Sister Shops in Africa » Mike's Bikes Africa

The Big Red S Comes Through in a Big, Big Way

Feb 012012

Let it be known: Our friends at Specialized Bicycles have hearts as big as their bike-designing brains. Late last year they made the single biggest donation to our projects in Africa that we have ever received, and all of us here at Mike’s are hugely grateful for their gift of bicycle-powered, well, empowerment.

The first component of this gift was an entire 40′ shipping container full of parts, accessories, and riding gear that was loaded up at Specialized’s Salt Lake City warehouse. This was container #12 that we have shipped to Africa, and it was sent directly to our new distribution center Bicycle Recycle in Gaborone, Botswana. This sorely-needed equipment will be spread throughout our Sister Shops to help keep existing bikes running, help refurbish used donation bikes, and to help enable the local population to ride in greater safety and comfort.

Having been familiar with our Africa Sister Shop program for some time, Specialized determined the most effective bike to donate considering the conditions in these developing communities would be a light cargo bike. When we agreed with this premise they shocked us by committing to donate no less than 100 of these bikes, brand-spakin’-new! The cargo bikes joined our customers’ donation bikes to fill Container #13, which was loaded at our warehouse in San Rafael.

We could not be more thankful to have a partner in Specialized that not only produces the best bikes in the world for us to provide to our customers, but who also shares our belief in the power of the bicycle to make life better for those in need.

The Birth of Bicycle Recycle

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Nov 162011

If you’ve been following our project for a while, you know that we have set up three Sister Shops in Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and have plans for a fourth in Lesotho. While it was a difficult task to get these shops up and running, it was fairly straight forward – we pack a container full of bikes, ship it over, and then we meet it there and get a shop set up. After doing this three times, I feel we have it down, although there are always new challenges. One thing to note is that this project would be impossibly more difficult if weren’t for the incredible generosity of our customers and vendors! But now that the shops are up and running and have sold through

their initial container load, they have found it very difficult to get resupplied. We have been creative in attempting to resupply them ourselves, but given the lead time and the fact that we can only send a 40’ container, it’s just not a reasonable or manageable solution. We’ve worked with BEN Namibia to get some bikes to MakVeto, we’ve sent three total containers to JonMol in Botwsana, and now MK Cycles in Zimbabwe has sold through its initial container. While there is a distributor in S. Africa called ProBike that can supply these shops with parts and bikes, they don’t really want to deal with these countries, especially for small resupply orders, and the logistics of transporting and paying for the orders are daunting. This is a huge problem and a threat to the future sustainability of our Sister Shops. Remember, our ultimate goal is for these shops to be profitable and grow without any outside financial help or further philanthropy required.

So what do we do about this resupply issue? We originally thought the supply chain from S. Africa would be able to support our shops, but that’s not the case. That’s where the Carle brothers enter the picture. Rob and Andrew Carle own a freight company, GMR Freights, based in Johannesburg and Gaborone (capital of Botswana) and they transport goods all over southern Africa. And they just happen to be obsessed with cycling! Rob is based out of their Gaborone office and that’s where our relationship started. He heard there was a new shop in town and went to check out JonMol. He met Bones and Jerry and very soon became their best customer. As their relationship grew, Rob provided a lot of assistance to JonMol and was very interested in helping the shop be successful. We met Rob when he helped us deal with a container destined for Gaborone that was literally sliced open by a forklift operator en route to JonMol. Rob’s expertise in dealing with this process was invaluable. If it weren’t for him, that container would still be sitting at the port in South Africa with its guts spilling out…

At the same time that all of this was happening, Rob and Andrew were growing increasingly frustrated with the supply of high end bikes and parts in South Africa and Botswana. So much so that they began exploring options for importing and distributing themselves. There are two major obstacles in the distribution business – one is the access to product and the other is the logistics of moving those products to where they need to be. As a successful freight company, the movement of product is not an issue and as for access to product, that’s where Mike’s Bikes comes in.

