It was February 15, 2024, and we had just gotten the keys for our new shop. Two weeks prior, on February 6, 2024, Toronto City Council authorized the Harbord Street construction. We got the notice around the same time we got the keys. Oh no, we thought. I guess we’re playing the long game here! With the spectre of concrete cutters, orange pylons, and street closures imminent, we renovated the store in two short months, opened it up to our customers, and felt the pride of being new business owners. And then, sure enough, in August 2024 the pylons came out. Then the concrete cutters. Then long rows of pipes. Construction crews who preferred Tim Hortons. You get the idea.
Stress Test
But we’re cut from optimistic cloth. All the same, there were moments. Especially as months turned into more months, then the entire summer of 2025, and finally a ribbon cutting at Pedaal on December 14, sixteen months later. Harbord is one of the oldest and busiest bike lanes in Toronto, and now it rides like a magic carpet. When we look outside, we can say that despite a weird first year of business, is that it was worth the wait.
If there was ever a stress test for whether a business model actually works, it was having a broken-apart street in the first full year of business. So, how did it all turn out? Besides being named Toronto’s best bike shop (!!!), we finished the year quite above our revenue target, all with the low operating expenses that looked great on paper but felt even better in real life. When you start a business, a lot of things that were true on paper tend to get tossed into the wastebasket. But in our case, the fundamentals proved themselves, all in a year where everything could have gone sideways. A big shout-out to Ryan, our social media guru, who made our store a Toronto destination despite the construction outside. And an equally important shout-out to Bizwize, our stellar bookkeepers, who kept our numbers in line.
Coffee & The Unexpected
If coffee opens the conversation, the conversation around bikes is where we get to use our experience as educators. Our mantra is simple: if you live, play, and work downtown, a bike glues that “last mile” more economically, efficiently, and joyfully than any other option. It gives you back your freedom, and some fun to the daily commute.
You can come for a coffee and, if you’re feeling whimsical, take a ride on a cargo bike or folding bike. We’ve seen people come back smiling on a Brompton (you can never guess how it rides until you try it), and friends taking each other for rides on our cargo bike. Nothing is more routine than your daily coffee, but it’s always fun to watch people break that routine with some unexpected fun.
A Breakout Year for Brompton
On the bike side of things, it was a terrific year, despite the construction outside. In less than a year from getting our keys, we were awarded Brompton Gold Level dealer status (that means we sold over 100 Brompton bikes). We had the honour of hosting a group ride with Brompton CEO Juliet Scott-Croxford, and we were also the launch partner in Canada for the new Brompton G-Line.
The G-Line was designed for North America, so we thought we’d create a bit of a scandal by having our friend Connor Gregory, a pro bike racer, compete in the Paris–Ancaster race. Wearing his office clothes (to show Brompton’s city-bike side), he managed to prove that a Brompton has a place in the recreational and performance world too, placing in the top 10%.
Bullitt Across Canada
On the cargo bike side, things were also great. We’re the Canadian distributor for Bullitt, and it was great to see at least half of our sales going across Canada. A big shout-out to our retailers: Bishop’s Family Cycles, Redbike, Bike Doctor, London Bicycle Café, Dumoulin Bicyclettes, Halifax Cycles. You’re all stars.
Bullitt is an amazing solution that bridges the gap between light and fun longtails and much safer (but often very heavy) front-loading bikes. It’s also infinitely modular, so it has a life before kids, during kids, and after kids too. Perhaps that’s why so many Bullitt’s entered the Toronto Bike Brigade this year, including one to Bicycle Lawyer David Shellnut, a co-founder of the Bike Brigade. The Bike Brigade is a volunteer-powered mutual aid group that uses bicycles and cargo bikes to deliver food and essential supplies across the city. Special shoutout to Chad, a Bike Brigade member who logs 10,000km on his Bullitt yearly and got a lot of new riders signed on.
Street Level Politics
It’s also worth saying that this year unfolded against a wider political backdrop that made our work feel more sensitive than usual. Doug Ford spent much of the year positioning bike lanes as something unnecessary or ancillary, despite the fact that congestion already costs Toronto billions each year in lost time and productivity. At the same time, Donald Trump returned to power, marking a broader rightward shift that has tended to treat cycling infrastructure as culture-war material rather than basic urban equipment.
Almost overnight, Canada found itself talking seriously about new trading partners and new economic alignments. We saw our little shop as a small example of what this might look like. We import urban solutions from mature cycling ecosystems that solve Canadian issues like gridlock. (That’s Martin Siessler above, leading a talk on how cargo bikes reduce gridlock.) And we work with free-trade partners like the UK and Denmark that open new partnerships and commodity pipelines. This helps fuel the huge cycling adoption that is happening in Toronto. Our numbers prove it, as does the large volume of Bike Share users that have pushed Toronto to one of the world’s most successful Bike Share cities.
