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Manchester’s Insync Bikes is set to move its UK headquarters and distribution centre to new 60,000 sq ft premises in Trafford Park.
The new premises bring Insync’s corporate and distribution arms together in one location, having previously been based over two sites at Newton Heath and a 40,000 sq ft warehouse in Worsley. The new headquarters represent a significant investment in Manchester and the UK by parent company Hero Cycles.
Insync Bikes executive director Raman Awasthi said the new hub sends a ‘bold statement’ about Insync’s plans for growth as it seeks to double its market share of the UK bike industry from 10% to 20% by 2024.
Awasthi said Insync’s focus will be on the family market producing bikes in the mid to premium range of £250-£800 including e-bikes, road bikes, women’s bikes and children’s bikes under brands including Coyote, Viking, Ryedale and DeNovo.
“The new premises are fantastic and enable us to bring our team into one place, ramping up our operations to better serve our 300 strong bike dealer network and our customers,” he said. “From Trafford Park we can distribute more than 500 bikes a day and customers can also easily come and collect stock.
“With bigger storage and production facilities we can give bike dealers a quicker, more efficient, more predictable service. Dealers are the backbone of the industry and represent 50pc of bike sales and Trafford Park immediately improves our ability to support them with better with more advanced tech monitoring inventory and stock capacity as well as multimodal transport connections.
“It’s a giant leap forward for Insync and our ability to drive growth by supporting our customers and partners.”
Awasthi said the Trafford Park expansion will also see manufacturing take place for the first time in the UK with plans to set up an e-bike assembly line by August, producing 50,000 e-bikes over three years with an ambition to scale up to 30,000 e-bikes annually.
“Our parent company Hero Cycles is India’s biggest pedal bike maker selling five million bikes a year and has huge experience of growing and operating a bike business at scale,” he said. “We are bringing all that knowledge of managing bike design, building and distribution from our top team in India to this new hub in Manchester.
“We believe by fusing the depth of our supply chain in India as well as manufacturing facilities in India and Sri Lanka we can offer the best quality, best value mid to premium range bikes to the UK and European market.
“We are especially keen to bring all our design expertise together here in Manchester maximising the skills of our German e-bike manufacturer HNF based in Berlin, which is part of the Hero International company, with our UK and Indian designers.”
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Awasthi said Trafford Park will tie in closely with Hero Cycle’s new 100-acre Cycle Valley in Ludhiana, in the Punjab region. “This will be the biggest and most advanced bike making centre in the world,” he said.
“We plan to have all the suppliers and parts in one central location to de-risk supply chain disruption and share innovation between the cycling industry’s leading companies.
“Ultimately we want to have the capacity to produce around nine million bicycles and e-bikes each year adding a further 60pc capacity to our operations. This will have a massive impact on the Trafford Park site and our ability to provide high-quality bikes of all kinds at scale.”
