WHEN a friend of his father’s showed Andrew Ritchie the Bickerton folding bike
he was selling in the mid-1970s it sparked an obsession that drives Ritchie
to this day.
Impressed by the practicality of a folding bike, Ritchie thought he could come
up with a better design. “Seeing someone’s efforts in the flesh made me
think perhaps I could do better than that. I started jotting down some ideas
that evening.”
Ritchie set to work building a working model in his flat overlooking the
Brompton Oratory in South Kensington after persuading 10 friends to invest
£100 each.
“The Bickerton had been designed to be super light but it was not as steady as
it should have been. I also had the idea of making the rear suspension point
the hinge the bike folded on.”
With a finished product to show off, Ritchie tried to license his creation to
manufacturers, but with no success. Being an engineer by training and a
landscape gardener by trade, he did not feel he had the business skills
needed to get a manufacturing business off the ground.
“Engineering wasn’t much use for the kind of metal-bashing I was doing and I
had never intended to go into manufacturing,” he said. “The objective was to
come up with some prototypes and present them to existing players in the
market. I got a lot of interest but no hard bites.”
Unwilling to stop there, he decided to make the first batch of bikes himself.
After drumming up orders for 30 bikes, paid for in advance, he made 50 and
sold the lot. “The first bikes were pretty awful and I was pretty ashamed of
them, but they did sell.”
During the 1980s, Ritchie began to search for more investment, gaining some
funding from the Greater London Enterprise Board but failing to convince the
really big venture-capital backers to whom he spoke. “They didn’t believe in
me and walked away with good reason.”
Ritchie did, however, raise £8,000 from friends who had bought the bike. They
became shareholders, which enabled him to buy basic machinery, occupy a
corner of someone else’s workshop and increase production to a few hundred
bikes.
For several years, production was small scale and the business was merely
breaking even. Ritchie’s fortunes changed when a friend introduced business
angel Julian Vereker, who had bought one of the bikes.
Investing his time and money was an incredible leap of faith on Vereker’s
part, said Ritchie. Vereker agreed to guarantee a £40,000 overdraft for
Brompton Bicycle and offered Ritchie much-needed advice. With additional
cash from his stockbroker father and friends who had bought his first
production run, Ritchie secured £100,000 to set up a better-equipped factory
under a Brentford railway arch in 1987.
Ritchie’s five-year search for capital was over, but the hard work was just
beginning. Scaling up production wasn’t easy.Demand soon outstripped the
factory’s capacity. It expanded into a second railway arch in 1994 and in
1998 into the Chiswick Park premises it occupies today.
Persuaded by his co-directors, Ritchie started bringing new talent to the
management team in the early 2000s, including Will Butler-Adams, who is now
the firm’s managing director.
“It has paid dividends,” said Ritchie. “I’m not a model businessman. My
strength is my eye for detail and an obsession with getting things right but
I’m weak in other areas. I would have been happy with the 10%-a-year growth
we were seeing but Will recognised that there was a much bigger market not
being satisfied.”
Brompton Bicycle should produce 25,000 bikes this year, achieving sales of
£7m- £8m, and Ritchie expects it to grow 25% a year under the leadership of
Butler-Adams. Exports to markets such as the Netherlands, America, Germany,
Japan and Scandinavia account for about 60% of its sales.
Ritchie, now 61, has been handing over control of the firm in the past few
years to enjoy more free time, finally giving the job of managing director
to Butler-Adams this year. He also sold half of his 50% share to
Butler-Adams and a new group of shareholders. “It solves the succession
issue,” said Ritchie. “I have no children. I’m 61, Will’s 36, and he has a
lot of energy.”
Finding committed private shareholders rather than institutional investors has
worked well, even if it came at the cost of slow growth early on, said
Ritchie. “It’s a much better environment for an entrepreneur. I’m a
perfectionist and I would not be able to work in a business where you are
chasing growth rather than creating a perfect product.”
