There are specialist MTB stores in Brisbane, Melbourne and elsewhere, but surprisingly there has been a gap in the market in Australia’s most populous city, until now.

Summit Cycles has recently opened in the south eastern suburb of Hillsdale.

It’s being run by two very experienced staff, Adam Macbeth and Joe Dodd

“I was previously Store Manager of City Bike Depot and Joe was a mechanic there,” said Adam.

“Then I took a break from the bike industry for six months. Then came back and we were both at Cheeky Velosport in Randwick for the past 12 months, with the owner knowing that we were only there for a short period while we set this up.

“We started building here in August and opened on 6^th November.”

Although it’s in a medium sized shopping centre, the area is somewhat tucked away, being near the coast just north of Botany Bay. It’s also a long way from the nearest mountain bike trails, but Adam does not see this as being a problem.

“When we first announced in social media that we were going to be in Hillsdale. People were like, ‘What! Where the hell is Hillsdale?’”, Adam recalled.

“But regardless of where you are in Sydney, if you type our address into your GPS it’s actually pretty easy to get here. And when you get here, it’s real easy to park.

“And if you come with your family, there’s Trade Secret next door, there’s Coles downstairs and the beach is a five minute drive down the hill.

“So as a destination, making an effort to go to this bike shop, we can make it worth it in here, but there’s a bunch of other stuff around it that makes it pretty simple and enjoyable.

Secondly, to be totally honest we are reasonably close to the warehouse for Yeti, Niner and Devinci. So if you drove from Newcastle and got here some time around midday and said, ‘Oh man, I really wanted to get a Yeti SP5, when can you get it and have it ready.’ We can say, ‘We’ll have it ready for you in four hours.’”

The store’s proximity to the Rowney Sports warehouse is no coincidence as both businesses are owned by former MTB international racer, Paul Rowney.

Adam following comments make it obvious that part of the reason for opening the store was to get retail exposure for their high end brands.

“When Joe and I were setting up the store, we went to every bike shop in the city. Every bike shop within 30 k’s of this place,” Adam said. “Do you think we could see one mountain bike with better than Shimano XT on it? No.

“Do you think you would see more than two or three options in full suspension on the floor in any shop?

“One shop (name withheld) had 273 bikes on the floor, of these they had 17 mountain bikes when we visited them.

“The big thing is, if you’re a road cyclist, there’s multiple places you can go to see multiple options and get great service for high end road. That didn’t exist for mountain bikers.

We’re purely a destination for mountain bikers and mountain biking.

“Secondly because of the whole single brand alliance bull---- that bike shops have going on, other brands really find it difficult to get in there. Really awesome brands like Yeti, Niner, Devinci and Santa Cruz don’t find a place.

“So what was seen as risky for other bikes shops to do, now for us doesn’t seem risky at all because no-one else is doing it! (laughs) It seems a reasonably sensible thing to do.

“For a long time there was a perception that these brands are substantially more expensive. Compare S-Works to Yeti, Yeti’s cheaper. Compare Giant Trance… whatever their top thing is, Santa Cruz is cheaper.

“That’s been the big thing we’ve noticed the past couple of weeks. People come in and say, ‘What? You can get a Yeti for four grand. Since when?’ Yes you can.”

Clearly Adam is passionate about both mountain bikes, and what he thinks a bike shop should be like.

He explained, “I used to go to Bike Addiction on a rainy day say back in 2002. What are you going to do? Go to Bike Addiction. Hang out for a while. Have a chat to the guys. They’ve got something new in stock. You’d always end up buying a pair of gloves or something because you’d made the trip.

“But bike shops are becoming this place where you go and buy your bike and leave. But we want to be… Yeah! Come down to the shop and watch Enduro Worlds on TV.

“Our first ever day open was a Thursday and we posted a thing on Facebook, ‘Hey! Thursday chill at Summit. Come down after 5:30 pm. There’s a beer in the fridge with your name on it!’

“Quite a few people turned up. So the next week we said. ‘Ok, let’s make it a thing.’ And that second week a lot of people turned up. There’s no pressure. Hang out on the sofa, watch TV, read a magazine. Yes, that translated into us selling bibs and bobs and creating those relationships long term will mean that people are not really going to go to other shops.

