Urban Bike Wear

With the emptied savings account a business plan was formed, inspired by Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail Theory”. An URL and company were registered, I ordered two boxes of hand-sewn messenger bags and cycling jeans that were sold from my living room. When that situation quickly became untenable, I found the space for a shop at Södermalm, Stockholm.

I started this business because I saw that there were several strong brands in the bicycle industry without a collective marketplace. Brands that didn’t find the right sales channels, they were sold at places where they don’t belong at all, which can damage the brand’s integrity and liquidity in the long run. My idea is to bring together as many small-scale, niche cycling brands under my Urban Bike Wear umbrella as possible. With the attitude of building strong business relationships where we can grow together long-term.

I am sort of a geeky type and am passionate about the cycling lifestyle, I can sit for hours researching what I’m looking for. I know that there are tons of similar bike geeks in the world and therefore decided to open a store that only sell things that I would buy for myself, a place where like-minded bike fanatics can meet and feel safe with the quality product selection. The goal is to stay within our niche segment without starting to compete with the big business companies and, in short, I have succeeded.

We offer custom made bicycle frames produced in Italy and we tailor the components to the cyclist’s needs. Be it for road, gravel or touring purposes the customer will always find the right bike at UBW. We enjoy this sales process as its builds a stronger relationship with our clients and creates a foundation of trust. These cyclists will often be a returning customer for years to come and even sometimes become friends of ours.

Apart from the online shop and over the counter sales we have a workshop with a fully fledged bike mechanic that’s been working at UBW for many years. Our business is built on quality first and the mechanic represents this ethos perfectly, always being thorough to a perfectionist level. He services our drop in customers bikes and builds the custom bikes.

We are three people (including myself) who work within the company. Me being the owner work mostly at the macro level, our store manager at the micro, dealing with the daily workflow, and of course the bike mechanic. We all have key competencies that complement each other and being such a small team, we oftentimes float into our different roles depending on the situation. This flexibility and non-hierarchical environment allow us to be agile and make fast decisions as well as plan for the long haul.

Today we are ranked number 1 among all bicycle shops in Sweden on Trustpilot, also number 1 in the category Shop with bicycle accessories. We haven’t gotten here because of our financial muscles, it’s just because we’re good at what we do.

The online shopping has increased by 35% on average over the past 8 years. Export orders increased from 15% to 42% in 2022, something we put a lot of focus on because our growth potential is primarily international. Today we sell worldwide without major marketing to specific countries, but for example we have customers in Tasmania, Israel, Germany, USA, Japan, New Zealand, Great Britain and Guadeloupe to name a few. In the physical store, there’s a world map where each pin represents cities we have sent products to, from bicycles to beautiful made in Japan hand tools (and soon we’ll need more pins).