Bike Shop Day
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Bike Shop Day: Fred Clements, former executive director of the NBDA, returns in this episode to talk to Joe Nocella, Owner of 718 Cyclery and creator of Bike Shop Day. Bike Shop Day serves to connect the independent bike shop (in all shapes and forms) and our community through inclusiveness, promoting a healthy lifestyle and sustainable local business practices. Learn how you can get your shop involved for this year’s Bike Shop Day!
Black Friday may still dominate the post-Thanksgiving news cycle, but a growing backlash has inspired holidays like Small Business Saturday and smaller, industry-specific events that encourage shoppers to support local merchants. But there hasn’t been a specific day celebrating the local bike shop.
That is, until now. Joe Nocella, the owner of Brooklyn’s 718 Cyclery, was holding a staff meeting a few months ago when his employees pointed something out: The music industry has Record Store Day to promote small businesses in the field. Why can’t cycling do the same?
“Unlike record shops, people still absolutely need bike shops,” Nocella said. “People need to come in for repairs and have interactions with staff. But the cycling industry could still use a day for shops, and I’m hoping more shops will sign on and get involved.”
Bike Shop Day (www.bikeshopday.com) serves to connect the independent bike shop (in all shapes and forms) and our community through inclusiveness, promoting a healthy lifestyle and sustainable local business practices.
For this year’s event, we are asking all participating shops and vendors to submit an idea for an event that demonstrates how your shop brings the joy of cycling to your community.
Support the show (https://nbda.com/articles/donation-form-pg511.htm#!form/Donate)
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Episode 9 – Bicycle Retail Radio
Tue, 8/18 9:34 AM • 42:31
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
bike shop, people, shop, bike, year, store, industry, events, workshops, retail, kinds, thinking, buy, new york city, classes, day, record store day, brands, world, customer
SPEAKERS
Fred Clements, Rod Judd, Joe Nocella
Rod Judd 00:10
You are listening to Bicycle Retail Radio brought to you by the National Bicycle Dealers Association.
Fred Clements 00:16
Welcome to the NBDA is bicycle retail Radio Podcast. I’m Fred Clements and I’ll be hosting today I’ve worked in the bike industry in a number of roles, but mostly as a past executive director of the NBDA. I’ve done some publishing some retail relations work, some consulting and for today, podcast hosting. So I’m here today with Joe Nocella, a dealer out of Brooklyn 718 cyclery, and outdoors in Brooklyn. And to the point for this podcast founder of bike shop day. So what I know of Joe is that he runs an excellent store. He’s one of America’s best bike shops. Per the NBDA and I think has been in the past, the store was founded in 2008. I believe Joe, and very activity focused a store focused on inclusion. And I think according to your website, Joe, you’re currently involved in a store relocation, which is not an easy process at all. So, you know, thank you for taking the time to be here today.
Joe Nocella 01:23
Hey, great, Fred, thank you so much.
Fred Clements 01:25
Yeah. So before we get into the bite shot discussion, maybe I’m kind of interested to learn a little more about you, Joe. What was your background prior to opening your store?
Joe Nocella 01:36
Well, as an architect for about 20 years here in New York City, the precursor to that was in the 80s. I was a bike messenger. So I always had a little bit of that and that left went away to school, came back, and was an architect for 20. So years and then slowly but surely got into the cycling world, in retail capacity in that had a bike stolen 2007 2000 If I had some friends convinced me to build my own bike, which, you know, I didn’t even know what that meant. I went for it and you know, started researching parts and it just took me down the rabbit hole. And the rabbit hole was the same rabbit hole that I loved about architecture where there was a lot of left brains and right brain stuff, you know, you’re into design, and then it’s a math and physics and everything about being an architect, I kind of was able to scratch that itch with bikes and it was very subconscious. And looking back, it’s pretty obvious, the architecture I was involved with, you know, massive firms were building, you know, an airport that was gonna be done in 12 years, and just these massive, massive things. And, you know, with cycling, I felt that I was able to really affect things pretty quickly. Like, you know, you’re building a bike for someone and you’re affecting pollution and their health and congestion and all these things environmentally adopt the city that you could actually affect pretty quickly relative to the long term stuff. I was used to it. So little by little drifted into a shop in my backyard. And then I had a little shop and now I have a bigger shop. And, you know, I’m one of those proverbial idiots that left the Wall Street shop behind to come to jump into the bike shop world. And I’ve never looked back. I mean, I love, love the industry, I love being able to kind of make it do what I wanted to do in terms of how I’m going to live my life every day. And sometimes we win. And sometimes we lose. It’s an internal challenge that gets me up every day to keep seeing how I can contend this thing to make this work the way that we want it to. You know,
Fred Clements 03:30
you’ve been a bike messenger so you’ve been a pro at riding bikes. Are you enthusiastic also or what are you on?