“The reason you go into a bike shop is because riding your bike is fun. Going to the bike shop should be equally as fun. For a long time in Sydney it hasn’t been.”

You’d imagine that a mountain bike store might be in an older building, perhaps something a little industrial or grungy. But Summit Cycles is in a very corporate, conservative looking shopping centre, where rents are usually high.

Fortunately this is not the case for Summit Cycles as Adam explained. “This space was empty for six years, because of the size of it and because it’s on the street frontage, which is less busy for this centre than the stuff on the other side, because there’s a proper shopping centre car park on the other side.

“So we were able to get exactly what we wanted with our lease arrangement with the shopping centre. Like, we got the letter the other day for Christmas trading, ‘All shops are expected to be open on the trading days between… except Summit Cycles!’ (Laughs) Who can do what they like.

Joe and Adam (right) are bringing plenty of attitude and passion to Summit Cycles.

“It’s a big open shop where you can actually see stuff,” is how Adam describes his store. There’s a new curved stainless steel front counter still to be installed in the place of the temporary white one you can see here, plus artwork to be mounted on the walls and more product storage. They also have a row of GT’s along the window as their ‘mainstream’ brand.

The mural behind their Devinci bikes shows you exactly what they’re designed for.

Santa Cruz are not imported by Rowney Sports, but fit the store perfectly. The Juliana on the right is an example of a high end women’s specific MTB that you would rarely see in a general bike store.

All bikes are grouped by brand, rather than by price point or model type.

Mountain bike videos are running on the flat screen, magazines are on the coffee table and cold beers are in the fridge for Thursday nights.

lAlltrack Bicycles was a relatively new shop opened in the southern outer Sydney suburb of Heathcote by Murray Mackney.

Unfortunately it has recently closed.

Heathcote is a relatively small community to support a bike shop with a population of just 5,977 at the 2011 Census. But the shop was just across from the Royal National Park which includes popular MTB trails and road cycling routes.

Alltrack Bicycles, has closed.

Only some shop fittings remain.

In late 2014 AvantiPlus Wollongong closed. The store, which was at 4 Regent Street Wollongong was one of four shops within a short radius of the centre of town. Owner Mark ‘Kegs’ Keegan is now working for one of those other three stores, Spearman Cycles.

AvantiPlus Wollongong

BikeBug started with one retail store in North Sydney, in 2005 but has been rapidly expanding since then.

They’ve just opened a large store in the inner eastern Melbourne suburb of Prahran. It’s in the same premises that was previously occupied by a short lived bike shop called a’bloc.

BikeBug now has three stores in Sydney, one in Melbourne a workshop in Adelaide and two warehouses, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne.

The business is owned by brothers Frank and Rocky Fortuna who also own FRF Couriers which runs a large fleet of trucks and FRF Sports, their wholesale bicycle distribution business whose agencies include Colnago.

They’re perhaps best known in the bicycling industry for their bikebug.com online store, which has become one of the Australian bicycle industry’s largest internet mail order stores.

So it’s interesting, given their heavy investment in their online business, that they’re still opening new brick and mortar bicycle stores.

Frank Fortuna was quoted in ‘Cycling Tips’ as saying, “The web is not there to support the shop, the shop is there to support the web presence. So we’ve taken a reverse approach on that. It’s to give the consumer confidence. It’s a click and collect model.”

Having been established in 1973, Gateshead Cycles is one of the oldest shops in the Newcastle region of NSW.

Eighteen months ago Ian Simpson bought the shop from Michael Duffey. Late last year he moved the store to larger premises at the front of a small shopping centre at 56 Medcalf Street, Warners Bay.

“It’s a million times better. Parking was getting very hard to find at the old premises due to the hospital expanding,” Ian said, referring to the Lake Macquarie Private Hospital which was directly across the road from the old premises at 20 Pacific Highway Gateshead.

“We’ve now got a separate workshop as well. Our main brands are Cannondale, GT and Felt. This is my first bike shop.”

Wholesalers hurried to the premises of Action Cycles in the northern Brisbane suburb of Chermside on Friday 16^th January to collect their stock.

Action Bicycles was run for many years by Guy Berger. During this period it was a small store that mainly sold lower priced, family bikes.

