BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
Business is booming for three-year-old Sabbath Bicycles, with a 50 per cent turnover increase in the past year – despite changing name after a legal dispute last year with Sunday Bicycles.
Sabbath founder and MD Greg Roche told BikeBiz: “We’re still in the infancy of what we want to do, so the fact that we’re over 50 per cent up on last year by turnover now, without launching a new product, is encouraging. More importantly we’ve increased our margins by over 10 per cent through improved purchasing. The good news for the end customer is that our bike retail prices didn’t really change at all in the last year and they won’t again next year.
"We’re expanding the range right now, which should see turnover and margin improve further, but they’ll have to because we’re also going to need larger premises and more staff to facilitate that.”
Sabbath now has a 30-strong dealer network and is set to expand and diversify its product range for 2010, as well as upping its consumer advertising spend.
Last autumn’s re-brand hadn’t affected business, according to Roche:
“We had known about the issue pretty much since we started back in 2006. Though, if anything, sales increased because we did a pretty comprehensive job of managing the re-brand with customers and so we were suddenly quite visible.”
Last month Sabbath boosted its international credentials by signing up two dedicated distributors for Australia and France respectively. Roche told BikeBiz that a deal in the UK wasn’t out of the question:
“At the moment we do all our own distribution in the UK. Until last month I’ve also been the only person on the road for us, as well as managing the brand, but we do now have an agent selling for us in the north. We’re open-minded. If a distributor said it could get 800 bikes to market for us, we’d listen, but we’re also very keen to keep strong links with the guys on the shop floors and selling the stuff.”
Sabbath: info@sabbathbicycles.co.uk
