she founded her agency, 138, in Munich while pregnant with her second child and with the vision to build her business around her family. Together with her husband, Philipp, it was decided they would merge both their businesses and share workload, income and parenting tasks equally. Today, 138’s values are reflected in a steadily growing company that puts their team first, while offering their expertise in content creation, marketing, communication and change management support to a diverse array of clients. Find out more at 138alternatives.com