Joe Nocella 03:37
Yeah, I mean, not so you know, uh, yeah, I would say that you know, a casual rider, I would ride to work and things like that as I was working in Manhattan. And then let’s open the bike shop. I really got pulled into it real deep and the parts that I got pulled into where we had a staff at the time and still do that we’re doing a lot of camping trips and stuff on their own time, you know, leaving the city and going camping by touring kinds of things by packing. And little by little, I get drawn into that. And little by little our customers got drawn into that. So now we do, you know, 10 to 15 trips a year we take 40 people on a trip each time we, it’s a big part of our culture. And so I’d become really kind of immersed in that side of the bike touring and backpacking side of kind of side of cycling in which sounds weird coming out of Brooklyn, but uh, you know, this is not Montana. And we’re not, you know, riding to the fire towers every weekend. You know this is a different situation. But it’s great because I think that there are so many people, an endless supply of people that live in any city that want to try to get away from it on the weekends or for the weekend just, and we’re very lucky. We have some very beautiful natural landscapes nearby the Catskills, the Adirondacks, these are places that we escaped to. So I’ve become a kind of really into the whole world of the experiential side of retail, I guess you’ve put it where we’re, you know, having orientation classes in the raking gear and we’re kind of building a lot of the shop around these events and these experiences, which has been, you know, pretty fantastic. And what I was described is that, you know, someone could come in, buy a helmet and pay for leave, or someone could come in that was camping three weeks ago on the side of the mountain in the rain, and you have this connection that’s like, unbelievable, you know, the community-building aspect of those kinds of things. pretty unbelievable. And it’s really led to us like building a great community around that kind of thing. He’s sharing something really special and intimate with, you know, with a customer precisely.
Fred Clements 05:32
So it’s been just about 11 years in retail for you during a very challenging time. It sounds like you’re doing what a lot of people recommend for independent retailers of all types is used community engagement, customer involvement, events, things like that. Has anything changed in the 11 years? I mean, we’ve been we all say it’s a fundamental change, but for some people, it’s it hasn’t changed that much at all. Where are you on that?
Joe Nocella 05:59
Yeah, I mean, I think that we scene, you know, urinate, you know, a slight decline in the number of people that walk through the door. And you know, as as a pure retail experience. So we’ve seen a definite slight decline in those numbers, but I always offset those in my mind, at least, with the people that we reach that, you know, go on our trips, and don’t ever come to the shop and were, you know, engaging in that way. And the return on that investment. It’s hard to track because someone that goes on a trip with us and never comes to the shop and tells their coworker about our shop and that coworker buys a bike from us, you know, there’s all kinds of intangibles, when you kind of like cast your net out really wide and really kind of really direct But yeah, I mean, I would say the one trend that I’ve seen is just a decrease in the physical boots walking into the store. But again, we’ve tried to offset that by you know, the things that you know, I always describe it as we try to do the things the internet doesn’t do very well being and it doesn’t do camping. Very well being it doesn’t do events and races and runs. And all those kinds of things, and we kind of focus on what the internet doesn’t do well, and that’s interacting with people. So, you know, we’ve kind of gone down that road, and it’s been all over the place. And it’s a lot of work to make that happen. But I think in the end, it’s a long game, right? You’re really working towards that customer that’s going to stick with you through thick and thin and not going to price shopping and not come in with a, you know, looking to buy a derailleur cheaper on Amazon a significant match the price we hardly ever get that person.
Fred Clements 07:30
Yeah, so so just you know, so in my mind, I’ve never been to your store, but I imagine an urban store because it’s in an area of expensive real estate. My guess is 2000 square feet and guessing for employees. How wrong am I?
Joe Nocella 07:46
You’re pretty close. We’re really, really close. Actually about 1875 square feet upstairs. We have about 900 in the basement. We have right now four employees, me and three others.
Fred Clements 07:57
Okay. So I lucked out and it looks You carry a variety of bicycle brands. I noticed on your site that you’re not so you’re not one brand-focused, you know?
Joe Nocella 08:08
Yeah. Yeah, we don’t carry into the big guys right on Trek, Specialized, Giant, Cannondale, we’ve kind of consciously avoided that business route in a way just to allow us to work with vendors that really understand us and really kind of give us the leeway to kind of maneuver the way we like to maneuver. And again, that’s not to disparage those bigger brands or shops that carry those bigger brands, because there certainly are some amazing success stories and some fantastic bikes, but I just feel the business relationships of the brands that we carry are relationships that allow us as a small entity to really navigate and kind of get into the reasons why I got into this industry is to really explore ideas that I have, like work, you know, let my creativity find a home for my creativity and find a home for you know, potential, you know, crazy ideas and really kind of sketch these things out without having you know, maybe a huge preseason by hanging over my head or something like that. So, you know, there are some negatives to it, right? You know, there are some negatives to it. But yeah, we have a lot of smaller brands and a lot of brands that really I feel understand us. And we, we distance ourselves from brands where that relationship isn’t there where it’s not a very, you know, we look for sustainable relationships with our vendors. And that means, you know, there’s equity there on both sides. And it’s not just selling us like $80,000 worth of bikes. All right, see you next year. And we’ll write that order up next year. It’s more of a continuous kind of relationship. So
Fred Clements 09:32
that’s one thing that struck me my years in the industry is the incredible diversity among retailers, you know, for some people that that model works and they want to 20,000 square foot store and, you know, a single brand, right and right, and people that like,
Joe Nocella 09:47
yeah, I always tell people that my mom, you know, where we stumble or where we have challenges is like, then when someone walks in the door, they don’t recognize probably almost any brands that we carry, you know, whereas I was thinking about my mom knows what trends is, you know, I think about though that the opposite of that scenario. So what we do is we turn that into positive words to a situation that we’re using these brands and these bikes to do our trips. So it causes us to have to talk more about why we carry these brands and who they are. So I think it’s a positive turn into a positive unfamiliarity because it allows us to kind of talk about brands that we’re really excited about.
