G&O Family Cyclery is closing after ten years
From a March 2017 community celebration of G&O moving to its latest location one year after the Greenwood gas explosion. Founders Tyler Gillies and Davey Oil are in the grey caps. Gillies left a few years ago and now runs Dandelion Bikes at 18th and Jackson. In a devastating and unexpected announcement Friday, G&O Family Cyclery sent a message to customers that the shop is permanently closing. They will be totally closed until January 17, then they will reopen to sell off remaining stock. They are also working to complete existing orders, but are no longer taking service appointments.
This news comes on the heels of a series of bike shop closures in the area, a troubling nationwide trend. Like several other industries, bike demand went through the roof in the first couple years of the pandemic when supplies were limited. Now supplies are plentiful, but demand has dropped back down. At the same time, the margins on running a shop dependent on in-person retail sales have continued shrinking. Some mainstay bike shops like Velo and Counterbalance closed, and now G&O is joining them.
The business has not been consistently profitable ever," said owner Davey Oil, who is also a personal friend of mine. (Full disclosure: G&O has been a Seattle Bike Blog advertiser). They have had ups and downs, but the inciting event was unexpected," he said. A loan was denied that I had been assured we had secured." As a result, they were not able to secure the funds we would have needed to get through a very lean winter."
Half the team at G&O has already been laid off, and the remaining staff will be on hand to work through what is necessary to close the shop (UPDATE: Jenna from G&O has set up a GoFundMe to support staff). Oil is taking sales offers if anyone wants to own a family bike shop.
The shop's challenges are two-fold, according to Oil: The cost of quality electric cargo bikes is unreasonably high" for most people, and the cost of living in Seattle is too high for the skilled tradespeople needed to run this kind of specialty shop. I think it's impossible to operate a shop like this without a sizeable staff of very well-trained and knowledgeable workers," said Oil, but Seattle is not affordable to tradespeople." He said he was trying to figure out some way to increase worker pay and grow the number of staffers when the loan was denied and the bottom fell out.
Washington State passed funding for e-bike subsidies in the 2023-25 budget, but WSDOT has not yet set up the distribution process to get those subsidies to buyers. So that is a bright spot on the horizon for a future family and cargo bike shop, but it will come too late to save G&O. What I hope for for the next family cyclery, customers have access to more subsidies that make them more affordable so that a broader range of customers can use them," said Oil.
Oil is taking the closure hard. We cried on the phone together while talking about it. I don't believe we failed," he said. We accomplished most of what we set out to do." They had an impact on the industry, and they equipped countless families with the gear they needed and the community resources they needed to make a, sadly still radical lifestyle shift." The rise of family biking in Seattle changed the face of who shows up for political advocacy for safe streets, and all the people out biking around town with their kids are demonstrating to the public that such an activity is not only possible, it's also wonderful. They also trained a lot of people who had never been professional bike mechanics in a welcoming environment, fostering a workforce that is overwhelmingly queer."
This is not the first time G&O has been on the brink. In March 2016, a major nighttime gas leak caused a massive explosion inside the restaurant space next door to G&O's original shop location, destroying a lot of the shop's merchandise and equipment and rendering their physical location uninhabitable. Puget Sound Energy held out on paying for the damage as long as they could, hanging G&O out to dry in the meantime. Seattle Bike Blog along with many other community members rallied to raise funds to keep the shop alive and help them find a new home nearby.
I may have been the first ever customer of G&O Family Cyclery back when they opened in 2013. I visited the shop before it opened and swung by on day one because I was so excited about the idea of a shop dedicated to cargo and family biking. And like so many biking families in town, we got our workhorse of a cargo bike from them, allowing us to easily and happily live car-free even with a kid.
Davey Oil works to open G&O back in 2013.Back in 2013, and maybe still today, the idea of a shop forgoing the higher-volume commuter and road bike markets to focus solely on cargo and family bikes felt like a huge risk. Oil once described it to me as a fringe of a fringe business." My road bike was built by G&O in the early days when they were still toying with the idea of selling conventional bikes along with cargo bikes. But the demand for cargo bikes turned out to be strong enough that they would have their hands full just serving families, so I may be the only person with a G&O road bike. In the process, they helped create a model for a family-focused bike shop that has been influential across the industry.
By specializing in this family biking niche, G&O became a powerful resource for anyone looking to stay car-free or at least do more without driving. Losing access to their knowledge and experience with finding family biking solutions feels as tough as losing the shop itself. You gotta understand that in 2013, family cargo biking in the U.S. often required all kinds of (sometimes sketchy) DIY workarounds because the mainstream bike industry had very few off-the-shelf solutions to meet people's needs. Morgan Scherer, former Executive Director of Familybike Seattle, used to bike a fleet of different cargo bike options to various community functions because that was the only way to let people try these things out. The past ten years have seen a remarkable increase in the number of family biking options available, and even mainstream places like REI are now selling quality electric cargo bikes. G&O played a part in legitimizing this market in the U.S. because if this kind of biking can work in hilly Seattle, it can work just about anywhere.
Below is an excerpt from G&O's post announcing the news:
Over the years our cost of doing business and the cost of living in our city have only gone up. We have aspired to provide living, professional wages to highly skilled tradespeople. I firmly believe that high wages and more opportunities and entry level positions for more diverse types of mechanics and salespeople are the keys to revising the bike retail model and replacing the exclusive and gatekeeping culture of bike shops and at the same time provide service that is more reliable and better value than riders are typically able to depend on.
After years of skirting the edge, depending on tightening margins, and digging for good luck in heaps of bad, we have hit a string of the bad kind; the reality that we cannot support ourselves and at the same time do this work in the manner that we most want has become undeniable.
It is a true thing to say that if your business can't afford to pay fair wages, your business has no business doing business.
The shop's closure is happening faster than we would have liked, and the livelihoods of my staff and myself are all at risk, as is our ability to meet all of the obligations we have to our customers. We will be closed for the next few days to organize ourselves, and then in the next few weeks, starting on Wednesday the 17th, we hope that you'll consider coming in and picking up anything you might need from our shop. We have many high-quality ebikes for sale, as well as accessories like lights and helmets. We have bags of Lego for sale on a sliding scale from $5-500. We have all kinds of lovely things, and any support would be greatly appreciated.