‘The UK’s first subscription bicycle scheme’, the Bike Club, has confirmed funding of £5.7 million, helping the brand expand its fleet of lightweight bicycles available to families for a monthly subscription as their children grow.
The Bike Club, founded in 2016 by Alexandra Rico-Lloyd and James Symes, is the first of its kind in the UK cycling industry; and now claims to be the largest private bike-rental scheme in the UK, outgrowing the fleets of Lime, Uber and Santander Cycles.
With a current fleet of 16,000 bikes, the £5.7 million investment puts the Bike Club on track to grow to 150,000 bicycles, with 12,000 arriving ahead of the Christmas peak.
With the likes of Netflix, Uber and Airbnb, the ‘access economy’ has revolutionised the way we travel, eat and consume media, and the Bike Club team argues that the time is right for these changes to arrive in the bicycle industry.
The Bike Club offers a flexible monthly cycling subscription service for families looking to discover the outdoors. When a bike is exchanged it is collected from the doorstep and refurbished at the Bike Club’s 25,000 sq ft workshop, then made available to the next family. This circular model eliminates waste whilst giving families the most appropriate bikes.
With 16,000 bikes currently in circulation, parents typically pay £5-£15 per month. With more than 700,000 children’s bicycles sold annually, the Bike Club’s fundraising efforts look to disrupt the industry by offering families a ‘more sustainable, accessible and affordable way to cycle’.
James Symes, CEO of the Bike Club, said “Our business model has always been focused on helping families to have bikes that grow with them, effectively solving the pain of constantly having to buy a new kid’s bike every 12-18 months as they get bigger. The Bike Club is a solution to a widespread problem for parents and for the industry.”
He added “Over 80% of parents will teach their children to ride. People increasingly recognise that if you put your kids on the right sized, better quality bike they’re much more likely to take up cycling and much more likely to have a better happier time.”
Jamie Lawson-Brown, a co-founder of Codex Capital said, “We’re delighted to be partnering with the Bike Club to offer families a more sustainable and fundamentally better means of getting their children cycling. The combination of our investment and the entrepreneurial focus of the management team ensures we can increase the fleet rapidly, to offer this unique subscription service to an even greater number of families in this time of high growth.”
Mike Balfour, Founder of Fitness First and Chairman of the Bike Club commented, “In the same way Fitness First fundamentally changed the affordable health club industry, I can see the same growth opportunities with the Bike Club and family cycling. We are at the forefront of a generational shift in how we get our families cycling.”