Fred Clements 10:22
I noticed your store name is 718 cyclery. And outdoors, do stock much outdoor specific equipment or mostly bikes in. Yeah, how’s that work?
Joe Nocella 10:34
That’s a recent change. And that’s what then change the name changes the flight and its recent outdoor stuff is in about a year and a half, we started doing more and more of these camping trips, bike packing, bike, touring, bike, camping, whatever you want to call it. We found that more and more customers that want to either rent gear or even buy gear through us, and the outdoor gear landscape here in New York City is incredibly barren whereas Rei has Essentially, I mean, I like this not a negative about Rei, but they’ve essentially put out of business. Every single small mom and pop gear shop in the city that ever was, there’s none, there’s none. So if I attend to New York City, you’re gonna go to Rei. That’s it. And it’s unbelievable, right? So, you know, I think of the demographics of from where I’m sitting right now, in my basement, there are 20 million people within 20 miles of me, you know, you can’t tell me I can’t sell the 2010s this year to some of those folks. And so we started getting into the tents and sleeping bags and, you know, a vendor like QBP, for instance, has always been with us kind of hand in hand in terms of where our aspirations were and work there. We’re kind of going. So it’s been a good partner in terms of, you know, kind of going down that path with us, but we do well, and I think that what was starting to happen is people would come in and fittings of flour, you got to feel tense. You know, I never thought to buy a tent in a bike shop is what they would say you start thinking like Wow, is the word bike shop? Does scarlet letter for us? Is that limiting for us that? So the word Outdoors is kind of put there in the end, that’s kind of a prototypical test to kind of see what that would do. We didn’t legally change your name, but we kind of on the social media and everything, we kind of just added it just to kind of see what that would do. It’s a little bit of an experiment to kind of see if that changes the perceptions of what people can combine or store. So and that’s going really well. I mean, I think that you know, there are some pretty healthy margins in the outdoor industry. There’s a lot of crossovers because we’re going on these trips, and we’re using that tent, and that’s the sleeping bag I use, and there’s the sleeping pad, and there’s the stove and, you know, we start having classes, we last year, we did a lot of cooking classes, like camps, cooking classes in the shop where it was almost like one of that TV cooking shows where we had all their stoves lined up and different meals prepared and people came in and we talked about all the different kinds of stoves that are out there and, and things like that. And certainly, you know, we’re going up against Sorry, I think that there’s such a vast scale difference than just where, you know, we always joke around Whenever we sell a stove, somewhere in Rei server, you know, when they were supposed to sell to 20,000 stoves that day, and they only sold 19,999. like someone’s not gonna notice, like, the little tick that we’re taking away from them. But you know, I think that there’s plenty for us. And there’s just a barren landscape of that stuff here in Brooklyn in New York City. So we’re just kind of stepping into that in partnership with the things that we’re doing anyway. Like touring.
