Events

This year’s Local Bike Shop Day set to take place in April

Local Bike Shop Day is set to take place this year on Saturday 30^th April.

The date was chosen following an early December poll among participating retailers.

Local Bike Shop Day, an industry-wide initiative managed by the Association of Cycle Traders, aims to celebrate bike shops across the nation. Key objectives for this year involve getting new people into bike shops and building a new customer group of new and returning cyclists across the nation.

Organisers are teaming up with #BikeIsBest this year to increase the reach and involvement of Local Bike Shop Day through a number of ideas, including encouraging bike shops to host an “Ask us anything” session designed to break the stigma new cyclists often have towards bike shops.

Once customers find a friendly and encouraging environment, the goal is then to facilitate making them a regular customer.

The ACT said it would also like to thank Cyclescheme for its continued support in the promotion of Local Bike Shop Day. Cyclescheme has agreed to sponsor competitions and fund promotional materials for bike shops to use for the third year running.

Local Bike Shop Day 2021 was celebrated by 370 bike shops across the UK, an increase of 37% from the previous year, with some IBDs offering their customers discounted products, free bike services or guided bike rides.

Last year’s day was Saturday 28th August, which fell at an ideal time to encourage children to cycle to school and inspired the nation to continue cycling after the seasonal good weather came to an end.

In the campaign’s final two weeks, the hashtags #supportyourlocalbikeshop and #localbikeshopday reached around 250,000 users on Twitter alone and on the platform, all posts mentioning Local Bike Shop Day had over 300,000 impressions/views. On Twitter and Instagram, the number of people following the accounts increased by 40% in the final fortnight of the initiative.

Rebecca Morley