UK’s Adventure Bike Headquarters!

Shop visit at Keep Pedaling! https://www.keeppedalling.co.uk/
PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/PathLessPedaled
STICKER STORE: https://www.pathlesspedaled.com/store
SHIRTS: https://www.pathlesspedaled.com/store
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/pathlesspedaled

Affiliate Links:
Riding Camera: https://www.insta360.com/sal/go_2?insrc=INRNP7I
360 Camera: https://www.insta360.com/sal/one_x2?insrc=INRNP7I
Studio Camera: https://amzn.to/2U9SQiJ
Studio Mic: https://amzn.to/3eehci8
Fave Multitool: https://amzn.to/3ec9ntk
Fave Pump: https://amzn.to/3kd6Any

Hey there everybody. We’re here in Manchester and one of the shops that people keep telling us to visit while we’re in town is Keep Pedaling and we’re here with Rich from Keep Pedling. Hi. Can you give us a tour? Show us show us the magic. Yeah. Yeah. So, we do um mostly steel uh these days. So, we do if you run around, we do singular and brother and sirly salsa. Um obvious of course we do tumble weed. Um and then we’ve got some tie tie stuff as well. Not much in the way of carbon these days, but that’s kind of us. So, a lot of the bikes seem uh adventure and gravel oriented. Um, how easy is it to get to to gravel from from Manchester? Uh, it’s pretty good. Yeah. Uh, you can go because it’s quite a canal based city, so you can shoot out sort of three or four miles and get to some gravel tracks, uh, forestry tracks and things pretty easily into the Peak District and into the Penines. And then you can pretty much get off-road all the way to Chester out to Wales. Uh what’s what’s the most popular kind of style bike that you guys sell? Probably the the gravel bikes because it is the most useful of bikes. You know, you can go almost mountain biking on it and you can go to work on it and you can go bike packing on it and it does kind of everything and and then you have crossover bikes, you know, like the Stargazer that that is if you put skinny wheels on it, it becomes a gravel bike, but you you got your fat tires. So, this is a cool bike I’ve only seen online. Yeah. The Rufus Stone. Uh, what’s what’s this about? So, a British brand uh from a guy who uh kind of originated with skate stuff and then um so it’s a 27 and a half. Again, a fat 27 and a half, but the thing that make stands out, I guess, is the quill stem and the threaded steer. Uh but a really comfy again fun bike to ride. Yeah, that’s what it’s about. It looks like a blast. Yeah. Yeah. And we can build it up. And you know, it’s not just drop bars, it’s you know, flat bars, whatever you like. Yeah. Yeah. And we that’s what we do really because most of the brands that we sell don’t they don’t do uh complete bikes. So, we build up whatever you like. So, we got bikes on this side. Uh moving over to this wall, it looks like you’ve got a a nice assortment of uh biking bike packing bags and and racks. Yeah, sure. I mean, we’ve done Apura forever. We were the first, one of the first shops to be doing Apura 10, 11, 10 plus years ago, so we’ve kind of grown with them and it’s nice just to be in the center of Manchester. People can just walk in, bring their bike in, and there’s loads of different sizes. All you can fill all the little holes with all the bags and uh it all just works, you know. Uh, and then so and of course ought, we’ve always done ought, we do the paniers, we do the bike packing bags, and we like to keep stuff on the on the shop floor on the bikes as well. Uh, and Old Man Mountain, so they’ve just been got a new big distributor. Um, and that’s going really well. Yeah. Yeah. The the, you know, the rattle-free paniers and having a basket bag on the basket packing, right? It’s all great. Hashtag basket packing. Yeah. Yeah. So, they’re working really well for us. And then Wizard Works are, you know, relatively local, all made in London and you’ve seen them at the show and they’re great, lovely people and yeah, keep on pushing forward. Yeah. Of the customer base that goes uh touring or bike packing, do you find more gravitate towards bike packing bags or the the painter and rack system? Uh I guess most people if they are racing will will go I mean it’s most races there’s a sea of apura at the front. Yeah. Um and they work really well. Um so it’s personally, you know, we our bike doesn’t have Apura on it or only Wizard Works or only Old Man Mountain. It’s uh it’s what works for the customer. So we build the bike for the customer exactly how they want it. And then we use the bags that are the right thing, you know, it depends what fits and yeah, I mean obviously we do lots and lots of Brooks. Um we mentioned the ule stuff earlier. So lots of so many different ways to attach things to your bike. all these straps. Um, we just started doing a little bit of fidlock. Uh, the safety pizzettas are things we’ve always done. Uh, we’ve carried a safety pizzetta around Morocco and Kyrgyzstan and everywhere, you know, and keeping us safe. So, how how popular is the safety pizza? Do people come in the shop seeking it out or do they? They do a little bit. They see Yeah. Yeah. The the the internet’s a wonderful thing, I guess. It’s so cool because the guy that that started that was local to where I grew up like in the LA area. We met up with him and uh yeah, he didn’t think it would turn into to a business at all. No, no, it’s Yeah. And we sell a lot and and it’s great and uh you know and with with more and more events and people are need to be safe. Safe and fun. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. A safety avocado is never boring. All right. What do we have over here? So, we have over here. Yeah. Obviously, we do the crane bells, the nog bells we’ve done forever. Uh these are cool little flings. I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen these. These are hand painted in Belgium. little metal figures and they do all the teams. Again, local beer babe. We’ve been selling those forever as well. She washes and washes and washes the tubes and then they’re really soft and nice and Yeah, I love those. Uh we sell a lot of books. No normal coffee that started in the UK last year, I guess. Swiss brand. This I’m not familiar with that at all. Yeah, it’s um it’s just coffee in a tube. In a tube? Yeah. Yeah. Do you I assume you dilute it or Yeah. Yeah. If you have a pack if you have a little packets of instant coffee, it produces so much waste and it doesn’t generally doesn’t taste very nice. Whereas a little blob of this in your cup, some hot water, you’re good to go. And all recyclable cuz it’s just that little bit of plastic and that’s all metal and you can cook with it as well. We make banana cake with a really little squirt in there. It’s really good. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone needs water filters. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. Stay safe. Again, we bring seven racks in from Ukraine. Oh yeah. Um that’s pretty that’s very cool. You know that is um just again they just do they do custom bags and they’ll do lots and lots of just whatever you want basically again. And uh yeah it’s very popular. Um yeah what’s on this wall? Yeah. Voil straps again. You know voil straps. We sell so many of those. If you want to strap a terrier down to a bike then uh you need a voil strap. And we’ve uh yeah when we had to abandon the Silk Road when we first time we took the tandem. Right. Uh, three oil straps to the top of a taxi. Wow. Perfect. Obviously the tumble weed racks in steel and titanium. Uh, Tubis Topi Surirly Blackburn. Um, yeah. Again, you know, not all racks fit all bikes. So, you got to you got to do that. Uh, and then bars. We we used to do Jones uh bikes a long time ago when they had a UK distributor. Not anymore. So, we we get the Jones bars direct from Jeff and Sheila now. Yeah. And that’s great. and so many alt bars and it’s a constant challenge how to uh how to keep them all displayed. And Rune, we were talking about Rune. They do their own flared rando type bar. Is it that the silver one? How wide is that? Looks awfully wide. Pretty wide. Yeah. Yeah. They’re like like the tumble weed, you know, 50 57s. Yeah. Really big. Uh and again, you know, whiskey and salsa and all all that different stuff. It’s surprisingly hard to find alt bars in Spain. like people, it’s just not on people’s radar. Do people seek it out here? Are they more? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’ve only just dragged ourselves into this century really and we’ve just got a a website that people can look at and see what’s in stock and see everything we stock. We didn’t used to have that up until 18 months ago. So, we’ve been here 15 years, just over 15 years. And we had a website and a commerce site that had a few things on it, not very much. Yeah. And uh but now it’s all integrated. And uh so people can see and they then they don’t necessarily buy from there but because we have a huge population around us and we’re pretty much in the middle of England. Yeah. Um then we can yeah they come in they see it they hold it touch it hold it up to their bike and yeah we sort them out. So you’ve have you been in this same location for 15 years or Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the story is that we were looking for a location and everywhere was so expensive. Yeah. Uh, and this place came up just we were about to run away and go traveling and do all that thing, but uh, this place came up and our landlord is Ace. Really cool. And, uh, I think we’ve seen him twice in 15 years. That’s a good landlord. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of lead us to it. Yeah. We haven’t set fire to anything yet, so it’ll leave us alone. Yeah. Um, so yeah, and we’ve got a bit more of the lease left, so we’ll just carry on. Have you always focused on uh on touring and adventure or has your focus shifted over the years? Kind of a little bit because we were we were always travelers and bike packers when bike packing meant strapping a bag to a rack, you know, and um but I mean we when we started off in in here, we had a few more mainstream brands. We had Siran Salsa. We couldn’t have opened without Sir and Salsa and we always wanted to. Um but we had other more uh like hybrid bikes, town bikes, right? But then um as things have progressed then we have uh specialized more. You know, we’ve