The store was sold in 2012, renovated, expanded and became a Specialized dealer. There is a much larger bike shop, 99 Bikes Chermside, on the same side of the road, a few blocks away, which opened around 2009.

One of Melbourne’s oldest and largest bicycle stores caught fire on Thursday 22^nd January.

AvantiPlus Ray’s Preston has been trading in the same premises at 545 High Street Preston for 37 years. It’s owned by long time cycling identity Ray Larkins and was once known as Rays Bicycle Centre Preston being one of a chain of Rays Bicycle Centres around Melbourne.

The fire was caused by an electrical fault that sparked it at about 4:30 am. Store Manager Terry Nicholls said that although only the front third of the store was burnt out before the fire brigade brought the fire under control, the rest suffered smoke and water damage.

In addition, because the old building had an asbestos roof, all of the stock must be written off and dumped, because it may now have asbestos contamination.

Fortunately the business was insured. The owner of the premises also had vacant building nearby, so Rays has now relocated to 255 Plenty Road Preston, and kept the same phone number, 02 9478 2064.

Terry thinks it could be at least a year until the old premises is rebuilt and they can move back. In the meantime, they’ve had to restart from scratch, restocking every tool, spare part and shop fitting as well as new stock. They built counters and fittings themselves to be up and running again as quickly as possible.

Street presence is a term you’d typically hear commercial real estate agents using when they’re trying to sell or lease you an expensive premises.

They use it to describe how wide the store frontage is, how visible the shopfront is from the street, signage opportunities, passing traffic and other virtuous attributes along these lines.

But Jetnikoff Bicycle Co, located in the inner northern Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, has turned all of this conventional retailing wisdom on its head.

They’ve moved into a small, low rent, semi industrial space located on a dead end street that has virtually no car traffic at all.

Jetnikoff’s interpretation of street presence is that they literally do business on the street. Their premises has no shop windows at all. Once the big roller shutters go up, it’s completely open like a market stall. Some of their bikes for sale are displayed on the street and a shop counter fronts the street so that customers stand on the footpath. There’s also a park bench, customer bike parking and a repair work stand all out on the street and footpath.

And the street itself, while it may be a dead end for cars, fronts the Upfield bike path that runs all the way along a suburban railway line, meaning that a steady stream of cyclists goes past them all day, every day.

From this small space, that he opened from scratch just three years ago William Jetnikoff now runs a busy shop that employs up to five people in total. Although he says that the working space only practically caters for three staff to be on duty at any one time.

You would think that having the western wall of your premises completely open to the elements would get terribly cold in Melbourne’s winter, but William says hot summer afternoons when the sun is shining directly inside are more of an issue than cold winters.

From left to right: Robbie Hannibal, William Jetnikoff and Lars Zwetzschke.

Here’s a cyclists’ eye view of Jetnikoff Bicycle Co as they ride past.

Most of the cyclists going past are commuters, utility or recreational riders.

A pump for free air next to their sandwich board sign gives passing cyclists a reason to stop.

The premises may be basic, but it’s well stocked with carefully selected bikes and p&a that caters for their local market. Their main bike brand is Focus.

Jetnikoff’s clothing range includes Levi’s 501 Commuter jeans and other urban cycling gear.

Where else can you talk to the mechanics without having to get off your bike?

Claude Altin’s busy Mega Bike store is located in the city centre of Adelaide, on its main shopping street, Rundle Street, just a few doors down from the eastern end of Rundle Mall.

It’s a strong tourist and visitor precinct with the major galleries, museums and universities just one block to the north and restaurants with sidewalk seating all along Rundle Street.

Claude has capitalised on his prime location and passing trade by designing and manufacturing his own South Australian jersey. It features the state floral emblem, Sturt’s Dessert Pea on the front and the South Australian bird emblem, the Piping Shrike (a type of magpie) on the back above the city skyline along with his store logo.

Claude says this jersey is a strong, long term seller.

His second great clothing idea can be seen in the photo in the form of the sign above and bucket below.

Megabike offers a $40 discount on his South Australian jersey if customers ‘trade in’ any old jersey. Being light, compact and not fragile, these can be economically shipped to Rwanda where they are donated to aspiring cyclists.

