Our History
Our History
Hoops began its life originally as East Street Cycles. Opened in 2004 by founder Gary Bird. Gary started out life in the cycle world in 1989 in an independent bike store in North West London. The store also sold hand built frames which gave Gary a real appreciation of the attention to detail that can go into a bicycle frame. After managing a number of other stores, Gary decided to open up East St Cycles.
Based in Farnham, in 2013 the year after Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France, the East St Cycles store was under threat from demolition! An empty pub just 200m up the road was up for grabs and their plans for a new retail interior suited a bicycle shop down to the ground. East St Cycles was outgrowing it’s old home and so an idea was born to open a pure road bike store! Just after the Tour de Britain rolled past our doorstep, Hoops opened!
Fast forward to 2017 and Gary decided to combine the East Street Cycles store with the Hoops store. Bringing everything under one brand name meant that Hoops and East St can continue to offer the best customer service and those little touches that would be expected of a local independant bike shop!
Today Hoops consists of three stores. Walton, Farnham and Petersfield. Walton typically sells way more hybrids and folding bikes and has a larger commute and family market. Farnham focuses more on our road market and is seeing an increase in gravel and electric bikes, but also sells a number of mountain bikes. Being very close to a mountain bike park and great riding in the South Downs, the Petersfield store was mostly Mountain bike focused but has a great road bike offering too!
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One thing that has retained throughout the history of Hoops, we don’t have sales targets and we try to be as authentic as we can, we want our customers on the right bike and right size for their intended use.
We hope to welcome you to one of our stores soon!