Fred Clements 13:26
Right. So the focus of this podcast is your, I guess, invention. I’m not sure if that’s quite the word, but bike shop day, December 7. Yeah, I saw it in quotes on your website. So maybe you didn’t really invent it, but you certainly invented it for the bike industry. And so bike shop day is December 7, this year this, maybe I’ll just tell you what I think I know about it, and then you can correct me. So it’s December 7, it’s gotten quite a good amount of attention. This is the third year I believe, of bike shop day. It’s a promotional program that encourages independent bike shops to promote themselves and have celebration bike shops. And this is done through activities. I think the last count I saw was 85, retailers, 28 states to international. I think you volunteered that you’re thinking it’s going to hit 150 stores this year, which would be great. So it’s growing. You know, one of my future questions will be how do you handle all this, but I think you handle it because it’s pretty simple. And the way you set it up is the retailers themselves are doing most of the organizing and if not all the organizing. So what was behind by shop day? How did you come up with this? What’s your thinking on
Joe Nocella 14:48
essentially behind the back shop day is something called Record Store Day, leave an employee who came from the music industry and managed a bunch of record stores and music stores in New York City. And a couple of years ago, we were just talking about this, you know how to kind of kickstart sales in the winter and what to kind of do about that. And we just started talking about Record Store Day, which is a really big deal and the record industry, it’s a huge deal in the independent music scene. So we thought, like, why don’t we just do by chapter, like, why don’t we just do this for the bike industry, and then we did a little research and didn’t really find much, we found something and you taught a bunch of years ago, that was maybe a collection of shops in Utah did something like there was, you know, scattered evidence of something that might have been their point. And we just decided to, you know, for me, it’s like I can we can see if this you know, throw this against the wall and see if it’ll stick you know, it doesn’t take much to me to fix the website gets a little promotion out there and social media see what happens and, and it was great, you know, the first year which was 2017 was pretty awesome. You know, it went really, really well. And we came away from the bike shop in 2017. And thinking wow, you know, we maybe we have a voice here. Maybe There’s a way to use this because some shops did, like, coat drives and all kinds of amazing things. Like there’s some really interesting ideas. And again, you’re right. I mean, everyone else is doing the work. It’s like Tom Sawyer, get everyone to paint the fence, right? You know, I’m just kind of ingesting the forms and putting on the website, you know, there’s no, you know, national convention or anything like that, it’s a pretty easy thing to kind of manage. And the next year, which was 2018, which was last year, I’m sorry, I’m gonna step back. The reason why we do it on the first weekend in December is that it kind of gets beyond Black Friday. It gets beyond shop small Saturday, it gets beyond Cyber Monday. It’s kind of after that craziness right after Thanksgiving is over. And once that’s over and the dust kind of settles, you’re still early enough in the holiday gift-buying season for that first weekend in December to matter. So we just wanted to be I didn’t want to get involved in the shop small Saturday thing. I just wanted to really stay away from that. So that’s like the only real Like decision that I ever really made, and you know, someone could probably talk me out of it. We’ve had people ask us to do it in March or April when people are getting ready to write thanks again in the cold. And so we’ll see. I mean, we’ll see where that turns into. But anyway, so last year’s event was 2018, we had tons of people sign up. And we kind of talked about the kind of creating an event that dealt with diversity and inclusion in the bike industry. We have a very diverse staff. We live in a very diverse city, things like that, you know, come a little easier for us because we’re around it all day. And the interesting thing was, as we kind of put this format for people to apply, essentially, for my chapter, and kind of come up with an idea that deals with diversity and inclusion, you really saw a huge spectrum of what that meant to people. You know, in South Texas, that means something very different than in Brooklyn, and that means something very different in Seattle, you know, so that was a really interesting kind of survey and we weren’t like the gatekeepers. Like that’s not diverse enough. You know, we want to do whatever they want it you know, as far as I was concerned But I came away like really thinking hard about what we consider diversity to be in what other places might consider diversity to be. So that was kind of an interesting scenario. Or what also happened to that was kind of interesting was that one of the big mobile bike shops that like that. I don’t know if that’s the actual demonstrate term, one of those big organizations that I’ll won’t name decided to sign up for that for the event, which is like, okay, that they managed to sign up in a way that like, they basically somehow managed to kind of take that form and kind of have some kind of robot fill it all out because I got like, hundreds of applications from every single van and it was all the same situation was all the same kind of events that were very boilerplate and it was a very, it was kind of very scammy I felt, and it kind of took me back a little bit because I didn’t know how to deal with it. I wasn’t really prepared for that to be kind of, you know, that onslaught of like, tons of these applications coming in and then thinking what is this the spirit of the event and You know, what are the rules here? Is that just brick and mortar is that you know, what are the rules? And I didn’t really know the answer. So I kind of let them all sign up. Great, sign up. That’s fantastic. And by shop day, 2018 went really well. And then, you know, coming around to this year, to be quite honest, for some reason, I was a little miffed by the way that the mobile shops have handled it with us. And I have, no dog in the fight in terms of mobile backstops. They don’t really function that well here in New York City. It doesn’t affect me the way I’m all for things that are change agents of change in industries. And so I think it’s an interesting thing. I read a lot about the mobile shop and the challenges and successes that they face. So you know, just for the record, I’m not pro or against them, just I do my thing. So the initial description this year, for bicep day that went out maybe three or four months ago, was written in a way that kind of excluded, you know, I wrote it in a way that was a brick and mortar only, you know, and for no other reason than just because I was like, I just didn’t want to deal with all these applications again this year. You know, and Then the way I wrote it, I think that when I started to get some feedback from some non-traditional shops, and not mobile shops, maybe shops