Familiar Faces
Brompton CEO Will Butler-Adams likes to remind us that Mark Carney once visited the Brompton factory when he was Governor of the Bank of England, a small detail that connects city cycling to much larger conversations. We haven’t yet managed to get Carney on a Brompton, but one person we’ve sold several bikes to is Jagmeet Singh. This year, Jagmeet came back for something different: a Black Iron Horse Polly Bicycle schoolbus to carry his whole family.
Friendly faces like Jagmeet were a very special treat for us. Before Pedaal, we ran another bike store up the street, and, as a great article recounts, we’ve been serving this neighbourhood for decades. This year, a steady stream of people we’d served before found their way back in. These were customers we’d worked with for years, coming in to see what we’d built and proud to see our new chapter. Feeling that continuity carry forward into this space, especially in its first year, meant more to us than we can easily put into words.
Writing Ourselves Into Existence
While the street was being rebuilt, our website was too. Starting a business is an act of writing yourself into existence, and we take that writing seriously. Writing, and shooting videos, is how we educate people about folding bikes and cargo bikes (coffee too!). Buying a bike is not unlike entering the world of coffee for the first time and trying to understand origin, variety, processing, and roast. Without a map, everything feels overwhelming. That’s why we built a large and growing library of blog posts and videos.
So a special thanks to NVISION, who built our website, and our two geniuses – Pier and Sam – who keep it running smoothly. Another shout-out to Binary & Co for their great SEM strategy, and Digital Commerce for their SEO strategy. A big thanks to our friends Pier and Heather from Bromptoning, and Ty from My Other Bike is a Bike who volunteered to review our bikes and had a ton of fun (this and this are our faves). And, a big thank-you to George, our peripatetic (he’s Greek) videographer. He traipsed over from Greenland, of all places, to get our video stream up and running. To have such a great gang of contractors is a blessing.
Misfit Cafe
Pedaal is a Dutch word, and we like to say the ambition is to make cycling as daily as having a cup of coffee. That’s the Dutch way, though there is still a long distance to cover here in Toronto. Welcoming everyone to cycling is the same as welcoming everyone to our café, which is to say, everyone is welcome! In that sense, Pedaal operates differently. Much of the bike industry leans toward products that exclude rather than include. Not everyone wants a fast racing bike. But if a city bike can glue your city life together, then we want to welcome everyone to the lifestyle. In other words, an inclusive starts with inclusive products.
But if our products are deliberately inclusive, it’s only to attract the widest inclusion of customers. In between this is our staff. Accomplishing a workplace of inclusion is our our proudest success – and a constant work in progress. One customer, who lends us his garage for storage when space runs out (and who throws great parties with his partner, Joe), calls Pedaal “misfit café.” He wrote a book called Misfit, and he means the name as a compliment. Well hey. Selling bikes and coffee often comes down to finding fits the broader culture has missed. If it takes a group of misfits to do that, so be it.
Informal Clubhouse
Sometimes you might come into Pedaal for a coffee and find the sidewalk crowded with people and folding bikes. These are the Brompton Meetup rides, which have gradually turned Pedaal into an informal clubhouse. You don’t have to join any sort of club to be a city cyclist, but every movement needs a group of core enthusiasts who feel a value connection with a store like ours and the products we carry.
Janet Joy Wilson, Canada’s official Brompton ambassador, hosts these rides as a labour of love, and all are welcome. We’d like to send a big shout-out to Janet Joy for putting these rides together. So much creativity and planning goes into each ride, and we love how much colour and excitement it adds to our amazing city.
Thank You, Harbord Village
And of course, the customers. You lived through the same year of construction we did. While the patio looked inviting, concrete dust had a way of encouraging people indoors and back off Harbord quickly. We understand. We’re grateful you came. We’ve worked in the Annex for decades, but Harbord Village is its centrifugal centre. It’s diverse, politically active, and has been historically resistant to bad ideas like the Spadina Expressway. It’s a good place to do something revolutionary while taking the idea of neighbourhood seriously.
Once lined with bookstores, Harbord is now becoming a serious food destination. Most of all, Harbord Village is discerning, and we knew we had to earn the right to call us your coffee shop. So we’ll keep pulling those shots, finding adventurous new roasters, and more colour and community to the new and improved Harbord Street.
Thank You!
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