CIN Market Data: Bike workshops are stable, and full of potential

There’s a degree of unanimity that the workshop is vital for the retail trade, but are we seeing any evidence that the service side of independent retailers is in growth? Or do fairly static numbers indicate that bike workshops are not yet fulfilling their potential for a large proportion of independents? We examine the stats from CIN’s Market Data…

One of the benefits of having a few years behind the CIN Market Data project is that there is now just about enough data to compare results and pinpoint a few trends. Regular readers will have spotted us dipping into this honey pot of information of late in CIN and we’re taking the opportunity to do so again here, namely in examining the importance of the workshop.

The broad industry consensus is that the workshop is a critical part of not just keeping the nation’s cycle riders on their bikes, but also to keep bike retail businesses profitable. With a workshop, independents have the diversity of income of a service side and a retailing side. Given the recent market challenges with overstocks, it might have been logical to expect hat shops would have focused harder on their service offerings and workshops, but – on the face of it – the stats don’t appear to support that supposition.

In 2025, the bulk of independent bike shops saw the workshop represent up to 40% of their business. Rewinding back five years, pre-Covid and pre (implementation of) Brexit, it’s a picture that is surprisingly static. Back in 2020, the same number of shops were in the 0%-40% category.

Looking closer, shops where workshop trade represents 0%-20% of their business has increased (2000: 21% versus 2025: 27%), indicating a fall in the importance of the workshop for a fair number of shops. Back in 2020, a chunky 27% of respondents said the workshop represented 80-100% of their business. In 2025, that total was down slightly to 23%, further hinting at some softening of the workshop share.

As always, there are a multitude of ways to interpret those stats – perhaps retail is growing over the workshop in turnover terms, particularly with sales on overstock items still making their way through the sales channels? Or maybe workshop recruitment has been a challenge (as has been finding the cash to pay a mechanic head) so that side has been pared back, limiting the potential and workload that workshops have been able to handle?

One fairly irrefutable finding from the stats seems to be that the workshop is a rock solid reliable contributor to many businesses. While there may not be a great deal of change for the majority of retailers, that kind of stability is gold dust – not even a market as severely disrupted as the cycle trade’s has been in the last five or six years has knocked the workshop significantly.

Nevertheless, it’s either a negative that the workshop hasn’t actually grown across the board, or it’s yet another nudge for shops that workshops are perhaps not yet fulfilling their potential and there’s room to grow the business, and profitability, through service.

Of course, the CIN Market Data is not perfect and, naturally, those that take the survey are probably fairly engaged with CIN. So we urge shops and workshops to use their voice and take part in the next survey and feel free to shoot us views and insights on the topic.