[Words by Steve Thomas – Photography from Cotic]
Sounds like a grand old idea – launching your own bike brand, sitting around tinkering with wild frame designs, putting together dream machines, riding them all day long and making your fortune doing just that? Aha, well, that’s all well and good – but actually doing it, living it, making it work, balancing the great books of life, and surviving in the hostile après Covid era is a whole different and far more grounding proposition.
Back in 2003, wide-eyed and tall laid-back ideas were abounding in the Sheffield garage of Cy Turner and, so, he went out and launched Cotic Bikes. Now, 20 years on and his Peak District-based brand has earned a cult-like status within the offroad community – but, it sure ain’t been no smooth ride, as we find out.
In your own words, who are you and what do you do?
Cy Turner. Husband, Father, Mountain Biker, Engineering nerd.
What is your job?
Founder and Director of Cotic Bikes. I run the company, chief designer on all the frames, and do a lot of the product management as well. Due to the powers of the algorithm, I am also a semi-reluctant vlogger for marketing purposes.
We’re a small company, so while I am ‘The Boss’, I do whatever’s needed, from raising finance to packing boxes and swinging spanners occasionally.
The name Cotic – who came up with it?
It’s a play on words Cy-Cotic, from psychotic, right? A silly and ironic nickname, because I am really quite level-headed and it was given to me at University. My last name is Turner, so that was already taken as GT is Gary Turner, and CT was a bit close. There’s even a guy called Paul Turner – who founded RockShox, so we’re bloody everywhere, although unrelated.
Cotic looked good and was graphically interesting because it’s nearly symmetrical on both axis, so we could potentially do interesting things with it. If I had realised how many people would mispronounce it (It’s Cot-ick, not Co-tick), I probably would have picked something else. There was very little pre-meditation when Cotic started though…
How did you get into what you do?
I have always wanted to design things, I’ve loved it since I was a kid. I went to uni to become a mechanical engineer and went to work in the rail industry so that I could stay in Nottingham, where I studied and a lot of my friends still were. All of the time, I designed bike frames and parts for fun. I had a couple of things made but it was never anything more than a hobby.
In around 2000 I bought a 1999 steel Kona frame because I always loved steel hardtails, and even the DH bike I raced was steel – I had a Raleigh DHO made with Reynolds 853. I built the Kona with too long forks – with a whole 100mm of travel, then put a short stem and riser bars on it. It was fun, but it wasn’t right. It had tight tyre clearance, no rear disc brake and the geometry was all wrong with the long fork and short stem.
I measured it up and designed a frame to solve the problems as I saw them. I specced Reynolds 853 because it’s so strong I could keep the frame fairly light and lively, and my dream steel hardtail. Dave Yates was a custom builder and I got him to begin the process of making it – for my amazement.
Then a chance introduction via the Singletrack forum to Brant Richards (then at On One Bikes) ended up with him and his partner offering to get me 100 frames from their builder in Taiwan, and I still don’t know why he did.
I got samples through them and they were good, and people who rode them loved them. That was the original Cotic Soul. It was right at the start of Internet direct selling, and my friend said he would “write” me a website in exchange for a frame and bits. I got a quote for what I told the back was a car loan for £25k to buy the first batch of frames. The only bit of business planning I did was to work out that even if I hardly sold any, I could afford the loan because I wasn’t giving up my day job. So I pressed the “f&*k it” button and ordered them. They all arrived in bright pink, but that’s another story. Fortunately, it hit a chord with people, as it sold really well – after some good press that was it.
How big of an initial learning curve was it going into business?
The initial learning curve wasn’t steep because I was totally clueless for the first 3 or 4 years. My accountant would roll his eyes at me and just say “Don’t worry, we’ll sort it.”
I was just designing bikes, loving chatting to people and sharing my dream bike with them. The overhead was almost zero because I was working out of my garage and spare room in my spare time. I barely took any money out for the first three years, I just designed stuff and got myself some cool bikes. When I finally went “stress-pop in my day job” in 2006, it was my accountant who told me Cotic was a viable alternative. I went full-time in August that year and have been doing it ever since.
Learning curves since then have been quite steep and almost constant. It’s never dull, I’ll give it that.
