Just
Ride Your Bike
Morgan Hunt and Adam Lilly are building community on two wheels, leveraging their University of Alabama and Culverhouse educations to do so.
Building a business is just like riding a bike: it requires balance and practice, and a destination, in either situation, doesn't hurt.
But what about when the business is bikes?
That's where a clear vision, passion, and community comes into play.
Meet Morgan Hunt and Adam Lilly, co-owners of VeloCity Cycles in the heart of downtown Tuscaloosa. They together — the couple are engaged — have built Velocity into a hub for cyclists in the area.
Hunt and Lilly met as students in The University of Alabama's engineering program. Lilly, from Texas, was the experienced cyclist and had ridden and raced bikes from childhood. He was involved on campus with the College of Engineering's Human Powered Vehicle team, leveraging his skills as a bike mechanic to help build a competitive machine.
Hunt, on the hand, got into bikes when she met Lilly in 2018 on a group date: "All my life, I had horrible bikes that didn't work. When we first started dating, [Adam] said, ‘Come out and ride bikes with me. It's super fun!’ And the rest was history after that."
"Building relationships with my customers, building value in my business. Just so many things that I learned that I didn't realize in the moment how much value they would bring to me now."
Morgan Hunt on how her Culverhouse degree in marketing helps in the day-to-day of selling bikes.
The VeloCity Cycles story is something of a winding, singletrack trail. The business was started by Culverhouse professor Gina Simpson and her husband, Mark in 2006. Avid cyclists, they saw that the conditions were right for a successful bike shop given that UA was growing its student body and road cycling was having something of an American renaissance.
The shop was later sold in 2013 to Warren Myers, who hired Lilly and Brad Poindexter, a retired BFGoodrich engineer and an ace bike mechanic, to handle wrenching and sales. When Warren wanted out of the business, Poindexter and Lilly bought the operation, with the former selling his share to Lilly and Hunt, who at this time had started working at the shop as well.
When Hunt started, she was majoring in marketing and sales at Culverhouse and leveraged what she learned in the classroom to take the lead on the shop's social media marketing efforts. Lilly convinced her to work full-time while also going to school full-time, something possible during the time of COVID when classes at UA went largely online.
"Throughout my entire senior year, all the marketing classes I took then have had such real-life application to what I do now," Hunt said.
"Building relationships with my customers, building value in my business. Just so many things that I learned that I didn't realize in the moment how much value they would bring to me now."
Adam Lilly and Morgan Hunt, owners of VeloCity Cycles in downtown Tuscaloosa, AL.
Adam Lilly and Morgan Hunt, owners of VeloCity Cycles in downtown Tuscaloosa, AL.
Talking to Hunt and Lilly, the conversation tends to come back to the concept of community. Cycling can be a solitary affair, but it’s also best experienced as part of a social gathering, whether in a screaming dialed-in paceline with a tailwind, or a group of buddies out on the trails, urging each other on. Add in coffee stops, post-ride quaffing at a brewery, and the more obvious choice, hanging out in a bike shop itself, and it’s easy to see the ways that bikes connect people.
Hunt says, "We are a very community-driven business. Something important for us is giving back to the community." That's borne out through the shop's sponsorship — and close involvement with— the Tuscaloosa chapter of Little Bellas, a mountain biking organization for young women that focuses on mentorship and fun, as well as sponsoring the area's cycling advocacy organizations. Furthermore, VeloCity is closely engaged with the city of Tuscaloosa to add bike infrastructure and advocate for the needs of cyclists and pedestrians in the dynamic, growing college town. The shop also supports The University of Alabama's Adapted Athletics program, servicing athletes' equipment.
Running a bike shop is a process of trial and error. Hunt explained, "It's a continual learning curve for us, what you need to keep in stock, what's a good seller, this is what the customer needs, this is what Tuscaloosa needs. It's all been an interesting challenge for us."
Check out VeloCity on their website here, and join them for a ride out on the roads and trails.
