BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
The Bike Shop of the Year award will be widely publicised in IPC’s cycle magazines, including Cycling Weekly. News of the award will appear in IPC titles within the next month and there will be regular editorial mentions, including reviews of nominated shops.
Consumers will be invited to nominate their favourite bike shops – be they IBDs, Bikehuts or Tescos – and an expert panel will whittle the nominations down to a shortlist. These bike shops will be ‘mystery shopped’ to find the overall winner. The expert panel will include representatives from Madison, IPC and BicycleBusiness as well as an exterior-to-the-trade retail expert.
What makes a brilliant bike shop? That’s largely up to the consumer nominators to decide. They will have to write a short paragraph on why they feel their particular fave shop should win: this could be because of interior design excellence, or a particularly brilliant wheelbuilder who may be grumpy to customers but is God’s gift to spoke tensioning.
Superior customer service will clearly be on the top of most consumer’s agendas when choosing who to nominate so start being extra special to every customer from now on!
BIKE SHOP OF THE MONTH
In addition to the one-shop-takes-all award, BicycleBusiness is to start a Bike Shop of the Month award. Just as Sir Alex Fergusson doesn’t win the football manager of the month every month, despite having arguably the best team every month, the Bike Shop of the Month will go to the ‘most improved’ IBD from the preceding month.
This award will be nominated by a select bunch of sales directors from those supply companies with 1500 retail accounts. Reps will be requested to keep their eyes open for IBDs making extraordinary progress. For some that could be washing the windows for the first time in five years! For others it could be installing a superlative changing room, or building a workshop you could use as a Star Wars film-set. Reps will feed such ‘making real headway’ reports to their sales directors who will, in turn, inform BicycleBusiness of those IBDs making waves that month. BicycleBusiness will then talk with the nominating suppliers to see if consensus can be reached on which IBD is the outright winner that month.
The winning IBD will be featured in the magazine and will win a prize to be donated by a supplier from outside of the bike trade.