As an independent brand in a market dominated by big players, how do you manage to find your place?
By not doing what they’re doing. Almost no one else bigger than us is concentrating on steel bikes. We build thoroughly modern, forward-looking bikes. There’s nothing retro about them. We just think that steel is an awesome material for those bikes.
Given the global changes in the past few years, have they impacted smaller brands more than bigger brands?
I think everyone’s had a really tough time. The last 18 months have been the highest stress of my entire life. The thing bigger brands have is shareholders or investors, who will keep pumping the money in to keep them afloat. For small independent brands, that comes down to the owners or people like me who take quite a lot of financial burden to keep things going. It’s not ideal.
How long have you been working in the bike industry?
21 years.
How have things changed since you started – in terms of the market, evolution from your side?
The biggest change for us is that when we started loads of people just bought frames and built their own bikes. About 10 years ago, when standards started changing regularly, they switched massively to complete bikes. So, we had to grow the business to provide that, even though we still sell quite a few frames on their own.
We never made or planned to make drop bar bikes when we started, and now the Escapade and Cascade are a big part of our business. It’s always changing, we’re always learning, and we’re always trying to build better bikes. One thing that hasn’t changed is lovely people riding bikes on dirt. The community that’s built around Cotic is ace.
Is there anything you wish you could change about your role/job?
Right now – for the wider industry to sort itself out so we can all go back to making a bit of money at this. I don’t need or want a mansion or Porsches, but a couple of years ago, we were ticking along nicely, and I was in a good place. If it could go back to that, I would be quite content.
What does the average week look like?
What’s one of them them?
What advice would you give to someone who wants to do your job/what you do?
If you’re talking about designing bikes; go and get a job in another industry so you can learn how to be a proper professional engineer. Bikes aren’t set up to provide the breadth of experience and training to become a decent engineer. Once you’ve done that, bring that good practice to bikes.
What do you like most about what you do?
The team I’ve built and working with them to make Cotic tick. I love designing bikes. I love that the bikes I design bring so much joy and meaning to people’s lives. There are very few jobs where you get to touch people’s lives in the same way. It’s wonderful and a privilege.
If you weren’t doing this, you would be?
A professional engineer of some description. I worked in the rail industry for a decade before doing this full-time, so I would probably still be doing something related to that.
What have been some of the highlights of your career?
One of the wonderful things about this job, especially when you’ve been doing it for 21 years, is that there are so many. Actually getting the Soul into production and getting those first great reviews from Steve Worland, having Jo Burt paint a Mint Sauce canvas for my daughter’s birth included.
Kate Potter racing a Cotic in the XC World Champs in Canberra, Neko Mullaly racing a bike I helped design in the DH World Champs in 2023, and being able to walk into his pit at races to say hello too.
Making the Rocketman video, ringing some production back to the UK, racing in Finale with my team also rank high. Meeting people who I just read about when I was growing up, and that’s all I can think of.
There have been loads and it’s been quite a ride. Basically, anything that would have blown 16-year-old Cy’s mind.
The industry finds itself in a tough situation in terms of the cost of living. Do you see it recovering any time soon and, if so, what will brands need to do to stay relevant and afloat?
I don’t think it’s the cost of living at all, the big players in the industry screwed us all by massively over-ordering during the Covid boom because their investors told them to. If they can sort all that crap out then we can normalise pricing and supply again. I’ve no idea when it’ll turn itself around – you’d have to ask a big company that behaved stupidly on that.
What do you dislike most about the cycling industry?
Right now, see above.
How do you keep things balanced when your hobby becomes your job?
It’s been bloody tough recently. Riding bikes isn’t the escape it is for most people when you’re riding a bike with your name on it. I tinker with old Tamiya RC cars, I have also taken up running and spending time with my family.
If you were in the same position now as when you went into business would you still take the risk today, and how different would it be to try and achieve now – where the market, the powers that be, bikes themselves, all have changed dramatically?
I think, given I started with minimal investment in one model line and did it in my spare time and ran it out of my garage, the risk probably isn’t much greater now than it was then for how we started.
It’s a more crowded market today , but it’s also much easier to reach people online. I guess, finding a niche that isn’t filled would be the tricky bit now. I started this because no one was building the bike I wanted.
