Welcome to the bicycle camping outpost. This is CampfireCycling.com!
Last week, we switched the website over from BikeShopHub.com to CampfireCycling.com. Having had a week to make sure everything is running smoothly, I am incredibly excited to share our new website and brand with you. I feel much gratitude to have you, our customers, friends and partners, here with us on this next leg of our journey.
Conjuring Up & Building a Brand
Our rebranding began 16 months ago with the realization that BikeShopHub.com wasn’t feeling special anymore. While we had made great strides over the years serving the gear needs of bicycle commuters, family cyclists and cycle tourists, shifts in the market and our ability to be ecommerce leaders across multiple cycling niches had been diminished. We felt spread thin and needed to find new inspiration and focus.
So, we began brainstorming where we could take things to get the positive energy flowing again. The first notion was to revive an old site of ours, BikeBagShop.com. But after some ruminating, I realized I wanted to build our focus around customers not products. I chose the cyclists I felt most connected to and inspired by, bicycle campers!
Next we needed a name. The naming process was exhausting, but the day the name Campfire Cycling occurred to me was a day we celebrated.
With customers and a name in mind, the real work began. I took a deep dive into getting to know all of the relevant communities, brands, events and personalities that were a part of the overall bicycle camping scene. As my knowledge about the larger community came together, I started thinking about what CampfireCycling.com could offer. Grandiose ideas were floated. Meanwhile back on earth, we began narrowing in on how to evolve a new direction out of the BikeShopHub.com business model.
With ideas coalescing, we got to work. We hired a brilliant designer, Ian Crombie, to develop our brand visuals. We began reorganizing our catalog, closing out no longer relevant products and sourcing bicycle camping specific products. We planned out and then began setting up our showroom. With the launch drawing near, we began developing our processes for producing great bicycle camping content, all while planning out the technical and marketing details of the website launch.
With this effort, on Monday, April 29th, we changed over the website from BikeShopHub.com to CampfireCycling.com.
We Are Committed To…
We are committed to serving bicycle campers to the best of our ability.
We’ve done our best to launch the Campfire Cycling brand at the balance point between being well-defined and adaptable. Now, the opportunity that is getting me up in the morning, is getting to know all of you bicycle campers. With the brand launched, we’re ready to really dig in and learn what makes you tick.
As we roll off the start line, the following services are what we are committed to excelling at.
Continuing Our Tradition of Great Customer Service
As BikeShopHub.com, we’ve been an ecommerce shop focused on bicycle accessories for 13 years. We’ve taken care of tens of thousands of customers. Everything we’ve learned about how to be excellent at making our customers happy will be carried forward into CampfireCycling.com.
Expertly Curated Bicycle Camping Catalog
Our ecommerce catalog has been the heart of our BikeShopHub.com. When we first got started in 2006, for several years all we focused on was bike cargo trailers and it was a beautiful thing. From there we expanded and the great thing was we learned about a ton of gear for expanding the capacity of bicycles. The not so great thing was that over time we spread ourselves thin and lost our laser focus.
I am very inspired to be getting that focus back. The opportunity to focus only on gear for bicycle campers is proving to be very revitalizing. We’ve been very busy researching and testing new gear, learning from our bicycle camping friends and setting up new partnerships with suppliers. And we’ve only just begun.
An expertly curated catalog goes beyond product selection. It is really explaining what each product does within the context of bicycle camping. We are committed to going deep with descriptions, photography and video to really inform and educate about the products we’re offering.
An Amazing Tucson Retail Experience
At BikeShopHub.com, we had a small showroom for our Tucson customers. At Campfire Cycling, we are building out a large and truly impactful showroom.
Our showroom is being built as the physical rendering of our online catalog. When our customers visit us in person, they’ll instantly get what we’re all about and have an opportunity to learn about many of the nuances of bicycle camping. And our showroom will be instrumental for how we entrench ourselves in getting to know the gear that we offer, improving our ability to present this knowledge in our catalog.
Finally our showroom will help to build our connections to our local community here in Tucson. Tucson has an amazing cycling scene and tapping into that energy can only improve what we do.
The showroom is more than halfway done. We’ll be finishing it up and dialing it in over the summer in time for a retail launch party in early November. We sure hope you can stop by sometime to experience it.
Inspirational and Educational Bicycle Camping Content
Our ecommerce catalog and showroom will be how we present bicycle camping gear. But we’ve also got big plans to produce bicycle camping content that inspires and educates.
To get started, we’re launching a podcast where I’ll be interviewing bicycle camping experts. We’re still finalizing the details, but the plan is to launch the podcast mid-summer. We plan on releasing an episode once a month and interviewing experts in all forms of bicycle camping.
The focus of these interviews will be discussing bicycle camping techniques from a variety of different approaches and perspectives. We’re excited to be learning from all styles of bicycle campers from luxury tourists to ultra endurance racers from road tourists to bikepackers. Of course we’ll be learning about these cool folks and talking about their gear setups and favorite routes. But we’ll also be digging deep into their philosophies of adventure, exploration and outdoor living.
Stoke the Fire!
For the foreseeable future, we’re honing our focus on our goals of delivering bicycle campers an exceptional catalog, showroom and content. But we’ll also be keeping an ear to the ground for what’s next.
As we get underway, we’d love to hear from you. Shout out and tell us what you think of CampfireCycling.com.
Enjoy those bicycle camping adventures and I can’t wait to swap stories with you ’round the Campfire.