or out of people’s houses, or maybe things that were different than brick and mortar stores, and, you know, they’re kind of suggestions to me, or their input was to really make it more inclusive. And take a step back and realize that and if you notice the way that’s written, now, I use the term you know, in all shapes and sizes, and it’s a very kind of welcoming and inclusive language now, because, you know, it’s great. I mean, we all are bringing something, we all have a value that we’re bringing to our customers, and we wanted to kind of showcase that and, you know, again, put your hand up and saying, hey, look at us, you know, we’re really important to the cycling community, and in that we’re really important to you enjoying the sport safely, and those kinds of things. So I kind of rewrote it maybe about a month and a half ago, and kind of reissued it and I think that I’m very happy with it personally. And it seems like we’re getting some good responses from it. And, you know, there’s always a few folks that maybe feel I’ve gotten a couple of emails, okay, take me off this list. I don’t agree with this, for whatever reason, and that’s fine. You know, I think that try not to make this all about us also, it’s kind of, you know, one of my goals too, it’s not like 718 presents bike shop day, you know, we’re hoping that you know, it kind of it goes beyond us. And, you know, I don’t know what that would look like, how that would be. But I do want to kind of, you know, grow beyond this particular shop. You know, my hope someday is that if you look at Record Store Day, you know, bands produce like, special records for that day and people collect them and it’s just really cool thing. And my hope was to one day, get my act together enough where I’d be able to go to a vendor and say, hey, maybe we produce a special saddle or a special stem with you know, like some kind of something that shops could kind of buy and then have exclusive to sell or some way to kind of do that. It’s not again, we’re not we wouldn’t be the one selling the shops, we just figured out that that’d be the kind of way to kind of start to deal with some, you know, maybe the exclusive product or something about it, that would kind of give it Even more legitimacy. I know that there are a couple of other efforts out there. I know in Canada that do Canadian, as the local bike Store Day, there’s something in Canada and I’ve done a couple of years in a row believe it’s in March. And it looks pretty cool. We’ve invited, you know, we’ve reached out to them to kind of get involved, see if we can share resources and, you know, they kind of are doing what they’re doing. I think it’s great. There was also something in England called, I want to call it a local bike something day, I forget. And they seem to be gaining some traction too, and, you know, reached out to them to kind of, you know, see if we can somehow combine or somehow, you know, join forces because in the past we’ve had a lot of international shops, it was almost Yeah, it was all of the world was crazy last year, and this year, we’ll get some more I’m sure. There’s one in Nigeria that was like really, I feel like I have to check out this website that’s all about just about what does a bike shop in Nigeria look like? You know, so I was really kind of intrigued by it. You know, if you looked at the map, it is definitely sprinkled across the country and really looks a lot like a population graph. Have a country in a lot of ways was more sparsely populated states, there are one or two shops and, you know, through the East Coast, there’s like in a pen and you know, the city of that city. So the map on the website is a pretty interesting kind of overlay of the demographics of the country, in general, I think of something.
Fred Clements 23:19
So the website you refer to his bikeshopday.com. Right? That’s where I found the list of participants so far, and there’s a logo for bike shop day, I assumed that it’s available for the participants to use in their promotions.
Joe Nocella 23:35
And I people make shirts, and we’ve had people make mugs and make whatever and effect that fantastic, like, take it and use it, you know, that’s what our contribution you know, it’s like, you know, use it as you need to so
Fred Clements 23:47
probably another phrase from you, I think, is on that day, quote, just do something, unquote. And I guess that proves that participation is up pretty much to the store or Not pretty money off to the store.
Joe Nocella 24:03
I didn’t want to prescribe. We didn’t want to I’m sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, we didn’t want to prescribe anything, we didn’t want to say like 11 o’clock, we’re gonna raise we do this together. And I really wanted to be decentralized and a lot of ways. And maybe that changes someday, maybe that’s not the most effective way to do it. But, um, in terms of our workload, and things here, you know, I don’t know if I’d be able to manage, I don’t know what that would be. And I think that if we had prescribed like, this is what you have to do to be a bike shop, a bike shop, it just seems like a lot of rules. And, you know, I think that probably not, you know, they’re probably shops, they’re just doing what they do on a Saturday in December, you know, that’s what they do anyway, you know, and it’s just an interesting way to kind of have some connection between shops and have some communication and there aren’t too many opportunities to kind of, like, interact in this way. You know, as far as I know. I mean, it might be some others, but this is kind of a fun, easy way. You know, this is a low hanging fruit kind of story. You know, it’s like, how could you not like this, you know, it’s simple enough, friendly enough. It’s kind of spirited enough when I’m making money. on it, you know, there’s something that we’ve kind of started in wanting to push into the industry and see the kind of work
Fred Clements 25:07
I see you refer to it as open-source, which I guess backs up the makeup as you will philosophy. Right. So, right, I noticed the national Record Store Day they do it twice a year, you mentioned you know, maybe there’s a possibility because you could almost envision this when obviously, is positioned for the holiday season for the dealers and try to drive some interest in traffic. You could almost envision you know, something at the start of the riding season May or April or anything like that I but I guess you have to get through the establishing it first before you think about expanding to more than once a year.
Joe Nocella 25:46
Right. Right. And I thought about it for sure. And people have thought about it. You know, people ask me about it too. And certainly, I’d be open to it for sure. So you know, maybe we have someone else to kind of manage the spring side of it. But um, yeah, yeah, I definitely see that as Not down the road. It’s part of its growth for sure.
Fred Clements 26:02
Right. So I noticed Record Store Day that they have a site and one of their participants had Metallica visit the store. Yeah, another one, Hootie, and the blowfish going to their event. Okay, what was one work in the bike industry, we probably don’t have Metallica unless one of them rides a bike. But what’s sort of the most effective technique you’ve seen for making this work?