always had the shop kind of in our image, right? Yeah. All this stuff that we sell, we’ve kind of used at one point or another and love it all. So uh yeah, we don’t sell stuff we don’t kind of stand behind. Yeah, for sure. What’s cycling like in in Manchester? You see a lot more. Certainly it’s growing, you know. Um there are parts of South Manchester that have huge amounts of uh infrastructure. Um but we touched on the whole getting out of town thing, right? And because of the canals and the old railway lines, you can get out of town pretty quickly. Uh and and it’s the hills are really close. There’s no hills in Manchester, right? But but the hills are pretty close. You can see them, you know. Yeah. So it’s it’s a good place to be. And even if you, you know, if just jump on a train if you want to miss the traffic or you don’t want to ride the canal again, uh half an hour on the train and you’re out to the Peak District or an hour you’re in North Wales. Yeah. Um so yeah. Yeah, it’s cool. What’s the What would you say is like the most popular type of cycling in the area in the I mean we have higher bikes in town so a lot of tourists can just um get on the app and and get moving and we see a lot of people just getting about by bike like that. Yeah. But um there are yeah the whole gravel thing is obviously really big like we like we said it’s it’s just if you if you live in a flat in Manchester you can’t have half a dozen bikes so you yeah you just with just one bike uh maybe a mini Veil gravel bike would be the way the wheels are turning um so yeah but we because of where we are you know people can get off the plane get off the train or just however they want to get And we’re here, you know, we’re five minutes from the stations, so uh it’s dead easy to to do that. So, um there are obviously other shops in Manchester that cater for more sporty stuff, right? Um and we can send them there and they send people who want what we sell here. So, it’s quite a it’s quite a good kind of relationship with all the other shops. Yeah, we everyone gets along nicely. What’s what would you say is like the oddest or weird weirdest thing you sell in the shop? The oddest really. Aside from the tube coffee, I think the the thing that people pick up most is probably the uh wide foot poo shovel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They want to know what it is. Do I do I eat noodles with it or like a mud guard? Yeah. Yeah. What is it? Where does it go? Where’s it clip? But yeah, that’s probably the thing that people pick up most. But then but then some people just come in and go, “Oh yeah, push. Yeah, I need that. I’ve been looking for that.” I’m I’m assuming like many shops like during co you had a big boom. How has it been years after? Well, because for us, well, we stayed open obviously um because we could and um we kind of just went through it, you know, and we did a little bit of uh getting out there a bit more and and seeing people and, you know, we had the time because we weren’t necessarily here, but we were open. Yeah. Um so, we just kind of carried on as normal. Um, but I guess the boom was 300 pound hybrid bikes. Not not really the bikes that sell, but for a lot of people that period was a period of planning, I guess. Yeah. You know, yeah. When this is all over, I’m going to go and I’m going to go and do the Tour Divide or I’m going to go and do the Atlas Mountain race or whatever and all these things. So, uh, yeah. Yeah. For us, it it kind of almost carried on as normal, but with the shutters down. Do you guys host event? Yeah. I mean, we do coffee camp like we had coffee camp the other morning, but we do it on a smaller scale generally. Yeah. Yeah. Some Friday mornings and then we had a couple of weeks ago we had Brooks out. Uh so Stefano was here with with Brooks and we did a ride out to a pizza barn and then we stopped and so we do infrequent. What’s the best way for people to to keep up with what you guys keep up with keep pedaling? Well, we can keep pedaling is Instagram that obviously goes to Facebook and we have a little blog on the uh keep pedaling.co.uk. Okay. Uh, one last thing. Everyone keep kept telling us about uh the dog. The dog. So, Olive is a long-suffering uh small terrier who’s now um probably about 11 and she so we we joke that she has the FKT, fastest known terrier for for things like the Badger Divide. Let’s figure it out. So, this is the other half of keep pedling. By the way, what’s your name? Jonah. Jonah and Olive. And Olive attempting to eat the mic. So, do people come more for the the bikes or the or for Olive. Uh she’s like an emotional support dog for a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, you know, if Olive can go out and do the bike packing and sleep in the tent, then anyone can. Well, Rich, uh thank you so much for the tour. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you. Yeah. If you guys are in Manchester and are looking to get a gravel bike, adventure bike, uh poop shovel, or even coffee in a tube, uh keep pedaling is your spot. or you can just get some emotional support from Olive. Uh be sure to follow them on the gram, all that good stuff.