visit for the laughs alone even if you are not in the market for a high-end mountain bike at the moment.
Pennsylvania resident that his team in Southern California has put more thought into the winter side of things than ever before. “Mountain biking is also becoming less and less a seasonal thing. Fat bikes are popular with people who want to ride in the snow – and on the sand – and the companies making these wide tires and speciality bikes are also making the apparel that makes riding in unique condi- tions fun and manageable. We’ve got you covered. People who truly love to ride habitually aren’t going to let the snow stop them. Very often our customers have a summertime bike and a wintertime bike. It’s a great passion to have year- round because it’s no doubt An annual 35 percent plus growth rate comes with its own fair share of exercise. “Managing our growth has been our biggest challenge. Marketing and customer service is bringing customers back and it’s bringing more and more new customers every year. Our biggest priority is to ensure that the quality of service we provide never deteriorates for our customers. We also don’t want the team stressed out and overwhelmed with what often feels like too much business. It’s just growing pains. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new order online or someone bringing in their bike for service, we try to have as little turnaround time as possible. I’m not complaining – these are great problems to have!” Editor’s note: Worldwide Cyclery takes care of their own. Jeff and his East and West Coast teams recently ran an auction that raised several thousand dollars for the Steve Smith Foundation. Steve Smith was a legend in the world of professional mountain biking who recently passed away. Please visit https://www.worldwidecyclery.com/pages/ steve-smith- poster-auction for more information. In 2016 through Road2Recovery, Worldwide Cyclery donated $1,000 to Jessy Nelson, a professional motocross racer who broke his back in a horrific crash. the most fun way to get exercise and put a smile on your face.”
Worldwide Cyclery is also a kind of a response, Jeff said, to the saturation of generic, do-it- all bicycle shops that fill the retail market today. “Cycling has really evolved in the last decade. There are so many facets of the industry now – there are countless different types of bikes, riders and price points. So much so that the typical shop trying to serve them all really just serves them all poorly. We have begun with our niche of top-tier mountain bikes alone. It’s my background, after all. I knew the market existed from my time travelling throughout the US and Canada when I was racing, which is why I knew we needed to be online from the start. We couldn’t survive with just a local retail store front if we were going to target just one niche. We needed to be on all these different sales channels and it’s really that philosophy of targeting that niche, really focusing on that customer experience in the most modern way possible that’s enabled us to grow sustainably.” Jeff explained that perhaps the most encouraging element of Worldwide Cyclery’s growth projections is the nature of its market. “Cycling has been popular since its concep- tion and the sport has been growing like never before. TV exposure during the Summer Olympics and the Mountain Bike World Cup has really put the spotlight on the high-end mountain biking scene. Mountain bikes have been in the Summer Olympics for a while, and now with BMX on the world’s biggest sporting stage a whole new generation will embrace the sport. The publicity doesn’t necessarily mean a spike in sales for us. Our typical customers are people who have been riding for years already, someone who fell in love with the sport a long time before. It’s when you know your love of cycling is for life when you desire a shop like ours. The kids watching this stuff on TV and getting out to local bike parks and trails are our future customers.”
Jeff confessed that since Worldwide Cyclery became a
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JUNE 2017 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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