Joe Nocella 26:27
I think when it’s tied to the kind of a fun event, you know, like, again, there’s a shopping road at Providence, Rhode Island called Black dash. And they were the ones that really kind of got in my head about making this really unique and they do a code draft. And you know, scrolling through the list of what people are doing, it really really ranges and it really just gives people kind of creativity flowing a little bit, but um, you know, hey, who could we have, you know, come here, like, I don’t know if that would be the same. I know there’s a lot of shops in New York City that have famous riders come with their tracker, specialized, you know, those kinds of famous road riders and And those seem to be kind of fun events. And I don’t know if we’d ever been able to pull something like that off, or how effective it would be. But, you know, yeah, I mean, I think it, you know, getting out in front of people in the regular kind of person, so they understand what we provide as a bicep, why potentially buying a bike online and having it shipped to your house, you know, why that’s fraught with challenges and why that could lead to unenjoyable experiences down the road, you know, this is what we do. And this is how we kind of position ourselves within their kind of experience, you know, we all want the same thing. And so just kind of show, you know, the value of local bike shop essentially, or a mobile shop or a shop out of someone’s house, you know, we’re providing, you know, people come in, upset or mad, you know, that happens all the time. And when I was covering this, like, you know, where we all want the same thing, like, I want you to be on your bike, you want to be on your bike, there’s no reason for me to keep your bike, you know, it’s like, we’re all on the same team here. You know, we all kind of want the same thing and keep it really positive like that. You know, we’ve had great relationships with other shops who Sitting, there’s tons of biceps here, and I’m fewer and fewer, unfortunately, it seems but uh, you know, I think this would also, you know, it’s funny whenever I get an application or whenever one comes online, from an area, it always seems like there are one or two other shops in that area that all of a sudden, also find out. So I don’t know if it’s a competitor down the street or someone in the same town, but they always come in pockets, which is really interesting. And it’d be really cool. If maybe there were shops that were arch-rivals that could somehow do things together. That’d be kind of fun.
Fred Clements 28:31
So I noticed one of the options, a number of the participants seem to be doing our workshops in the store and especially for those of in cold weather areas around the holidays, maybe group rides are maybe less common than in midseason, but what kind of workshops Have you seen or done yourself? What seems to draw the most people?
Joe Nocella 28:52
We do a lot of things during the year anyway, so the workshop we did last year was a women’s and we do a trans Gender non conforming workshops that we do every week, we kind of just made it on Saturday. And again, as a white, middle-aged guy, I’m always thinking about the opportunities that I’ve certainly have. And also ways to welcome into the industry, people that maybe aren’t treated that way haven’t treated the way that I’m treated. So, you know, in our staff, it’s very diverse, but most thinking about ways to kind of welcome people into the industry that is currently underrepresented. So that’s kind of what we do. And that’s the community we live in. Right. That’s the world we live in a very diverse city. So you know, you’d be slightly foolish to kind of like not welcome folks in that didn’t look like you because a lot of people in the session looked like me and that’s why I live in the city because it’s a very diverse place. So I think that like when shops, you know, come stretched a little bit for their comfort level. There’s a world out there a world of people that want a place that they can call their home and want a place where they feel comfortable. And I don’t want to say a safe place because that term means other things, but it’s the place For people to come in and feel at home and feel comfortable, you know, I always tell people, and no one was born with this information in their head. And we all learned it at some point from someone. So you know, we could be the people that are providing that information to another generation of people or a different group of people that may really want to get involved. So I’m always looking for those kinds of connections across that are very diverse, have diverse connections. It’s very critical for us. How about
Fred Clements 30:26
workshops or classes in a sort of ignoring a lot of customers are mechanically challenged, but things like flat repair basic may? Have you done any of that?
