There are any number of ways to measure bike brand success. One obvious one is by the number of dollars sold. Another is by the number of units. But in the specialty retail channel, something like 90% of all new bike sales are accomplished through independent retailers. So another measure of success is what I call “dealer footprint”: How many dealers does a given brand have here in the U.S.?
To answer this question, I turned to Michael Forte, an industry longtimer who’s done stints with Giant, Felt, and Specialized in addition to owning his own bike shop. In what he calls his “semi-retirement,” he purchased The Bike Shop List from its creator, Christopher Georger.
I reached out to Forte (“the ‘e’ is silent,” he says) recently to find out what’s happened to The Bike Shop List and to brands’ dealer footprints in general. To begin with, a little more about his background with TBSL:
How did you come to acquire The Bike Shop List?
I’ve known John Georger since he was my sales manager at GT when I was a retailer. When he recruited me to work at Felt, he introduced me to [his brother] Christopher, who was just starting what became The Bike Shop List. When Chrisopher got ready to sell the list and approached me to continue what he had built, I pulled the trigger on January first and here we are.
What changes have you made?
I try to avoid reinventing the wheel. But a lot of times you need to look at what works and what doesn’t work, and that takes time. However, I have modernized the dataset [and] leveraged technology to improve the phone numbers, email addresses, websites and Facebook pages, and I’ve incorporated that into the data. By leveraging technology, I can tell whether a shop is open, closed, or temporarily closed. I’ve also done some things to make the list more usable and affordable to customers, and added subscription plans to allow clients to obtain updated lists with more frequency.
How many total bike shops do you list in the U.S.?
It changes regularly since I’m constantly updating. I just did an update, so 8,659 names, and that changes with every update. I’m tracking approximately a hundred brands, and I ask clients for a list of brands that are important to them, so I make sure to update those brands. The Bike Shop List is simple. If it appears on dealer lists, it’s on TBSL. It allows users to focus the list on what is important to them. They can do things such as filter out brands that sell to Dick’s or REI or whatever. That allows clients to filter the list according to their particular needs.
Putting the picture together
Here’s the result through March of 2026:
The first big surprise in the chart above is the surge of more than a thousand Aventon e-bike dealers. The brand wasn’t even in the top ten back in 2023. I should also mention a change in how the data is handled. Electra was not listed as a separate brand at that time, so its appearance as a freestanding entity may give some reviewers pause. But since Electra is a separate brand from Trek, with its own dealer agreement and retailer base, Forte finds it worthwhile to list separately. For what it’s worth, I agree.
The big news is that the majority of bicycle retailers in this country no longer carry brands from The Quadrumvirate.
The second big surprise comes from the fact that back in 2023, I wrote that about 55% of U.S. bike shops carried one or more of the four Quadrumvirate brands: Trek/Electra, Specialized, Giant, or the Pon Group (Cannondale/Santa Cruz/Cervélo). Now, according to Forte, that number has shrunk to 47%, or less than half of U.S. bike shops. (Forte’s own assessment of the year-end 2023 numbers puts it at 50%, so maybe it’s not such a big reduction).
That shrinkage may be at least in part due to the rise in the number of nontraditional e-bike-only dealers, which now make up about 18% of the total retailer population, Forte says.
But the big news either way is that the majority of bicycle retailers in this country no longer carry brands from The Quadrumvirate.
To all this, let me add a couple other interesting facts about the list from our colleagues at Circana: The top 10 bike brands sold in the IBD channel accounted for 84% of IBD bicycle retail dollars in 2025.
Trek, Specialized, Giant and Cannondale, (not including Electra, Santa Cruz or Cervélo) together also represented 65% of total IBD bicycle dollars and 39% of all bike sales within Circana’s total measured market, including the Rest of Market channel, according to Matthew Tucker, executive director of client development for Circana’s sports equipment division.
But here’s the bottom line in all this. As I said back at the beginning of this piece, some 90% of new bike sales for the brands listed here are still made through brick-and-mortar bike shops.
And as I said way back in the 2023 piece referenced earlier, “It's a two-way street: Make your brand more relevant — whether through innovative product design, marketing, or other measures — and you attract more dealers. Attract more dealers and your brand's relevance to the market increases.” Whatever else happens in the developing Bike 4.0 dynamic, dealers are still the irreplaceable key to brand success.
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