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I love giving bike advice. I technically do it for a living, but only in a remote, aggregate sense. I used to do it one-on-one back in my shop days, and I kinda miss it. Now, I find myself baiting innocent strangers into conversations about things like transportation and exercise in the hopes that they’ll exhibit some sort of curiosity about bikes. That’s when I slip into my well-practiced and frankly very effective former role as a bike salesman. Within ten minutes, I’ve hopefully gotten someone stoked about what their next bike could and should be. But it takes a little longer if the topic of used bikes comes up.
“I don’t wanna go crazy,” they tell me. “A bike from a few years ago would be just fine.” Nonsense. Is reading a newspaper from a few years ago just fine? There’s a reason they keep printing new ones. Things change. If you buy a bike from 2014, there are features it won’t have that today’s bikes will. A wide-range cassette or a seat tube angle steeper than 73 degrees, for example. As soon as you learn what you’re missing, you’ll miss it.
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But it feels like that’s different now. The rate of evolution in bike design slowed, or at least shifted directions. The updates from one model year to the next have became more subtle. Suddenly, bikes from two or three years ago don’t feel as out of date as they used to seem back… well… back two or three years ago. That happens to be about when I learned of The Pro’s Closet. If you haven’t heard of them, The Pro’s Closet is essentially an online used bike reseller. I’ll get to my experience buying and selling a bike with them in a minute, but the backstory is just as interesting.
Photo: Courtesy of The Pro’s Closet/BIKE Magazine
Their story started in 2006, when an ebay-savvy pro mountain biker named Nick Martin started selling off the gear he’d collected throughout his career. He then moved on to doing the same for his fellow racers, and eventually expanded the service to the general public. But still, The Pro’s Closet was based around ebay, which made his business appear more like a hobby for a stay-at-home parent and less like a growing disruptive force in the high-end bike industry. But that’s exactly what it’s become.
In late 2015, The Pro’s Closet moved (then still in its home town of Boulder, Colorado) from a 5,000-foot facility to one three times the size. It’s continued to expand since then, and now occupies more than ten times the space it used to. Through its history, they experimented with other sports equipment, but they hit a sweet spot in cycling. On the peer-to-peer used market, there’s an unhealthy combination of high price and low trust. The buyer has no redress if something goes wrong, so some choose to be extremely picky, some lowball, some don’t buy at all. And sellers risk leaving money on the table with no trusted standard for what used bikes are worth. The market was ripe for someone to solve that.
And soon after that first expansion, The Pro’s Closet was showing enough promise to secure a $2.6-million investment from venture capital firm, Range Light (now called
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from MansBrand https://www.mansbrand.com/the-pros-closet-the-easy-way-to-buy-and-sell-a-used-mountain-bike/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-pros-closet-the-easy-way-to-buy-and-sell-a-used-mountain-bike
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