Riding on a gravel trail with a group of nearly forty strangers is quite a strange experience in a lot of ways. Everyone is trying to figure out where “their place” should be in the peloton pecking order. Conversation is quite hard because you’re busy concentrating on the route and trying not to crash or do something stupid. But that shared experience breaks down barriers really fast. “You need to tell me your secret for keeping your socks so white” was my opening line to Alex and Paul as I rode behind them on a section of narrow, sandy and bramble strewn singletrack. “The fronts aren’t quite as pristine as the back!” shot back Paul. As ways to break the conversational ice go, this worked a treat and we ended up riding and chatting for big chunks of time over the next three days.
"We want to make cycling easy, affordable & fun"
Alex Gaudé and Paul Barthorpe run Moloko Cycling and are based in south-west London, UK. They set up the business with one key principle in mind – they wanted to make cycling “easy, affordable & fun.” They realised that the barriers preventing new people from getting into cycling were pretty big – in their words “cycling can be complicated, expensive and scary...so we set-up Moloko to remove those barriers and to help people unlock all the happiness that cycling can bring.” The pair started with a very reasonably priced bike hire scheme, where customers could hire a bike for a week/month/longer and if the customer wanted to purchase ‘their’ bike at the end of the hire period, the rental fee was knocked off the sales price.
The hire service was a big success, which led Alex and Paul to growing and diversifying their offerings. We suspect that everyone who has ever been into a bike shop will at some point have felt intimidated, out of our depth, ignored or worse, patronised and that is regardless of gender, experience level, ethnic background etc. Alex and Paul had experienced the same thing and wanted to make sure Moloko was a very different experience for their customers. They have set-up their HQ to look and feel relaxed, friendly and welcoming – it looks more like an interior design shop than a bike business!
While Alex and Paul started off serving primarily a road-based customer base, they soon realised that many of their customers were either gravel-curious or were already convinced and just needed some help with choosing the correct bike or finding routes or were looking for the camaraderie of a group ride. So, Moloko started to offer bike hire and sales of high-end gravel bikes from Canyon, Pearson and 1816 bikes. Their hire bike service has proved to be super successful on a ‘try before you buy’ basis “We’re getting more and more requests for gravel bike rentals as people want to try before they commit. A good example recently was where the renter was part of our community of road cyclists – she rented a Canyon Grail from us for the weekend along with some pre-planned routes and she loved it so much she’s wants to now buy the bike!”
But it’s not just about bike hire & sales. The pair also run regular group gravel rides, both locally to where they’re based and further afield. They’re also developing a series of recommended self-guided routes. Currently these are biased towards the south-east of the UK and the majority are road-only, but they have plans up their sleeves to offer gravel routes and across a wider range of the UK too.
We chatted with Alex and Paul a few weeks after our Hotchillee trip together and they gave us some great insight into how they started and what the future holds for Moloko. Paul started off by telling us a bit about their history “The joy of cycling was something I wanted to impart” he said. ”We both lived busy lives in London and I was getting so much from cycling – among other things, it was helping to fix a knee injury and to improve my mental health. I was looking at other people and seeing how much benefit cycling was bringing them – fitness, well-being, community building etc. Alex and I were in the middle of arranging our first holiday together as a couple and were going to go to Mallorca. Alex spotted me packing my bib shorts and a helmet into my luggage – she knew I was a cyclist but didn’t know there would be any cycling on our holiday!
So, I confessed that part of my reason for wanting to go out there was to hire a Canyon road bike that I couldn’t get my hands on back home in the UK and I wanted to feel it and test it before I went ahead and potentially bought a frame, to then build up myself into a new bike. I was off on a ‘test and learn and demo’ trip and I said to Alex when we got out there ‘why don’t I hire you an entry level road bike for the day as you might like it. You can try it for an hour or two and then if you don’t like it, we can give it back?’. I didn’t put any pressure on her and she agreed that she would give it a go. She ended up doing the Lighthouse Ride in Mallorca, which is perhaps one of the most picturesque road rides on the planet. You could see in her eyes that she was just falling in love with the sport. We ended up extending the hire on her bike and now she’s a fully keen cyclist.”
"If you introduce someone to this amazing sport in a gentle way which removes all of the barriers and reduces the cost outlay, you give them a lovely first experience and the enjoyment is hopefully so much greater than any negatives. "
Paul continued with their story “What we learned from that exercise is that if you introduce someone to this amazing sport in a gentle way which removes all of the barriers and reduces the cost outlay, you give them a lovely first experience and the enjoyment is hopefully so much greater than any negatives. We want to give this experience to more people and that is the core of what we offer. We want to make cycling easy, affordable and fun. Our main point of difference is that we offer long-term rentals to people looking to get into the sport. Our prices at the introductory level are as low as we can make them [£59 per month for a Specialized Allez road bike] with no minimum contract. We give customers loads of support to find the right bike, we give them a free 45-minute set-up session included in their hire price and a whole heap of other benefits too. We put a real emphasis on the warm welcome and creating a friendly, non-pressured environment”
“Things have slowly started to morph from where we began” continues Paul “We’re getting lots of riders coming from abroad, who are already keen cyclists, but want to experience the cycling culture in the UK. They want to ride a bike which is either identical level or an upgrade to a bike they have at home. We’ve started to diversify to be able to cater for customers who are not looking to get into the sport, but also to focus on people who are already convinced. So that is where our crowd funding plans are going to come in – we’ve got to the point where we’ve proven our concept and now we’re looking to ‘turbo charge’ our business. We’ve got all the groundwork set-up to enable us to serve our customers and now funding is the essential thing as we’ve exhausted most of our initial hire bike fleet for example. The crowd funding will allow us to invest in additional bikes, develop our web & app services, hire staff/consultants/copywriters & fund operational costs.”
In a world of bike businesses being quite specialist and often compartmentalised, Moloko’s business model incorporates a wide variety of different aspects and with a friendly, welcoming, community building ethos, we can see a great future for them.
If you are going to be visiting London and would like to hire a high-end gravel bike, find information about local gravel routes or even join them for a group ride, you can find the details on their website. For anyone interested in potentially investing in Moloko’s crowd funding scheme, you can find details of that on their crowdcube page.