As cliché as it may sound, this is the reason for Quella’s inception. I’m the one in the white tee – I was tired of construction jobs and what I really liked was cycling, I was riding around Cambridge at the time on a single-speed and after doing a bit of research I quickly realised there was a gap in the fixie market for a British brand so I decided to quit my job and started a bike business.
Our first line of bikes arrived and they weren’t finished to our high standards so we decided the best course of action was to strip them back to bare metal and get them resprayed – so that’s what we did. The end-result couldn’t have turned out better and it was certainly a valuable lesson learnt with us still to this day doing in-house frame finishes. A good friend by this point offered us his old Silversmith workshop to work from which was a great help and gave us a real base.
We started trading officially in the Summer of 2012 which couldn’t have been a better time. The cycling fervour after London 2012 and the Tour de France coming to town was amazing and needless to say: good for business. The bikes sold great but we got a little carried away with ourselves on creating our new website, the branding and our limited business experience meant we found ourselves in a position of not being able to design the next models without funding and possibly the abrupt end to Quella.
That’s when we found our first financial backers – by chance at a photoshoot that had been arranged using some of our bikes – and the point where it began to feel like a proper business. We moved into a proper workshop – an old chicken coup – and designed the Varsity Collection which still remains as one of our flagship ranges.
Since then we’ve come a long way. We’ve worked with the likes of Ted Baker, Wiggle, Halfords, Coca-cola and a number of other celebs. We’ve sponsored the amazing StreetVelodrome cycling series (which you should definitely check-out) and attended cycling events all over the globe. We’ve even moved into bigger and better premises in Cambridge. We have a great team here at Quella, we love what we do and hope that comes across with what we release to our valued customers.