Interview with Bell’s Bicycles: Challenges of running independent bike shop
Everyone involved in cycle retailing knows the industry is changing but how to adapt to those changes is the challenge that the trade is facing. For Bell’s Bicycles it has meant closing a high street store and moving to an industrial unit to concentrate on online sales and bicycle restorations. Duncan Moore investigates…
Big chains offering discounts, online retailers providing next delivery on the most obscure of items and the ever-increasing cost of living making many people feel that new bicycles are unaffordable are the main challenges the independent bike trading is currently facing but why try and face them head-on when you can go your own way and do something different?
Closing a high street store in a seaside town to move to a nondescript unit on an industrial estate is how Megan Williams (pictured below), the owner and founder of Bell’s Bicycles is dealing with the challenge of running an independent bike shop in today’s environment.
Up until late last year, a walk through the Old Town area of the Southeastern seaside town of Hastings would have taken you past Bell’s Bicycles. You couldn’t miss it with its rack of rental bikes outside and carefully dressed window displays showing the selection of traditional-styled bikes available for sale alongside a range of carefully curated parts and accessories to match. It was less of a bike shop and more of a boutique and that is just what Megan (Meg) Williams the shop’s founder and owner wanted.
“We’ve always been quite specialist really,” Meg explains. “It comes from the viewpoint of gender inequality. I’m a girl who’s always loved bikes, yet I always felt intimidated around other bike people, especially going into that all-male environment of the regular bike shops. Still, to this day, I find it intimidating, it’s so silly, isn’t it? I mean, why? It’s just a load of boys in Lycra, but it’s still there. So, a really big part of Bell’s was that I wanted to make a space that women would feel comfortable in and that followed more of a traditional regular shop feel. I wasn’t reinventing the wheel, just thinking about retail and making buying a bike a nice and approachable experience.”
Meg grew up with a love of bikes and cycling, and it was this love of old bikes that saw the creation of Bell’s. Despite landing a job in the arts industry after completing university, Meg wanted to earn a little extra money and with an ever-increasing collection of older bikes taking up every spare inch of space at home the answer was obvious sell some of the bikes.
A weekend-only pop-up shop was the first incarnation of Bell’s Bicycles. “I opened one [a pop-up shop] around 20 years ago and sold every single bike I had in the shop and I’ve not stopped since,” Meg explains. The stock at that time was older Raleighs, Claude Butlers, Carltons and the like, steel-framed road bikes and roadsters, the type of bikes at that time that were considered unfashionable and which Meg bought cheaply at car boot sales, as job lots on eBay and in some cases found in skips.
By working on rebuilding and restoring those old bikes to create fresh stock as stock for the pop-up store Meg quickly taught herself the basics of cycle maintenance and repair. Not bad for someone who freely admits: “When I started, I didn’t even know how you would take a brake apart. It was just picking skills up along the way. The business started with restoration, but then became a much more commercial, actual bike shop, still with that kind of feeling of a kind of classic bicycle aesthetic.”
It was this focus on the aesthetic of bicycle design that played a key role in the brands Meg chose to stock in the Hastings shop when she made the move from operating a semi-regular pop-up style store to a regular retail outlet. The decision to go full-time with bike retailing was helped by the fact that despite her increasing the price of the second-hand and lightly restored bikes she was selling she kept selling all of her stock each weekend she opened the pop-up.
It was the distinctly old-school and yet practical style of bike that she had been restoring and selling that set the theme for the brands that Meg has stocked in Bell’s Bicycles over the years and has included Tokyo Bike, Temple, Genesis, Pashley and Gazelle. The last two have always been the mainstay of the retail side of the business with the classic styling the two brands offer fitting with the founding ethos of Bell’s and the regular selection of bikes passing through the workshop for restoration.
The choice of brands stocked as accessories too has always been equally carefully considered and nothing as regular as trade team Lycra has ever been in favour or on the shelves. Meg’s choices have always been a carefully curated choice of ‘lifestyle’ brands; the type of accessories that hark back to an older, and some might say simpler and more elegant time. The type of equipment people who simply ride bicycles want rather than what ‘cyclists’ might desire.
There was also a third revenue stream alongside retail and bicycle restoration, during Bell’s time in Hastings. Bike hire was a useful additional source of income, albeit a rather seasonal one. Therein lies part of the issue with running an IBD in a small seaside town. Unlike its near neighbour Brighton, Hastings has never been an affluent town and passing trade was limited.
Fortunately, for many years the lack of local trade was not too much of an issue for Bell’s due to the brands and highly curated brands stocked many people from farther afield were happy to shop with the business online, indeed the sales breakdown in recent years saw almost 90% of sales being online. Meg says of the last few years in Hastings: “There’s no logical sense other than the fact that it was quite cheap to rent.
With home life changes causing Meg to relocate to London and then having to travel to Hastings every week, decisions about radically changing the business began to form. As Meg explains: “The restoration was just growing more and more and more to the point where we ended up having, like, an eight-month waiting list, and just didn’t have the space, couldn’t fulfil everything, and yet, that’s the side that we just love.”
And so it was that the high street shop front in Hastings was swapped at the start of this year for an anonymous unit in an industrial estate in Southeast London. Online sales remain as buoyant as ever: “Our online stuff is still exactly the same as it was before. We’ve just got more time to dedicate to actually being able to do it,” Meg notes, “and the restoration side of the business is continuing to grow.
“The idea is to fully commercialise bike restoration, which is something that really doesn’t currently exist on a commercial basis. There are plenty of people doing it at home as a hobby in an informal way. But it does not exist in the same way as it does in the classic car world, where you’ve got professional workshops who can fully restore something even though the cost will far exceed the value.”
In the short time since the business moved from Hastings to London the restoration requests are proving enough to keep two on-site mechanics and an offsite painter busy. The current job list stands at around 40 bikes ranging from examples of classic Raleigh Roadsters that Bell’s is known for restoring through Moultons and Raleigh Choppers and Grifter and on to more modern machinery with a mid-’90s GT Zaskar dripping anodised trinkets, that will soon be wearing a full period correct XTR groupset, being the latest bike through the door.
Given that one recent Raleigh Roadster restoration that is nearing completion will have cost the customer close to £4,000 it is clear to see what the potential for this aspect of Bell’s to develop given the move to a dedicated restoration workshop space.
However, despite the long wait list of restoration jobs, Meg has not forgotten the importance of retail and already has plans on that front. “My kind of plan for this year is, to keep this unit fully dedicated to restoration and then soon, we’re going to be taking on another space next door, and we’ll have that as much more of a showroom space. We will only be opening that on an appointment-only basis for people who want to come and look at a particular model and perhaps have a test ride before buying a new bike.
“We’ve already had so many people getting in touch and saying, ‘Can I come down see you? I’m just really glad you’re now in South London, you’re much more accessible than in Hastings.’ Which is an additional benefit of the move.”