Richard Hale is about to open a new bicycle store in the Victorian northern regional city of Mildura. Richard previously managed the local Bicycle Superstore, when the chain had a store in Mildura.

The new store will be small and relatively upmarket concentrating on road, time trial and cyclocross bikes. His first confirmed brand is Focus.

Richard said that his store will be the third specialist bike shop in Mildura. He wants to create a boutique feel, inspired by Wheelhaus in Sydney.

Cycleworld is already one of western Sydney’s largest and busiest stores. They’ve been located at 11 Burwood Road, Burwood for many years but due to the impending demolition of that building, they’re about to move into new premises.

An earlier version of this article talked about a potential new premises that is no longer being taken by Cycleworld.

Once their new premises has been finalised we will give more details and hopefully visit to take photos after it has been fitted out and opened for business.

V1 Cyclery is Brisbane’s newest bicycle store, having held their grand opening party on Sunday 22^nd March

Their new website says, ‘V1 Cyclery is the creation of Steve Geiszler & Zac Collins. Steve brings nearly 20yrs of retail experience across a very broad range of industries including Car Audio, Toy, Commercial Office Furniture and Cycling. Zac has spent his entire full time career in the cycling industry, and also manages and races for Team InterVelo (Powered by Fitzroy Island), a Brisbane based cycling team competing in the Queensland Road Team Series.

‘Located at Shop 2/360 Main Road, Wellington Point, V1 Cyclery is situated at the heart of what’s known throughout Brisbane as the ‘Bay Loop’, which takes cyclists from Inner Brisbane out to the Bayside suburbs through to Wellington Point. It is the halfway point of the route, and is a well know place to stop for a coffee and take a break.’

When Bicycling Trade phoned exactly one month after their official opening to see how the new shop was going, Steve was upbeat.

“There’s been huge support for us,” he said. “We’ve been fortunate. You hear the horror stories of shops opening and then hardly getting a customer for the first few months. But we’ve already met and slightly exceeded our sales targets.”

V1 Cyclery is heavily focusing on brands that are distributed by Monza Imports.

“Cannondale is our flagship road bike brand and GT plus Cannondale for mountain bike,” Steve said. “If you look at our p&a range just about everything outside Shimano and Stages is Monza based. Monza does not have a presence like this anywhere else in Queensland. But we’re totally independent and have full control of the store. We just made a conscious decision to go this way.”

Wellington Point is 28 kilometres away from Brisbane by road, located on the coast, but Steve sees their relatively distant location as a plus not a minus.

“That’s exactly why we picked this location,” he explained. There was a store in this area which closed about 4-5 years ago, so there’s no other bike shop around us.

We’ve probably got around 50,000 houses within a 5-7 kilometre radius of here.

Sure if you were in the centre of Brisbane you might have half a million people living in the same radius, but then you’ve also got eight or more major shops all close together.”

“Our shop is about 115 square metres in area. We’re carrying about 40 bikes on the floor, plus we have a coffee area.”

John Thomson, former Store Manager at Clarence Street Cyclery in Sydney, is starting this Friday in a new role at 99 Bikes.

“I was most recently at Clarence St for five years and nine months, but I’ve had a long history with the company,” John recalled. “I’m 43 years old now and I started doing part time work at the weekends when I was 16 years old. After I left school I worked for a couple of years there. There was about 15 years in between drinks before I went back again.

“In that time I worked in tourism, scuba diving, scuba wholesale. I worked with Orca in Australia when it came to the market. I was National Sales and Marketing Manager. Then I worked at Pearl Izumi with Wally Lancaster, as National Sales Manager and then I went to Scody.”

John said that his move from Clarence St was simply prompted by the need for a new challenge.

“I leave on really good terms with Tony (Cook, Clarence St founder). We go back a long way. There’s lots of respect there.

99 Bikes have been going for about seven years and they’ve got 20 shops. Their plan is to open 8-10 shops per year so that they have about 70 shops by 2020. And with the backing of Flight Centre, I was really looking to plug into a larger company with established systems, to add value to the company but also to learn a lot about their systems and processes.

“I’ll join as a Team Leader. I’ll be starting at their Brookvale store as the store manager. There’s three stores in Sydney at the moment: Bondi Junction, Artarmon and Brookvale.

