The bicycle man

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“Come on, let’s get you on the bikes,” says Will Butler-Adams. The chief executive of folding-bike company Brompton is clearly not a man to be gainsaid – so, despite the rain, off we go, whizzing around the empty streets of the west London industrial estate where Brompton’s factory and headquarters are based. It’s exhilarating, especially the electric bike, Brompton’s new baby.

The e-bike is the future, says Butler-Adams, describing it as the cycling equivalent of the smartphone. In Germany, the cycling bellwether, value sales of e-bikes have already overtaken those of traditional bikes. Brompton’s version finally gained impetus thanks to a collaboration with F1 racing team Williams to develop an electronic drive system. Customers will definitely migrate from the non-electric version, he says, because – let’s not forget – Brompton bikes are ‘urban transport solutions’, not exercise machines for “people wearing Lycra who enjoy sticking their arses in the air”.

There’s an uncanny similarity between Butler-Adams and another Will – the posh and very likeable intern in the BBC-spoof series W1A, who rocks up to Broadcasting House every day on his Brompton, folds it up, carries it inside, and stashes it by his desk. Butler-Adams shares his namesake’s penchant for latte and words such as ‘cool’ and ‘crap’, and describes the ‘Brommy’ – which was invented by Brompton’s brilliant and idiosyncratic founder Andrew Ritchie more than 40 years ago – as “a flippin’ masterpiece”.

W1A captured perfectly the kind of smug metropolitanism that Brompton ownership confers – cyclists nod to each other in recognition. Did the series help? “It was amazing,” says Butler-Adams. “We had no idea it was happening, and we watched it and laughed our heads off.” There was no resulting sales spike, but – at upwards of £900 a pop – a Brompton is not a knee-jerk purchase, he points out. “These moments of luck,” as Butler-Adams describes them, just contribute to the trend of rising awareness and sales. Another such moment was a chance meeting at a lunch with ex-pro cyclist David Millar: “I’d no idea who he was. We got on like a house on fire, and we’ve been doing work together for the past three years; he’s helping us engage with the MAMIL [middle-aged men in Lycra] community.”

Obsessive focus

Butler-Adams is the unofficial, yet undisputed, brand ambassador-in-chief for Brompton. Yet he’s not a fan of marketing. “I’m an engineer; a lot of it’s not my bag,” he says. “We’re not going to blow a million quid on some mega-marketing campaign, or sponsor some celebrity to ride around on a Brompton and pretend they like it.”

Instead, the company lets the bike speak for itself – or, at least, its customers speak for the bike, and then repackage what they say on the website or YouTube. It also runs “fun” events such as the Brompton World Championships, which is characterised by a strict dress code – suit jacket, collared shirt and tie, and absolutely no Lycra – and has become so popular that entry is by ballot.

Despite his professed distaste for marketing, the company does, Butler-Adams says, “go to quite extraordinary lengths to find ways to give people confidence to own a Brompton”. It recently launched a Barbour version aimed at urban fashionistas, for example, and has been plugging away at cycle hire for seven years – at £3.50 a day – to get people to try the brand.

But the main driver of Brompton’s transformation from nerdy to cool, and from local to global (it exports to 44 countries and 80% of its sales come from overseas), has been the obsessive focus on the product and the customer. This leads to strategies that are almost anti-marketing. For example, so keen is the company for customers to love its bikes that it trains dealers not to sell them to people they don’t think will appreciate them.

Visionary

The long-term view seems to have worked. In 2002, when the 28-year-old Butler-Adams joined the company as project manager, after a chance encounter with the chairman on a coach, it was making 6,000 bikes, employed 24 people and – while profitable – couldn’t keep up with demand. Today, it makes more than 45,000 bikes (it’s aiming for 100,000 by 2021 ), employs 312 staff, and has enjoyed compound annual growth of 15%-20% for the past 16 years. The bike is still hand-brazed by skilled craftspeople, who stamp their signature on whichever of the 1,200 components they work on.

Butler-Adams has been visionary from the outset. He was an instant convert to the bike – “I’m 6ft 4ins; it’s got these little wheels; I looked like a daddy-long-legs and my friends laughed at me, but I didn’t care because it was so bloody useful” – and almost immediately recognised its global potential.

The factory was chaotic, littered with parts and pallets. “Andrew didn’t throw anything away. It was heaving with his ideas, designs, prototypes, and it was not at all lean. I’d worked for Nissan in Spain, and Calsonic [Kansei], one of its first-tier suppliers, in Sunderland. All you are taught about at university [Butler-Adams got a first in mechanical engineering and Spanish from Newcastle] is best practice, and here was a company that – as far as I could see – was worst practice.”

Once he’d got production working better, Butler-Adams started to concentrate on strategy. The IT was antediluvian, there were no management accounts or budgetary control, and Ritchie signed every single cheque. “We needed to start having meetings, but there was no meeting room, and Andrew couldn’t see the point. So I cleared out a room that was full of shite and went to a second-hand shop and bought the cheapest table and chairs I could find. We started having meetings, and I created a plan.”

He called the plan ‘25k’, that being the number of bikes he believed Brompton should be aspiring to make every year. Ritchie said it was impossible. “So even the ambition was lacking.”

Though Butler-Adams insists he and Ritchie respect each other, the relationship remained fraught, even after he engineered a sort of management buyout in 2008 that removed all operational control from his former boss – and, when that didn’t work, persuaded him to step down from the board in 2015. Ritchie, who remains the biggest shareholder, still regrets ceding control, according to Butler-Adams. “He thinks I’m not taking enough care of the engineering, that we are trying to do too much too quickly.”

