SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (BRAIN) — E-commerce retailer Backcountry has bought the Canada-based mobile bike service franchiser Velofix.
Backcountry — which also owns speciality bike e-commerce sites Competitive Cyclist and Bike Tires Direct — plans to leverage Velofix's fleet of service van to eventually offer “white glove” bicycle delivery to customers.
Backcountry and Competitive Cyclist sell about 5,000 bikes year, with brands including Scott, Yeti, Santa Cruz, 3T, Cervélo, Pinarello, Ibis, Enve, and Pivot, among others. It is the exclusive U.S. retailer of Belgium’s Ridley bikes.
Terms of the acquisition were not released.
Currently about two-thirds of Velofix’s mobile operations are company owned, with the rest franchised to independent operators, Backcountry President Kevin Lenau told BRAIN.
Lenau said Backcountry will retain the approximately 60 bike technicians that operate the company-owned Velofix vans and plans to maintain Velofix’s headquarters in Vancouver and Velofix CEO and co-founder Davide Xausa will continue as a consultant. Lenau said future Velofix hires could be in Utah, Vancouver, or remote.
As for the franchised operations, the merger will drive customers to the franchise owners as they fulfill Backcountry bike sales orders.
“It’s going to be great for them," Lenau said. "Backcountry has the largest consumer base in America for cyclists, and we are going to be leveraging that consumer base and our Summit Club Plus program to drive consumers to Velofix,” he added.
Lenau said Velofix currently covers about 50% of the country’s biggest bike-buying customers and Backcountry plans to grow the fleet to cover about 75% of the bike market, he said. He said it would expand the fleet with a combination of company-owned and franchised operations.
Initially, Velofix will offer assembly of bikes shipped to customers’ homes by Backcountry or Competitive Cyclist. Eventually the retailer will offer customers the option of having new bikes shipped to Velofix and then delivered fully assembled and sized, Lenau said. Backcountry and Competitive Cyclist are already selling Velofix service packages with discounts offered to members of the retailer’s Summit Club Plus program.
Lenau said the merger doesn’t create many conflicts between Backcountry and the brands that Velofix has partnered with. Velofix does offer bike fulfillment for Canyon, which is a competitor to Backcountry in the e-commerce bike market.
“We’d love to continue to work with Canyon,” Lenau said.
He said he does not foresee Velofix vans offering Backcountry inventory for sale beyond consumables like tires and chains that the vans already carry. He does foresee Velofix offering more bike-fit services, however.
Backcountry has grown through acquisitions in recent and not-so-recent years. It acquired CompetitiveCyclist.com in 2011. In 2017, it bought TriSports. In early 2025, it acquired Level Nine Sports, a Utah retailer of outdoor, ski and bike products; later that year it bought Velotech, the parent of BikeTiresDirect.
Backcountry operates about nine brick and mortar stores around the country and Lenau said expanding that footprint is a major goal over the next three years. He said the expansion would likely come most through acquisitions.
Velofix launched in 2013. In 2014 the company appeared on CBC’s Dragons' Den, Canada's version of Shark Tank, which led to accepting an offer of $300,000 for a 20% stake from Jim Treliving. The company grew rapidly through that decade, with most growth coming from franchising operations. More recently it has pivoted to open more company-owned vans as franchise operations closed following the COVID whiplish.
In 2022, Yamaha Motor Ventures led an equity financing round, joining previous investor MacKinnon, Bennett & Co., and new investor Economic Development Bank of Canada. Lyra Growth Partners was also an early investor.
