99 Bikes Brand Guidelines: The Brisbane Bike Shop Named After What Fit in Its First Store

One shop, and a number taken from its floor space.

99 Bikes began with a single shop in the Brisbane suburb of Milton. Founder Matt Turner told The Latz Report, an Australian bicycle-trade publication, in December 2021 that he decided to open a bike shop in October 2006, incorporated the company in February 2007 and opened the doors in May 2007. He had no previous experience in the bicycle trade: he was a keen triathlete who had been a dissatisfied customer of local bike shops, and he spent the first year working in that one store.

The name is a description of that first shop. The company says on its website that it has been finding bikes for customers since opening in Milton in 2007, in a store “where only 99 bikes could fit.” The number has stayed on every sign since, even as the shops grew far larger than the original.

The business soon gained a partner. Inside Retail reported in March 2024 that a year after the first store opened, in 2008, Turner founded Pedal Group as a joint venture between the Turner family and Flight Centre, the travel company co-founded by his father, Graham Turner. In the 2021 interview Turner said Flight Centre’s involvement was tied to moving into wholesale, and to the chance to distribute the bicycle brand Merida.

Wholesale came through an acquisition. Pedal Group bought Advance Traders, a bicycle distributor, in July 2008, according to Inside Retail. Turner told The Latz Report that the distributor had announced it was closing when Pedal Group approached it, and that the new owners kept its staff. Since then Pedal Group has run two businesses side by side: the 99 Bikes retail chain and the Advance Traders wholesale arm, which, Turner said in 2020, sells through independent bike shops as well as supplying the chain.

The world’s most approachable bike shops.

The chain describes its aim in one phrase. In April 2023 Cycling Industry News quoted 99 Bikes as saying its objective was to be “the world’s most approachable bike shops,” taking customers “from their first bike right through to their dream bike,” and The Latz Report noted in 2021 that the company had adopted that line as the theme of its home page. On its own website the company calls itself Australia’s largest bike retailer; The Latz Report described it in 2021 as by far Australia’s largest bicycle company.

The shops follow a recognisable formula. The Latz Report observed in 2021 that 99 Bikes stores come in many shapes and sizes, many in bulky-goods precincts and some on older shopping streets, but that all carry the corporate colours and logos from top to bottom. Turner said the company mostly leased its sites and owned around 13 or 14 of them, with an average floor space of about 500 square metres. In March 2024 the chief executive of Pedal Group, Andrew Garnsworthy, told Inside Retail that the company looked for catchments of around 120,000 people, a 15-minute drive between stores, good main-road exposure and signage, car parking and about 350 square metres of floor space.

Membership and staff ownership are part of the model. Inside Retail reported in 2024 that the paid membership programme, Club 99, had more than 1.6 million members, according to the company. Turner described employee ownership as a key to the chain’s growth, and the company’s website lists shares, business ownership schemes and profit share among the ways staff hold a stake. Its “Earning to Give” scheme lets employees donate the equivalent of one per cent of their wage to a charity of their choice. In March 2024 Inside Retail reported that all Pedal Group operations had gained B Corp certification after a two-year review.

The chain also runs travelling electric-bike expos, one for mountain bikes and one for commuter bikes, that Inside Retail described in 2024 as giving people the chance to try the bikes on location. Garnsworthy said then that electric bikes were 99 Bikes’ largest growth category.

Shop signs, formulas and workshops.

Bicycle shop chains present themselves in a few recognisable ways. Some run very large stores on retail parks, with test tracks, workshops and thousands of bikes under one roof; Fahrrad XXL in Germany, for example, describes branches of up to 11,000 square metres with test tracks beside them. Others keep to city-centre shops and neighbourhood workshops, or began as websites and added a small number of shops later, as Tredz did in South Wales.

Structure shapes how the names look. A chain may own every branch itself, or a shared name may sit above independent businesses: Fahrrad XXL says its stores are run by seven family firms, and several of its branch names add the family name of the firm behind them. In the Netherlands and France, formulas and networks of independent bicycle shops work in a similar way, giving each shop one sign, one website and shared buying while the owner keeps the business, as the companies describe their own structure.

Workshops are part of the offer almost everywhere. The companies in this group describe repair and servicing in their own words, from in-store workshops for bicycles and e-bikes to trade-in schemes for used bikes; logos, shop signs and colour schemes are shown as the companies publish them on their own sites and storefronts. Their corporate pages usually tell a founding story and name the current owner, whether a family, a founder or a listed retail group.

These guides, covering chains in Germany, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and Japan, set out what can be checked about each one: who founded it, who owns it now, how its stores and workshops are described, and which descriptions rest only on the company’s own word. Each suggests an unofficial palette and a stand-in typeface for designers studying the category.

From Queensland to New Zealand and the UK.

The chain grew beyond Australia through acquisitions that were then given the 99 Bikes name. In February 2020 The Latz Report reported that Pedal Group would take over five Bike Barn stores in New Zealand, in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, together with the wholesale stock of Bikes International, from 1 July that year; 99 Bikes then had 47 Australian stores. All five shops were to be rebranded, and Turner said the company was “just too in love with the 99 Bikes brand” to keep the old name. By December 2021 he counted 66 stores open or about to open, 59 in Australia and seven in New Zealand, and announced that he was stepping down as managing director.

In April 2023 the four-store Hargroves Cycles chain in the UK, which had traded for more than 40 years, joined Pedal Group and was rebranded as 99 Bikes, Cycling Industry News reported. In March 2024 Inside Retail put the network at 62 stores in Australia and New Zealand, seven in the United States and four in the UK, and reported that the group had closed three New Zealand stores that year and planned two closures in the UK while opening more stores in Australia.

Ownership changed again in 2026. In April Bicycling Australia reported that Flight Centre Travel Group had agreed to sell its 47 per cent holding in Pedal Group to the Turner Collective, a consortium of Turner family members, lifting the family’s ownership to about 76 per cent and ending a partnership that began in 2008; the magazine counted more than 70 stores across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Flight Centre told the Australian Securities Exchange on 15 May 2026 that the sale had been completed after shareholders approved it the day before.

For a design guide, 99 Bikes shows how a plain number, taken from the size of one shop, can become the sign over a chain in three countries. Compare Leisure Lakes Bikes, a UK bicycle chain that grew from one site, and Evans Cycles, another UK chain. For this guide we use a deep teal, a sun yellow and a coral with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep 99 Bikes’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.