Joe Nocella 30:38
Yeah, we do this every week for like, eight years. We do every Thursday night, a huge part of what we do. Yeah, again, bringing people into this world and kind of demystifying A lot of it, you know, because again, I think that maybe 20 years ago, the bike shop was the place where all this information was kind of collected and dispersed. But now with YouTube, all those things that are out there. Now, maybe that person doesn’t put up with the bullshit that the bike shop dude is going to give her or him when they come in, and they don’t know the jargon, and they’re just going to go and find a video online and figure it out. So that’s, you know, again, that gets back to our beds on the internet kind of mantra where, you know, certainly, we can be as comforting and clear as the people that are on YouTube videos. But we can also use our hands and show you how I’m going to show you examples of touching and feeling. So those are a lot of the workshops that we do. We have women’s only workshops, we have the general population workshops mechanically based, and I think that it develops a customer who wants to know more and wants to get involved more. It’s not like, Oh, my dad, I’ve shown someone how to change their flat and now they’re going to change their own flats, and they’re going to put me in a business that’s injured flat on the street. You know, it’s so that’s a real short-sighted idea. And I heard that years ago when we would, you know, classes were free, and they still are, and people would fail. You shouldn’t give it away and you should keep that information. And for me, it’s like that information is everywhere. And I want to provide a place where people can come kind of share that with us. And maybe when they come to the shop, maybe they buy something, maybe they don’t. But you know what the next time they have an issue or when what I was thinking about is, when that person goes to someone comes to a class of ours and a Thursday night, they go to work on Friday, and they’re sitting in a cubicle and the friend asked him, what’s the what do they do last night. And the sound to this day plays, these guys are so friendly, these men and women, it was a great place, you know, that peer to peer kind of connection, in my opinion, the most coveted kind of advertising there is, you know, like when your friend tells you, you got to see Terminator seven, you’re going to love it or you got to go to this bar, this restaurant. I know you and I know you’ll love it. Like that’s the most cherished and effective marketing that there is, you know like Johnson and Johnson would love for me to tell my friends how much I like tide pods. Probably I could. But you know, I don’t but you know, that’s what we get. When we do a class. We get an army of folks that leave the class at night and go out to the world and spread the news. It sounds very evangelical. But, but when your friend tells you, you’re gonna check out this place, you’re gonna really like it. Like, that’s worth thousands of dollars. And what’s that worth? I mean, I don’t even know what that’s worth. So that’s why we do the classes the way we do them. And that’s why we kind of do our events and all these things the way we do them because that kind of connection and that kind of word of mouth are behind any Instagram posts or any stupid Facebook post. I mean, this is your friend telling you to check these guys out, you know, and that’s amazing. But again, this is nothing new. And this is nothing. This is like a 3000-year-old retail strategy here. This is like nothing special about what I just described. Is any kind of buy into it. You’ve really got into it.
Fred Clements 33:38
Right And so maybe those aren’t specific to bike shop day. ground for others it could be specific to bike shop day but so what about I’ve seen some people positioning it as an open house and they’ll have food and coffee on site. Even some doing fund-raising for charities. food drives are a gift drive. Yeah, and Have you tried any of those? Or what’s your specific bike shop day focus,
Joe Nocella 34:05
I’ve been approached by a couple of shops talking about like potentially trying to figure out a way for us to come up with an after this year, but for beyond maybe a few charities or groups where we could kind of work in unison in a way to collect funds to donate to a specific organization that we all decide on or four or five organizations. So you see those Subaru commercials where you can donate to five or six different charities when you buy the Subaru car. So that’s going to be really interested in how this could potentially move the needle a little bit with some funding. And, you know, at that point, you know, this thing becomes a little bigger and needs an accountant and probably a nonprofit status and all those kinds of things. But that was a really interesting answer. Two or three shops have kind of sent me inquiries about the possibility of doing that. So I think once the dust settles this year, I am going to look into that Potentially, you know, we have a list a couple of hundred shops long, you know that we could send out a survey and say, Hey, for bicep day in 2020. These are like 15 different organizations that we’ve kind of identified that pick the five that you think we should do. And maybe we have some kind of aggregate that somehow kind of routes into that. Now that doesn’t know specifically, what are we doing? I’m not sure. I’m not sure yet. Specifically, we’re doing workshops. on Saturday we’re having a group ride on Nicole’s and another some, we do like a bridge tour. We’re near a canal, there’s a bunch of draw bridges nearby. They’re kind of fun to go over and ride around. And we’re going to have a workshop maintenance workshop that morning, and we’ll have food and things like that. And I think that the shops that do things that are, you know, what I would consider not low level but like really, you know, simple things like coffee and donuts and whatever. You know, a lot of chefs do that, that maybe some chefs haven’t done that and haven’t interacted with people at a very casual level within the shop and kind of cleared out the workbench. Have coffee and stuff on so people can come through and see what that work area looks like. And, you know, basically, it’s this whole idea of inviting people into our world, to show them that it’s a great place to be, and we want to work with you on our world. So the idea of pulling people in is a strong idea for us also, is letting people in on the secret and essentially, you know, there’s really no secret but you’re letting people into the floor all day and we’re gonna, you know, we can be there with them.
Fred Clements 36:23
Right. And as part of the sort of open-source philosophy here, I noticed a few of the participants just having a good old fashioned sale, you know, certain sale today or trading programs or, you know, we’re going to do giveaways and have a drying and it seems like it’s really pretty open this concept fits a wide range of things that you had to
Joe Nocella 36:46
if you want to, and I think if there was like a such a professional like a retail psychologist or some kind of forensic retail person that would go through and look at all these submissions and kind of like come up with a kind of a diagnose. For the industry, or I mean, I think there’s a lot of really interesting, even the ways that people write and the ways that people describe these events, it’s really, I’m just captivated by the responses that I get and how people fill in the blank, essentially, which I think is really pretty cool. And it’s just a great way to see what everyone else is doing and kind of interact in a real positive way. But yeah, you know, last year when enlisted diversity and inclusion thing, it was kind of a wild thing, because in my mind, I had an idea of what that meant. And again, it didn’t mean when I thought it meant to a lot of other places where, you know, diversity meant, you know, a women’s ride, you know, something like that, which was fantastic and all but again, I was like, I expect that would have been already part of the normal thing already, you know, things like that. That was just me coming at it from a different place. So I definitely learned a lot last year about what diversity means in different parts of the country.