One thing that didn’t upset Ritchie, curiously, was his protégé’s early determination to develop overseas markets. It upset other people though – not least UK dealers, who couldn’t get their hands on enough bikes to satisfy domestic demand. It was also less profitable than selling at home, given the need to use distributors. But he stuck to his guns: “I was confident we were going to make enough bikes, and I anticipated that, within four or five years, we’d have this factory pumping out bikes and UK demand would be fizzling out a bit.”

The process is the same in every country, Butler-Adams says: early adopters get hold of the bike, attracted by its novelty value; the more they use it the more they love it; and then their friends catch on. But there’s a four- to six-year incubation period before it gains the momentum it needs to reach critical mass. “We are not spending millions of pounds making people aware – and, even if we did, one wonders if they would believe what we said, because increasingly people don’t believe what they’re told, and rightly so.”

His strategy has been vindicated by the period of strong sustained growth, but the approach isn’t foolproof. Global trends, such as urbanisation and a rising middle class, prompted Butler-Adams to claim a few years ago that “if it works in London it can work all over the world”.
However, China and the US – both key markets – have proved tough nuts to crack. Brompton has been in China for eight years, but progress is slow; despite a population of two billion, they are only selling 1,500 bikes a year there. This may be partly because of its super-premium positioning in China (it has a shop in Shanghai, close to Stella McCartney), which, admits Butler-Adams, “we find a little bit uncomfortable” because it is at odds with the brand’s ‘affordable’ USP. Another reason is China’s ‘media wall’ – consumers simply can’t see the thousands of blog posts from around the world that play such an important role in spreading the word.

While the company is content to let things take their course in China, it has had to completely change tack in the US. The main problem was that the independent bike dealers it backed were being hammered by the online market and by other manufacturers forcing them to take stock they have at discount.

“Some of our best retailers were going bust,” says Butler-Adams. What’s more, he adds, the dealers in the US are so independent that there is no scale. “They are high maintenance; you have to talk to each one individually,” he explains.

Investing heavily

Brompton spent two years and lost quite a lot of money before retreating, retrenching and trying a different approach. It is now working with REI, a large outdoor leisure retailer, which provides national reach, economies of scale, and a sophisticated web platform. But there are risks, points out Butler-Adams, not least ensuring the staff can give the high level of customer service that is synonymous with the Brompton brand.
In October 2018, Brompton signed a similar distribution agreement in the UK with national retailer Halfords. “In London, about 4.5% of the population cycle, but 99% of us know how to ride a bike,” says Butler-Adams. “Somehow the bike industry is not talking to the 94.5%.” As he points out, most specialist bike shops are male, cluttered, intimidating – and off the beaten track. “We need to find ways to communicate with that huge market of people who don’t consider themselves to be cyclists but who know how to ride a bike.”

Having to outsource customer service is a risk here too, but Brompton is investing heavily in staff training. The opportunity gives access to whole new segments of customers. “Halfords does lots of work with the Caravan Club, for example, and it does a huge amount of business with the corporate market.”

Butler-Adams is as sceptical about market research as he is about marketing. “We understand our customers by being the most obsessive customers ourselves,” he says. When Brompton outgrew its factory in Brentford three years ago, it moved a few short miles to Greenford – at considerable expense – instead of taking advantage of significant financial incentives to go to Wales. “If we’d ended up on an industrial estate outside Cardiff or Merthyr Tydfil, we would suddenly have become a company making something for which none of us had any need,” he explains.

“Many of us here use our bikes every day and we can see what’s wrong. For example, the bell isn’t good enough, it annoys me, we know we have to make it better. And some of the girls were catching their tights on the folding pedals, so we’ve changed that. We get all these little insights all the time.” The company has always done some research on the international markets it targets, although Butler-Adams admits it’s not very sophisticated.

Brompton would undoubtedly sell more bikes to city dwellers if it were safer and more pleasant to cycle. The average distance to work in London is 4.5 miles, and Butler-Adams believes the £20bn of taxpayers’ money being pumped into Crossrail would be better spent improving the cycling infrastructure in cities around the country. Although he talks to the government and city mayors, he knows he must stay focused. “I’m maxed out trying to get a good product,” he says. And he’s perpetually frustrated. “Everything’s sub-optimal here – we need better internal communications, better website content, more demo bikes, more mechanics. You name it. But if I stop being frustrated, someone needs to replace me – because if you are content with what you’ve got, you’re not going to make it any better.”

Taking control

In the short term, Butler-Adams’ focus is on managing the things he has control over, such as developing the e-bike, making the Halfords partnership work, and implementing the American strategy successfully. “Those things will make or break this business. Brexit won’t,” he says. On a “philosophical level” he believes the UK should be part of Europe – he has lived and worked abroad, he’d like his children to be able to do the same, and the people from other countries who work at Brompton enrich the company. But he thinks some businesses’ hysteria over Brexit is ill-founded; instead, he sees it as a business risk that needs to be mitigated.

Longer term, he anticipates manufacturing overseas. “The measure of our success is our impact on society and if that means building a factory next to Shanghai, or some other mega-city, so that more people in Shanghai can whizz around on bikes, we’ll do it,” he says. “But that’s proper long-term-vision stuff. By the way, we won’t do that with this bike – the Brompton is a very special bike and I can’t see it being made anywhere other than London.”

In the meantime, he and his team will continue to graft. He’s a fan of Warren Buffett’s strategy of seeking steady, long-term, compound growth. “Chucking money, or even people, at it is not the answer. You can’t accelerate it – unless you went out and raised £100m from venture capitalists, and they’d be bastards and I’d die of stress. Where’s the fun in that?”