Sometimes the universe throws you an unexpected surprise. Pedaal’s Timm was perusing the new issue of Post Magazine while his wife read over his shoulders. She asked if he had seen the vote for best bike store. He hadn’t. But, when he did, he picked up the phone and called Pedaal’s Eric right away!! That’s right, Pedaal was voted Toronto’s Best Bike Shop. Well, lordy – we are grateful. And, if you’ll allow some reflection, we’re also reflective. Why? Because hard work is always mirrored by those who see you better than yourselves. That’s where the gratitude comes in!
Philosophy and Construction
But, before we proceed, a quick note: throughout this little essay we’re going to sprinkle in photos of Pedaal’s development. We figure that tracks well with another narrative: the street construction scenes that ran in parallel with the yearlong Harbord Street construction outside our door.
The timing wasn’t always ideal (concrete dust on a patio is not a flavour note you want in your cappuccino), but there’s a certain poetry in it. As Harbord street is rebuilt – complete with its new bike lane! – we’ve been busy building something inside, too. And now, with the dust settling, we’ve never been more ready to help flood those fresh lanes with more cyclists.
Following Our Noses
When you start a new company the greatest gift is the network of customers and staff who get behind what you’re doing. They help mirror what you can’t always see. And, you tend to focus on that: building your Instagram following, getting to know a customer’s coffee order, fixing a flat tire, and selling a cargo bike or two. Of course, the whole plan is to build something special, but you don’t expect to get Toronto’s Best Bike Store in year one. Oh gosh, no!
But, luckily people have noses. Better noses than we have anyway! The thing about starting a business is that the opportunity you once smelled gets lost in a flurry of optics. All the same, in the last year, we were delighted to see our efforts mirrored by a wonderful BlogTo and Streets of Toronto article, both of which sniffed out that Pedaal is doing something pretty special. That certainly put some wind in our sails. But, we weren’t expecting to open Toronto’s Post Magazine and see that we were just voted Toronto’s best bike shop. Sure, maybe one of the most new and exciting shops. But, the best? Oh wow… now we have a lot to live up to!
Yin, Yang, and Aemulatio
Luckily, the two owners of Pedaal couldn’t be more yin and yang. There’s a whole theory that relationships are based on complementarianism – basically, that two total opposites work together and fill in the lack that the other has. But, we don’t agree with that. We’re different, and for sure there are some lacks that the other fills, but it’s more like we’re two synergistic forces that work in sync, now and then collide with a magnificent idea, and, at least a few times a year, have some solid disagreements.
If anything, we compete with each other, but not in the modern sense where competition is tied to identity. As far as we can see, competition isn’t about crushing your opponent; it’s more a creative tension and something constructive. Eric’s dissertation advisor calls it aemulatio – the kind of rivalry where you sharpen each other like steel on steel, each trying to outdo the other in excellence. Less of a cage fight and more of a dance-off. Pedaal probably fits into co-owner Eric’s eternal Philosophy PhD, and Timm’s intense desire to construct things. If there is a gap, it’s that Timm is phenomenal with his hands and Eric tends to be sharp with a spreadsheet. Anyway, it all seems to work.
From Coffee to Cargo
Of course, Pedaal didn’t pop up out of nowhere. We serve a neighbourhood we have served for a combined thirty years. We have a past life in the bicycle industry, which happened to be just a block and a half up the street. For some reason, the universe gifted us the coffee shop that we used to visit daily, and we turned it into a bicycle store.
This combined two loves of ours, and the conviction that riding your bike should be as much of a habit – addictive even – as your daily cup of coffee. If, in our previous life (our previous workplace), we’ve contributed something to Toronto and beyond with our work importing bikes from Europe, then Pedaal is our next chapter. In some ways, it’s all a philosophy and it’s all construction.
Incubation: Testing What Works
And, it has its challenges. The Canadian bike industry is remarkably male-centric and sports-driven whereas we view the bicycle as fundamental transportation and inclusive to all. If you want to add cycling as a sport on top of that, then go for it. But, don’t build the entire base on that. In our past life, we petitioned suppliers to bring in the stuff that we wanted to sell, and when they didn’t, we created the supply chain itself. And, when it started to work, we were like kids in a candy store, heading off twice a year to Europe on buying trips, using our sense of discernment to separate the good from the bad, and then shipping it all over so we could test what worked. However, many things didn’t work, and those that did required a whole new level of attention. This work we will call incubation.
Incubation is a lot like starting a new business. You have a new brand. That brand has a website that is all in Dutch, German or Danish. And their pictures all feature images of some very white people. If there’s one thing we love about Toronto’s bike culture, it’s the diversity. Beyond this, brands also have to be able to support customers if a warranty occurs, and, above all, their bikes have to make sense here. And, that didn’t always work. Slowly, naïveté turned into a sharp set of eyes.
