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Gateshead’s Vielo Sports to go up a gear with £250k investment

Father and son duo Ian and Trevor Hughes have landed a £250k investment to ramp up the retail operations at their high-end cycling business, Vielo Sports Ltd.

Gaining funding from the Finance For Business North East Growth Fund, the Gateshead-based company is looking to increase this number of retailers it manages in its network from 42 to 50.

The firm is also considering an expansion to larger premises whilst also increasing the number of stocks it currently holds.

Ian Hughes spent 15 years establishing and running the Swiss based cycling brand Scott in the UK before starting to distribute Storck Bicycles in 2012 after being personally approached by company founder Markus Storck to help him establish the brand in the UK.

His son Trevor joined the company in 2013, and they have since together built a £750k turnover business, a figure they are looking to grow significantly in the next five years in a specialist market that is overall worth around £50m annually.

The company was named as Specialist Distributor Of The Year at the industry-leading BikeBiz Awards 2015, has also now taken on the UK distribution of Lightweight Wheels, another German brand which supplies carbon fibre wheels that are manufactured to the standards used by professional cyclists.

Ian Hughes revealed: “My experience and contacts in the cycling industry put us in a great position to introduce the Storck brand to the UK market, and we are successfully building the Storck Brand and established it as a high quality name over the last four years.

“We’re already Storck’s largest distributor, but we think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what can be achieved, and are now putting both the management and retail structures in place to help us build on what we’ve done so far.

“We’re very specific about the types of retailers that we want in our distribution network and the sort of service they have to supply to customers buying our bikes, and we’re redoubling our search to find new places across the UK where we think there are opportunities to do more.

“NEL was mentioned to us as a possible investor by a contact, and their focused approach has given us the resources we required to realise even more of the business’s potential.”

Jane Siddle, investment executive at NEL Fund Managers, added: “The growth of the UK cycling market in the last 20 years has been nothing short of phenomenal, and Vielo Sports has the right type of high quality product to make further impressive inroads into it.”

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