The Birth of Cycle Bros: Our Hopes, Our Dreams, and Why We Actually Did This

We’d been saying we’d do this for years.

Not in a vague, wouldn’t-it-be-nice way. In the very specific way where you’re propped against a café wall, gloves off, hands round a cup that’s somehow the best part of the whole ride, and one of you says “we should just do this properly” for the hundredth time. Then you finish the coffee, clip back in, and it goes straight back into the group chat where good ideas go to get talked about forever and never actually happen.

At some point we got tired of that. So here we are.

Why coffee, why cycling, why now

We’re brothers, we’re from Devon, and we’ve been riding together since one of us was still on stabilisers and the other was pretending not to wait. That’s not a brand story we came up with afterwards, it’s just what happened. Somewhere along the way the ride stopped being the whole point. The stop at the end became the whole point, and the ride was just how you earned it.

We didn’t want to start “a coffee company” the way that usually gets done, big claims, a roastery we don’t actually run, promises about changing an industry. We’re not doing any of that. We picked a brilliant family-run roastery in Yorkshire because they’re genuinely better at roasting than we would ever be, and we said so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. We named every bag after something every rider has lived through, because that’s the actual language of this sport, not a marketing exercise dressed up as one. The label changes every season because we wanted it to feel like the thing it’s celebrating: something that comes and goes, that you’d bother collecting, not a static product on a static shelf.

What we actually want out of this

Here’s the honest bit. We are not trying to build a unicorn. We’re not chasing a headline number or an exit. We want a steady stream of orders from people who get it: riders who want a proper bag of coffee waiting when the legs are done, or something worth handing to a mate who’s exactly as obsessed as they are. Slow, real, ours. If that sounds like a small ambition, it is, and we’re completely fine with that. Small and honest beats big and hollow every time we’ve watched someone else try the other way.

We’re also not pretending we’ve got it all figured out. This is early. The lineup will change. We’ll get things wrong, a batch might not land the way we hoped, a label might not connect, and we’ll say so rather than pretend it was intentional. What we’ll always be straight about: where the coffee actually comes from, what a bag actually costs to make and ship, and who “Cycle Bros” actually is, which is just the two of us, not a boardroom.

What’s next

We’ve just kicked off a Strava club and we’re starting to run actual group rides, sociable pace, ending at a café, the same rule that started all of this. Some of those cafés are already in our directory. Some we’re finding as we go, which is half the fun. If that’s your kind of ride, come and join us.

And if you’ve read this far: thank you. Genuinely. Whether you’ve already got a bag of ours in the cupboard or you’re still deciding, the fact that a couple of brothers from Devon can put something this daft and this earnest out into the world and have anyone at all pay attention to it still doesn’t feel normal to us. We hope it doesn’t stop feeling like that.

More of this to come, whenever we’ve actually got something worth saying. We’d rather post rarely and mean it than fill a schedule.

— John & Rich