How to start your own small-town bicycle shop
(Page 2 of 5)
March/April 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
Although almost any building will do (at least to start with), it's best to find one that can be divided easily into a small showroom and a service area. When to start looking for that ideal place is a tricky question: You don't need a store until you have goods to sell but you don't want to fill your house with bicycle cartons while you hunt for a shop, either. Sharon and I initially chose to live with the boxes and I used our living room as an assembly area. After three or four days of tripping over bike parts, however, we found a location for our soon-to-be business and moved frames, wheels, pedals and all over there. A bit of hindsight: If you aren't native to the town in which you open your shop, it's easy to choose a poor spot. Our first building (which was small and rented for just $60.00 a month) was only two blocks from the main intersection of Independence, and-since that's a short distance by city standards-we assumed we were "downtown". To the local people, however, our place was on the outskirts of the community and we had very little walk-in business for a few months (until we moved to a roomier, better-located shop that costs us a monthly $125). What you want is a small building in the very center of town. An old gas station (easy enough to find these days) on a good site would be perfect.
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SUPPLIERS
Before your Grand Opening, you will-of course-have to line up wholesale suppliers to furnish you with bicycles, parts and accessories. This, too, calls for careful timing: During the summer months you may have trouble finding sources whose merchandise hasn't been sold out to existing dealers.
For this reason, I think it's best to open a new bicycle shop in the fall when the height of the season is over and most distributors will welcome new business. That way you'll also have time to become familiar with the operation before spring rolls around, and the local people will have some months to get used to the presence of your store.
The easiest way to find suppliers is by going to your local telephone company office (which probably has, or can get, phone books for every major city) and thumbing through all the Yellow Pages. Start with centers of commerce close to you, because the nearer your wholesale source, the less you'll have to spend for freight charges.
We've dealt with several supply houses and have found that they range in quality from excellent to terrible. The following are the best we've traded with:
Gitane Pacific
4925 West 147th Street
Hawthorne, California 90250
Alpine Distributors
328 Link Lane
Fort Collins, Colorado 80521
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