Small Business Project: Fuel crisis a boon for Wellington cycling repairs firm
Monday, 1 June 2026
The Small Business Project is a weekly series that shines the spotlight on Kiwi small businesses doing interesting and unusual things in their industries.
Get Lost Cycling co-founder Stuart Cunningham and his business partner Koen Greven set up a workshop-centric store out of a shared passion for bicycles and cycling culture shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic hit. More than six years later, Cunningham tells Aimee Shaw the business is once again seeing a renaissance in business ‒ this time as a result of the rising cost of fuel, stemming from ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
What has your venture set out to achieve?
We're a community bike shop. We opened up six months before the first lockdown, so the start was a pretty shaky few years.
When Koen and I met, we were both thinking about opening a bike shop and had like-minded ideas about what we wanted to do. We'd seen the death of the neighbourhood bike shop which, when we grew up, was always something of a staple in our experience of cycling ‒ having those familiar faces who know you, your bike, and your friends. We wanted to recreate that feeling.
We’re workshop focused, keeping people's bicycles functioning as well as they should be, and we’re also in the adventure cycling space.
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How much time and money have you invested?
Both of us didn't have much money when we started. We had $25,000 each, and serendipitously ended up in the first spot we looked at, when looking for a place to lease.
It’s definitely tough times out there for a lot of people, but we have built a lot of resilience into our business model by necessity, because we don’t have a buffer. At the time we started neither of us had a mortgage or a lump of cash that we could fall back on, so we were savvy from the outset about being able to scale very fast if something happened, being quite agile with what the business focused on, whether it was mountain or commuter bikes, and being smart about staffing and running the business conservatively.
As soon as the fuel crisis happened, we saw a stack of dusty bikes being pulled out from underneath people's houses because there's all this amazing cycling infrastructure being invested in by the council, and the Government, so it was fantastic to see people having this big uptake in cycling, out of necessity, which has meant an upswing in business for us.
What’s the biggest challenge your business is facing?
The perpetual rising costs of everything, and wanting to keep our pricing consistent for customers. We feel like we're getting squeezed. There'll be a tough year nationally, and then rent goes up, and it goes up perpetually. It's like this never-ending thing, year-on-year. Then insurance goes up.
I never want to make it sound like we're struggling, because we're not, we have a really good customer base that keeps coming back, and our books are always full with services, we're constantly booking the fortnight ahead, even through winter, but there are always those cost increases to consider.
The looming threat of Government sector layoffs in Wellington is another. The last round of layoffs was brutal for small businesses and we felt the downturn immediately after they were announced. Because of how the restructures were executed, it wasnt as simple as 9000 or so loosing their jobs, it was whole teams of people worried about their roles, so the cuts affected so many more Wellingtonians.
What’s next for Get Lost Cycling?
Business has been really good for us in these last years, and that’s mainly been because of word of mouth. We haven't done a heap of advertising, but we have been investing in our community. We host an endurance race every year up Mount Victoria, and all the proceeds of that race, every single dollar, goes into the trail builders up there. We also did a couple of raffles, where we raffled away a bicycle ‒ that was quite tricky, because we had to essentially get something like a gambling licence ‒ and we made about $10,000 off these raffles that went to Trails Wellington to develop the trail network.
We had a development squad of teenagers for a year that were rising talents in mountain biking, so we did a bunch of cool things with them, programmes and races, and set them up with mentors, and more recently smaller things, like in winter, we host a mini film festival for teenagers, where they make their own two to five minute video clips, and we screen them on a big screen all in one night, and have a bunch of prizes that we give out for the favourites. Community events are a way to keep people excited about cycling.
Next, we’re thinking about expanding our services, and having more locations within Wellington is definitely on the cards.
In three years’ time you will be …
Long term, we want to do more of the same. We're not aiming to take over the space, we want to continue to support cycling infrastructure and mountain bike sales.
What’s one thing you wish you’d known before starting the business?
There’s been a lot of learning on the job. It's like when people say when you have a baby, ‘there's nothing that can prepare you for what you're about to go through’ ‒ massive highs and lows. But I think being 100% sure of yourself and the business plan is extremely important, because if you're passionate about what you do, and if you're an expert in your field and being nice, customers are going to come to you. It's so easy to be nice to people.
Most helpful piece of advice you have ever received?
Have a continuity plan, think about how the market can shrink and expand, and how you can change with that to stay agile. Be prepared for anything.
If you would like your business to feature in The Small Business Project, email Aimee Shaw at aimee.shaw@stuff.co.nz