History

Thomas Ernst, founder and owner of Velo Zürich GmbH and Velo Winterthur GmbH, has already been cycling a lot since his youth. At the age of 20, he had to join the military service and was offered to choose from different corps due to his athletic performance and talents. The cyclists were his favorite corps and that is exactly what happened – he became a cyclist soldier in the Swiss Army. Towards the end of his basic military education, he was offered two used military bicycles for a low price. Within no time, Thomas sold those two old bicycles (Swiss Army Bike). He realized that there’s a huge demand for such bicycles and started buying military bicycles from the Swiss Army shop. At that time, Thomas worked for a print and design company which might have entitled him to set up his own military bicycle website as one of the first online market places in this field. Eventually he broadened his product range to tandems, folding bikes and other rare bicycles building and running multiple websites for each kind of bicycles. Mostly, he bought bicycles from local fairs and over the auction platform ricardo.ch. He still had to store his bicycles in the cellar and in different stockrooms. Prospective customers usually contacted him on e-mail and in 2007, Thomas already sold 200 bicycles without running a proper shop. By then, he had three stockrooms in different places. All this made setting up appointments quite time consuming and cumbersome.

Coincidentally, within short walking distance from his home, another shop closed and was available for a low monthly rent. This was the moment to start an official bicycle sales shop at Flüelastrasse 54 (Kochareal). This shop opened on the 15th of March 2008. In the beginning, the shop was open just a few hours in a week. But soon, the shop was open for 54 hours per week and Velo Zürich got well-known for its huge selection of used bicycles of high quality. Since then, Velo Zürich has hired one mechanic year after year and on the 1st of March 2013, Velo Zürich relocated to the other side of the street, to Flüelastrasse 47. As that building was on sale, Velo Zürich was a temporary tenant, finally running that location till 31st of January 2017. Since then as long-term tenant, Velo Zürich runs its shop at Rautistrasse 33, a modern and well-equipped place with all amenities. In the meantime, Velo Zürich has a highly qualified team of 8 employees with a repair center of 5 work stations. Used-bicycle trades has phased out.

Today, Velo Zürich is focused on e-bikes, cargo bikes, folding bikes and service and repairs.