We have access to almost everything the bike industry produces. And since we already have containers going from California to southern Africa, and since we need help supplying our Sister Shops, there are some obvious synergies. So several months ago, we tried an experiment. Rob set aside some warehouse space in Gaborone and we sent him a container of bikes and some basic spare parts needed by the Sister Shops. Also in the container was a decent amount of our BikeSmart line of products. Rob agreed to warehouse the donated bikes and parts and supply our Sister Shops, in exchange for us allowing him and Andrew to begin selling BikeSmart into higher end shops in South Africa. He affectionately called it the “Robin Hood” model. If they can sell enough quality products to shops in South Africa, they can cover their costs on supplying our Sister Shops. Rob even took one of his old Land Cruisers, which we’ve named “the Beast”, and repurposed it as the Mike’s Bikes Sister Shop Distribution Vehicle! With the trailer, it can deliver 40 bikes to almost anywhere in southern Africa. So far it has delivered two loads of bike and parts to MK Cycles in Zimbabwe, and two loads to MakVeto in Namibia. And with JonMol just around the corner, supplying them is a snap. The experiment worked and Bicycle Recycle was born!

Lend Your Support and Look Great Doing it

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Oct 312011

Our friends over at Selfless Tee have whipped up this stylish t-shirt in support of our projects in Africa. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of each shirt go to directly to help fund our Sister Shop program. The best part is that the more shirts that are sold, the lower the production costs are and the higher the percentage of funding is to our projects. Pick up a shirt and support our efforts in style!

Click to buy a tee or share it via social media.

Friday We Load Container 11, and You're Invited

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Sep 202011

This Friday at 9am you’re invited to come out and help (or say hi and take pictures) when we load up our latest container of Africa Donation Bikes. This container of bikes, bound for Gaborone, Botswana, and eventually our other Sister Shops as demand requires, will be #11 since we started our the program in 2008. If you’ve ever wanted to see what a load of 450+ bikes into one shipping container looks like, now’s your chance!

Container #11 Load: 9am-11am @ 24 Tiburon St. in San Rafael, CA

Africa Bikes, Ready for Loading

Container 9 Lands, Opening a New Phase in our Distribution of Bikes in Africa

Africa Bike Drive, Jonmol Bicycle Service - Botswana, MakVeto - Namibia, MK Cycles - Zimbabwe, Sister Shops in Africa, Village Bicycle Project - Sierra Leone Comments Off

Aug 052011

Filled to the brim with 480 donation bikes, container #9 has completed its 10-week journey to Gaborone, Botswana, and should clear customs in a few days. This latest resupply container represents a new direction in our model for distributing bicycles in Africa.

In the past, one single Sister Shop has been the recipient of an entire resupply container, taking the entire cost of transport and customs into their overall financial plan. Some difficulties in this approach have been the high up-front cost for the Sister Shop, and a shortage of physical space to store such a large shipment of bikes.

For our new model we’ve partnered with two avid cyclist brothers, both Kalahari Challenge competitors, who own a freight distribution company. They have agreed to store the donation bikes and send them out to our Sister Shops in ‘as-needed’ batches.

This system of distribution offers many advantages for the Sister Shops and for the Mike’s Bikes Foundation. First and foremost, the Sister Shops will be able to take delivery of inventory in smaller, more timely and more affordable batches, which eliminates the problems of lack of storage, slow resupply, and high up-front cost. Being able to forecast and plan inventories and expenditures accurately, the Sister Shops can now become more self-reliant and self-sustaining. On our end, this method of distribution enables the Foundation to focus its attention on increasing bike donations in the U.S. and gives us more time to devote to our new project in Sierra Leone. Because the new system ensures that shipping costs get reimbursed, the foundation will be able to afford to increase the number of shipments annually, while still allowing the bicycles to arrive at the Sister Shops cheaply enough for them to be affordable for buyers in the community.

In order to achieve the high-level goals of large scale distribution of bicycles in Africa and a widespread African transportation cycling culture, we need to speed up the flow of bikes to end users. The sooner we can scale distribution up, the sooner bicycle manufacturers will see opportunities to market their products and services in Africa. And with increased scale will come lower prices, enabling people in developing Africa to have a life-changing transportation option open to them.

This new model is a leap forward in long-term sustainability for the Mike’s Bikes Foundation Africa projects. To our knowledge, it is the the first distribution program of its kind.