On Your Bike

What happens when a good idea sits ahead of the market it is trying to serve? Wheelers, another Blackline original, was built around a simple premise and a very real problem. There was early enthusiasm, a credible commercial case, and genuine belief behind it. And yet, before the concept properly got moving, the wheels came off.

Nigel, co-founder of Blackline and one of the people behind Wheelers, was alongside Andy trying to reinvent rugby with Coach. At the same time, he decided to take on commuting, cycling culture, city infrastructure, property developers, and behaviour change too.

A different way of framing the problem

Most people hear “cycling concept” and picture something premium and performance-led, or the opposite: cheap, basic, a way of getting from A to B. Wheelers was neither. It was built on the idea that hardly anyone was thinking about the overall experience of moving through towns and cities.

Nigel, Blackline

Cities kept saying they wanted people out of cars and onto bikes, and fair enough. But for most commuters, the actual experience still felt completely fragmented. Unless you worked in a brand new office building, you’d arrive at work sweaty with nowhere secure to leave the bike, nowhere to shower, nowhere to change, nowhere to reset for ten minutes before the workday started. So loads of people just defaulted back to the car or congested public transport, because however frustrating traffic and delayed trains are, they at least feel predictable. Even now, nearly half of UK offices still don’t have showers, and research shows three-quarters of people say they’d be more likely to cycle to work if their workplace just provided some better facilities. That gap is enormous, and it’s largely unaddressed.

Movement for movement

The barrier was never really the cycling itself. It was everything that happened once you arrived. That reframing became the foundation of Wheelers, and it led to a phrase the team used constantly inside the business.

Nigel:

“Movement for movement” became one of the phrases we used a lot internally. Not cycling for sport, not cycling for performance, just helping people move around towns and cities in a healthier, more connected way. Because movement changes how people feel. It changes energy levels, productivity, wellbeing, even people’s relationship with the places they live and work. We felt the commute should play a healthier role in people’s lives, rather than simply processing people through congestion every day.

Building more than a bike shed

Once the team stopped thinking about infrastructure and started thinking about experience, the idea grew into something closer to a modern commuter club, wrapped in a connected digital layer.

Nigel:

We didn’t want it to feel like infrastructure; we wanted it to feel welcoming. Like a modern commuter club. Somewhere you could arrive, park safely, shower, recharge your e-bike, grab some breakfast, get your bike serviced, maybe do half an hour’s work in a relaxed environment before heading into the office. The aim was simple, really: help people arrive ready for the day instead of already depleted by it. We always saw it as a connected experience rather than just a physical space. The app linked everything together: memberships, access, servicing, route planning, rewards, health tracking, carbon measurement, local partnerships. You’d probably call it a mobility platform or ecosystem.

A commercial case that sat between categories

Underneath the club concept was a genuine commercial argument, aimed at real estate owners and employers, that this was not a wellbeing nice-to-have. It was revenue.

Nigel:

Most cycling facilities were treated as a cost centre, hidden away in basements. We thought they could become something much more valuable: a genuine amenity, a reason people wanted to work somewhere, a service that improved wellbeing, supported sustainability goals, and actually generated revenue through memberships, servicing, food, workspace, and partnerships. We were effectively saying to real estate owners, “This doesn’t have to be dead space.” A typical space run as a basic bike park has a significant capital cost, has ongoing running costs, and generates nothing. A fully realised Wheelers club generates an income and offsets those costs. That’s a completely different conversation.

The trouble was, Wheelers sat awkwardly between categories. Was it transport? Hospitality? Real estate? Wellbeing? Technology? The answer was that it was sort of all of them, which was creatively exciting and commercially much harder to place.

Enthusiasm is not the same as systemic change

Cyclists understood Wheelers straight away, because they lived the problem themselves. Developers liked the place-making angle. Employers liked the wellbeing side. Towns and cities liked the sustainability argument. There was genuine enthusiasm from almost everyone who heard the pitch. But enthusiasm and systemic change turned out to be very different things.

Nigel:

Infrastructure moves slowly, investment moves slowly, policy moves even more slowly. Most investment was still focused on the physical infrastructure: roads, bike lanes, basic storage, compliance. We were talking much more about behaviour, lifestyle, and the wider human experience around active travel. That’s harder to categorise, and probably harder to fund.

Ahead of a market that has since caught up

A lot of what felt slightly left field when Wheelers was being pitched is now a mainstream conversation: flexible work, health intelligence, connected mobility, sustainable commuting, wellbeing ecosystems. The numbers have moved too. Cycling in the City of London is up 50% since 2022. London as a whole now sees 1.5 million cycling trips a day, up 43% since 2019. Cyclists make up 56% of all traffic at peak commuting hours. That is a genuinely different city to the one Wheelers was pitching into.

Nigel:

We were ahead of where infrastructure thinking was, ahead of where workplace wellbeing conversations were, ahead of where ESG and active travel conversations actually were. E-bikes are changing accessibility in a way that wasn’t true back then. The UK is still way behind Europe on adoption, we’re near the bottom of the table per capita, but that actually reinforces the case rather than undermining it. The infrastructure to support e-bike commuting probably just isn’t there yet, which was always the argument, to be honest.

What this means for your business

Wheelers is a reminder, much like Coach, that being ahead of a market is not the same as being wrong about it. The gap between people wanting to move differently and the experience actually working end to end still hasn’t been solved. The problem never went away. What changed is how ready the world now is to hear the answer.

Nigel:

Genuinely, I still believe in Wheelers, possibly more now than when we first came up with it. Towns and cities are no less congested. People think differently about health and work now. E-bikes have changed accessibility completely. And the core issue still hasn’t gone away. Someone’s going to crack this. You never know, it may still be us. I still think if you make movement feel easier, safer, and more connected to daily life, people naturally make healthier choices. That part still feels very true to me.

If the wheels do start turning again on Wheelers, you heard it here first. In the next episode, we introduce the Originals Checklist, built to help founders think and work more originally.

This article is drawn from episode five of the Blackline Originals podcast. Find all episodes, the high five of original thinking, and the Originals diagnostic at blacklinecreative.co.uk/originals.