The Rockville Bike Hub in Rockville MD has a good relationship with the commercial shops in the area. The local Trek store takes in kids bikes as trade-ins and donates them to us. Those bikes get used for a City of Rockville program we support. The Trek store also gives us adult bikes that people get rid of when they buy a new bike, though in that case there's no "trade-in" given.
The local REI has donated tools to us and allows us to set up at a Farmers Market in their parking lot. Since we don't stock a lot of parts as a pop-up shop, we're often directing people to them for those purchases and then helping people do the installation or repair.
We've also done some bike maintenance workshops with the Trek store, particularly a women's night event.
Steve Andruski
On Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 10:14 AM J Fiedler jasonafiedler@gmail.com wrote:
In Detroit, Michigan and Brandon, Manitoba there have been shops that will trade in older bikes and give a percentage off the sale of a new bike. Many of those bikes that were traded in were then given to the non-profit shop. The project in Brandon, Manitoba was a smaller scale deal so the same shop that would get us a few bikes also sold us tools at cost. For context, this is a ~45,000 population town with only two bike shops so I don't think they saw our youth earn-a-bike program as competition or a problem. I imagine they saw us as another way of increasing bike ridership in rural Manitoba which they would benefit from. In Detroit the shops were more spread out. Also in Detroit a few of those shops didn't do trade ins, they just agreed to be donation drop off points for us because we often had people that wanted to donate bikes or parts but didn't have a way of getting all the way to our shop. The key to those relationships was communication and transportation to pick bikes up. For profit shops didn't want their storage areas filling up too much with bikes they weren't going to use. For better or worse in Detroit I think the customers (and maybe the staff) of the suburban shops got to feel good that they were helping folks in the city. The shops could also advertise that they had this partnership with us to get some more customers in the door. We would also do thank yous to them on social media which our volunteers/donors in the suburbs would see. None of those shops were near our shop because at the time Detroit didn't have many shops. There are a few for profit shops in Detroit now that are super supportive and community minded. After I left they partnered in our annual winter bike-a-thon fundraiser as a warming station for riders and I believe some of their staff rode to raise money as well. Similar to what other people said, there would be many referrals between those for profit shops and non-profit.
-J
On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 1:37 PM Josh Bisker jbisker@gmail.com wrote:
Hey who's got a great example or model of a nonprofit shop and a for-profit shop getting along well and it all working to everyone's benefit? Not a two-in-one model, but a symbiotic relationship between two shops, like maybe on the same block or something. Plz?
Josh Bisker 914-500-9890 New York Mechanical Gardens Bike Co-op http://bikecoop.nyc/ 596 Acres http://596acres.org/ Bindlestiff Family Cirkus http://bindlestiff.org/ ____________________________________
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