Local Problems, Global Bikes
The city bikes of Europe, we found, all started as local solutions to local problems. Import a heavy one-speed Dutch bike to North America, try riding it up a hill, and you get the point. This was true for brands that we carry too. Bullitt started out in a Copenhagen that had very few bike lanes, similar to what Toronto looks like today. The city was sprawling, choking on car fumes, and, like Toronto, a citizens’ movement kick-started a grassroots campaign that led to what is now the sparkling bike capital of the world. The same is true for Brompton. This was a bike that was originally designed for London train commuters.
If we’re surprised to earn best bike shop in Toronto, both Brompton and Bullitt continue to be surprised that their bikes became such global solutions. Somehow, in the original design, a multiplicity of use-cases was baked in, completely unawares. Having discovered that, they now continue to constantly re-engineer their products for even greater global use-cases. What both have in common is that their bikes weren’t designed for places that were quite there yet in terms of bicycle culture. The best thing is that they work even better when the bicycle culture arrives. Establishing that bicycle culture here is basically our entire mission.
Focus and Flow
So, our task at Pedaal was to take all the obvious winners from this incubation work and focus on these brands. Incubation takes a lot of energy, and if you’re here to help pack the streets with more cyclists – and if you have some established winners for brands – then you gotta focus on winning rather than incubation. We took Brompton, Black Iron Horse and Bullitt – the best folding bike, cargo trike, and cargo bike on the market – and built a little shop around them. The whole idea of this shop is that we can open some more shops too. But, one thing at a time.
Opening up a shop post-Covid was interesting to be sure. The bicycle industry soared during Covid and was decimated almost immediately after. During Covid, many cynical bike retailers thought that after Covid, people would drop the bike they bought for some other hobby (way to believe in bikes, people), but the opposite turned out to be true. Since Covid, ridership has surged North America-wide. But, despite the highest ridership figures we’ve ever seen, sales plummeted. Why? Because everyone bought a bike during Covid!
Retail That Pops
We have always prided ourselves on being able to read the tea leaves. Or, maybe it’s more tied to a sense of smell. Opening a store in the post-covid landscape was risky to say the least, but we had three things going for us. First, the universe granted us a store in the neighbourhood we’ve served for decades. We could meet all of our old customers or let them discover us. That’s still happening! Second, we knew that everyone post-Covid was sick of online shopping. We needed to bring a concept that made retail pop. Nothing cookie-cutter, nothing minimalist – if anything, we wanted full-on maximalism, like a Rainforest Cafe with bikes. Third, if all the fence-sitters had bought a bike during Covid, our task was monumental. How will we get the naysayers on bikes?
Indeed, our store is based in one of Canada’s most activist neighbourhoods. Our neighbours stopped the Spadina Expressway, got the bike lanes on Bloor paved, and helped make sure they were staying put. But, when you open a coffee shop with some bikes, you discover a lot of people coming for coffee aren’t cyclists – even in a neighbourhood like ours. If we’re subversive, it would look like this: most bike stores don’t give anyone a reason to walk in. They could pretty the whole place up, hire an inclusive breadth of staff accompanied by an inclusive range of bicycles. But, if you’re a naysayer, you’re not walking in. Plus, the bike industry is stereotyped for being kind of exclusive and sports-oriented, so why would you?
Subversive Conversations
Aha! But, open up a coffee shop and you can also open up a conversation. Besides the coffee, it helps if you have a good conversation starter as well, folding bikes and cargo bikes tending to be curious objects to say the least. That means you don’t feel funny asking about them and we don’t feel funny asking whether they might work with your lifestyle. After all, if you choose to live, work, and play downtown, most of your life and nearly all of your trips are in a radius that some call the “last mile.” The problem with the last mile is that all the distances therein are too close to drive and too far to walk. What glues it all together perfectly is a bicycle.
Anyone who has ever tried a Bike Share knows this instantly. Bike Share is, in fact, one of our biggest sources of customers. Same with people who bought a bike during Covid but discovered that it wasn’t really a city bike, or they had a kid along the way and needed a cargo bike. But, our high-five moment – in our minds at least – was that someone might come in for a coffee and walk out with a bike, and that’s happened more times than we can count.
Thanks to You
Well, enough about us because really, it all comes down to you. Thanks to those who supported us in previous chapters and in the current chapter. And thanks for seeing some sort of gestalt whole in this thing we’re putting together that still feels very much in process. It’s been a funny little year, with Harbord Street construction blocking off our street for an entire year. But, in that time, we’ve also become North America’s fastest-growing Brompton dealer, quite possibly Canada’s largest Brompton dealer, and we’ve had an absolute blast finding new roasters and bringing them to your taste buds. And, while we can think of many amazing Toronto bike stores (once again, we view competition as aemulatio), we’ll keep trying to be the top bike store for you.