“Brookvale would be the least well performing of those three. I was asked what I wanted to do. I definitely wanted to start in operations, to be on the ground and get a feel for the business.

“I’ll be looking to go in and really transform Brookvale. I want to get it firing, doing really well. They haven’t had the stability in staff. Also being able to plug into the local community.

“I think the position of the store is ok, but the layout of the shop… it’s hard to buy something in there. I think some clear strategies will really help. We should be able to make a good impact.

“There’s a lot of opportunities with 99 Bikes. Their head office is in Brisbane. I’m not looking to move to Brisbane at the moment but you never know what could happen.

“With the Flight Centre model, they get enough outlets in an area, then they have an Area Manager looking after that. So the more 99 Bike shops that come on board, the more potential.

“Beyond Brookvale, I might get a new store started for them and be heavily involved in their expansion plans.”

Long established Melbourne bike shop Gran Prix Bicycles is now owned by a couple completely new to the industry.

For many years Gran Prix was run by Stephen Hart and his partner Kay Marr. Stephen, who was a keen cyclist, was tragically killed in a road cycling accident in Europe in 2010. Kay continued to run the shop until December 2014 when she sold to Dean Bragge and his wife Renita.

“This is our first venture into the bicycle industry,” Dean said. “I am a graphic designer by trade and work at a small printing company in Scoresby. My wife and I decided that it was time to look for something else as the future of the print company was not looking good, and figured now was a good time for a sea change too. So we looked for something that I enjoy and came upon Gran Prix Bicycles. It has been an interesting journey so far - lots to learn!”

Gran Prix is a Trek dealer, based on Glenhuntly Road, Caulfield, which is one of the well-established older south eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

“Trek have been very good to deal with, helping us with training and so on,” Dean said.

“We are not planning on making too many changes. We are working more along the lines of a refresh. We have painted the shopfront and front part of the inside of the shop so far, and will be looking to neaten up and refresh the rest as and when time and funds allow. We will be sticking with our current brands, but will be looking at other products our regular customers may want.”

Meanwhile Dean is keeping his day job, and mainly working at the store on weekends, whilst Matt Cantwell is the full time store manager.

Wheelhaus is a high end niche bicycle store in the inner city Sydney suburb of Enmore.

We featured the store, not long after it opened in our December 2013 online edition as part of a feature entitled Inside Four Unique New Niche Bikeshops that you can see here: http://bicyclingaustralia.com.au/2013/12/inside-four-unique-new-niche-bike-shops

Until now Wheelhaus would have been in the running for the prize for the smallest floor space of any bike shop in Australia. They could only fit five customer repair bikes in their workshop, including one on the work stand and the entire store including showroom was 45 square metres.

But despite their tiny store, business has been good for co-founders Greg Chalberg and Greg Hamer.

They’re now moving 500 metres to the west and across to the north side of Enmore road.

“We hope to be open by late May,” said Greg Chalberg. “The new shop is already pretty tidy. It used to be an art gallery then a homebrew store. That’s a nice change from our current shop which was a dump before we took over and we had to do a lot of work on it.

“Business has gone better than we expected it to since we opened 18 months ago. Our new shop will be double the space, but it’s still small. We’ll be looking to keep the same vibe of the current store, just with a little more breathing room so we can handle more than two customers in the store and still have space.”

Greg said that operating from a tiny store has shaped the way they do business. “We can’t afford to speculate on stock that might not sell,” he said. “We only sell what we like and understand and we have a very limited number of suppliers.”

“Focus is our core bike brand but we also do other brands including Stoemper which is a custom frame from the USA.”

“We’re still doing Attaquer which is Greg’s clothing brand and we’re also doing Mapp from Melbourne and The Athletic out of Portland, Oregon.”

For a new business, the two Greg’s also seem to have struck an enviable work / life balance, only being open from Tuesday to Saturday each week.

“We open 11 am to 7 pm during the week and 10 am to 4 pm Saturdays. People around here like us being open until 7pm. Sunday is family day and Monday is our big ride day,” said Greg. 

Here’s a photo and post from the Wheelhaus Facebook page showing their new store.

Wheelhaus’ current store.

Inside Wheelhaus’ current store