London’s popular Bike Shed looks set to add even more locations to its growing portfolio having announced plans to open a venue in Dubai.
The community-focused motorcycle space in Shoreditch opened in 2015 and welcomes around 2,500 visitors every week. Punters can eat and drink while they immerse themselves in bike culture and can even get their hair cut. A host of successful events, shows and a love of the brand saw it go Stateside in 2022 by opening a Los Angeles branch and that growth will continue next year when the doors are thrown open on a 40,000sq ft offering in Dubai.
But plans to keep spreading the Bike Shed name won’t end there, with co-owner Anthony ‘Dutch’ van Someren revealing they are “having five or six conversations” about opening up in other cities around the globe as expansion hopes gather pace.
“We’re talking to a lot of potential operators who would take on Bike Sheds where they live. All of them are bikers, including the guys in Dubai,” he told motorcycle podcast Full Chat.
“They’re enthusiasts and they’re people that have been to Bike Shed on multiple occasions and they want to be able to do it there. In a way what we’re doing is giving the brand to the community, to those people that we trust. Some of them are members who’ve moved out of London and said: ‘Can I open Bike Shed where I live in Australia’ – and we’re like, ‘yeah, that would be great’ – or in Austin, Texas.’ The growth going forward is kind of in other people’s hands.
“It’s really about people coming to us and saying: ‘I live in X, Y, Z and I want to open a Bike Shed here and I think there’s a market and we’ve got the backing, the right partners and have operating experience or we’ve got operators we can work with, and then there’s a process of us putting that together. I’d like to think in the next couple of years we might open quite a few.
“The first one signed is Dubai and it will be huge. It will be bigger than LA, it will be all singing and dancing because that’s how they do things in Dubai.”
The entrepreneur, better known as Dutch, runs the business with his wife Vikki and insisted “I’m not a restauranter” despite the popularity of the cafe, bar and restaurant. The venue attracts bikers and non-bikers alike and has become one of the go-to destinations in the motorcycle community.
The venues in LA and Dubai are even larger than the original and are equally likely to attract celebrity riders such as Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor who have visited the one in London.
“It’s driven by world economics really,” the Bike Shed co-owner added during the episode.
“We bit off a big chunk when we went to LA and what it did do was that it got people interested in what we were doing globally and said ‘where else can we do this?’ We met a group of people in Dubai who said: ‘We really want to open Bike Shed in Dubai.’ After getting to know them for a year and trusting them to not mess it up and do a good job and capture our spirit and our mission, that’s the next one that’s going to happen.
“That’s where there’s revenue to be made for the people that will be the operators. What it also did was that it spun us off into creating a franchise model for our business. Because what we don’t have the money to do is just start popping Bike Sheds up all over the world. I would love that, it would be great if we were funded like a Soho House type company or whoever. The problem is they have to be good and they have to be big. You can’t do tiny ones because people have an expectation.”
- Full Chat is powered by Bikesure, the UK’s largest motorcycle insurance broker