Fred Clements 37:49
Yeah, so maybe remind people that like shop day.com is the site to go to sign up and be recognized as a participant here and let Joe know what you’re doing. So He can kind of catalog things and keep it straight. That’s where the logo is available. hope I’m not speaking out of school to Joe, give your email address if they have any specific questions or independent dealers, it’s info at 718 c calm for 718 cyclery, calm Joe, no seller. And any closing thoughts before we sign off here?
Joe Nocella 38:22
Not specifically, I think, I hate to say a feel-good story, but it’s like copies, you know, it’s like, come on this easy to do. You can even fake it and do it. It’s so easy to do. But I think that there’s something I think that chefs that are really engaged in it. There’s something there in terms of trying to just pool our efforts and really kind of point out to consumers, that we are still here and we are an important part of this and we want to continue to work with folks and we provide something that’s really, really important to cycling enjoyment. That’s really, these are things that have been said a lot lately, but just a moment in time to kind of celebrate how awesome it is to be in the bike industry.
Fred Clements 39:00
Right, as some people might even say that the bicycle retailers are the key to the future.
Joe Nocella 39:07
Yeah, you know, I think that Yeah, like looking at shops and how they all evolve and kind of move in some places is gonna evolve easier than others. But um, yeah, it’s really and again, that’s, that’s what fascinates me and gets me up every morning, really early to come to the shop. It’s just, it’s fascinating to like, have, you know, when I was an architect, I remember I was 15 or so years in and I looked over, you know, it’s like, Alright, in five years, I’m gonna be that guy. And then 10 years, I’m gonna be that woman, you know, like, I knew that you could see where you’re going. I’m going to be in that office in five years and the idea of like, my kind of future was preordained. I didn’t like that I didn’t like, I liked not knowing and I like, how’s this gonna work today? It’s raining sideways outside, like, how’s this gonna work? Today I’m stepping into the unknown was something that I really wanted to do and it just keeps me on my toes every day and it’s just nice to like, and you know, Looking at the people that were ahead of me in architecture, it’s like, that guy cares a lot about this firm. And I’m never going to care that much about the firm. It’s not, I’m never going to care that much. And that guy is still getting passed over for promotion. So we’re looking for people that care more than him. And it’s like, I don’t even care half as much as he does. You know, I love what I did. But I had a family and I’m leaving at five o’clock every day to go home, and I wasn’t staying late, and all that kind of do my own thing. And it was pretty lucrative. And I walked away from a scenario that sometimes I wonder, what was I doing? But, you know, in the end, I think what I enjoy about the bike industry is that every day I get to deal with people that are cyclists, and then I kind of boiled it down to like, what do I like about this? And every day, I get to deal with people that are interested in what I’m interested in. We’re both interested in the same things and you know, so I work at Staples and someone walked in and but printer cartridges and then left. They don’t care. I don’t care. You know, who cares? But hear every person that walks in the door in some way interested in what I’m interested in and there’s a connection there, and there’s the story. And there’s a simple like, hey, what kind of bike you ride. That’s all you need. And it’s like, you know, sometimes it lights a spark and people, but everyone that’s in here is interested, they can hear for a reason that took time out of their busy day in the busy city to come to the US. And that’s pretty cool to have people come in, and you get to deal with people that want to be there. And you know, cyclists tend to be a little more caring about the environment a little more. I won’t get into the political side of any of this, but they just tend to be more agreeable people in terms of their lifestyle choices, and you know, how they feel about the world and to deal with those kinds of people all day. That’s kind of why I like this industry a lot.
Fred Clements 41:36
It’s your own lifestyle choice. That’s great.
Joe Nocella 41:40
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I wouldn’t, I’m never gonna go back. I’m in the long haul. I really love it. I love what I do. I love the people I work with.
Fred Clements 41:48
Wonderful. So I want to thank you for carving out some time on this today, Wednesday, and Friday for creating or inventing the bike shop day program for the bicycle. The industry and thank you for the time and thanks for doing all this. So,
Joe Nocella 42:04
thanks for having me on.
Rod Judd 42:06
This has been bicycle retail radio by the National Bicycle Dealers Association. For more information on membership and member benefits, join us @NBDA.com
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After spending 12 years as a writer and editor, Fred Clements worked as executive director and vice president for the National Bicycle Dealers Association for 28 years. He then moved to Interbike in a retail relations role, later transitioning into consulting. He enjoys helping the NBDA with podcasts from time to time and rides about 3,500 miles each year on his road bike.
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The NBDA has been here since 1946, representing and empowering specialty bicycle dealers in the United States through education, communications, research, advocacy, member discount programs, and promotional opportunities. As shops are facing never-before-seen circumstances, these resources offer a lifeline. Together, we will weather this. We at the NBDA will not waver in our commitment to serving our members even during this challenging time—but we need your support.
Now is the time to become a member as we join together to make one another stronger. Whether you’re a retailer or an industry partner, your membership in the NBDA is one of the best investments you’ll make this year.
Learn more about the benefits of being a member and join now.
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