Ten years ago, Christian Bezdeka and Marcus Ihlenfeld founded a company that was intended to produce bicycles exclusively for children. Today Woom is the largest provider in the DACH region, with sales of €100 million in 2022 — and with the ex-Henkel and Adidas boss Kasper Rorsted, an internationally experienced manager joined the team.
The Woom headquarters is around 30 minutes from Vienna city center. However, many of the employees commute to work on two wheels, as the office in Klosterneuburg is located directly on the Danube cycle path. Next year, the start-up is set to move back to Vienna, which some employees also complain about: “My daily cycling will no longer be possible. “I don’t know how I’m going to accommodate it!” says one.In 2013, Woom, now the largest manufacturer of children’s bicycles in German-speaking countries, was founded in a Viennese garage. You can no longer see any of this in today’s office — instead, the open work area, on which there are numerous tables free of partitions, conveys a classic start-up flair. Christian Bezdeka and Marcus Ihlenfeld, the two founders, withdrew from operational business to the advisory board last year; We are expecting Paul Fattinger, who joined the company as an advisory board member in 2020 and has been CEO since 2022, and the former Henkel and Adidas boss Kasper Rorsted, who has been chairman of the Woom Advisory Board since the beginning of May and is supposed to advise the management. “Around three years ago, Christian (Bezdeka, note) and Marcus (Ihlenfeld, note) noticed that their company had reached a size where expanded management made sense,” says Fattinger. “With a company as fast-growing as Woom, there are a lot of changes. This will continue to be the case in the future.”Since its founding, Woom has achieved average annual growth of 50% until 2023 — and initially without any investors. The first round of financing was only completed at the end of 2020 (Woom did not publish the exact amount, but it was in the double-digit million range). The start-up was already in the black three years earlier, and in 2022 it broke the sales barrier of €100 million. (the company is currently not profitable in the USA due to expansion), Woom sold 400,000 bicycles, which corresponds to a market share of 40% and 20% in Austria and Germany. “In Austria we have almost exhausted the potential. There is still room for improvement in Germany, but we are primarily looking at other markets,” says Fattinger. The expansion in Europe is aimed more towards France, Italy and the Netherlands — and also into the USA, where Woom has been active under Mathias Ihlenfeld (Marcus Ihlenfeld’s brother) since 2014. But can the new management under Fattinger and Rorsted maintain the growth of the last decade? And what actually makes children’s bikes, which cost up to €3,000 significantly higher than most children’s bikes, so desirable?
Ten years ago, Christian Bezdeka and Marcus Ihlenfeld started with an idea: They wanted to make particularly good bikes for children. Fattinger explains: “Most children’s bikes are just shrunken adult bikes. We really design our product with children in mind and listen to their needs.” The Woom models are lighter than most other children’s bikes, which helps especially young children learn to ride. There are also some smart design features on the Viennese brand’s bikes: The geometry of the frame is slightly different on Woom bikes; the pedals are more elongated because children often slide their feet back and forth; the handlebars are blue and red so parents can shout “Brake on red!” instead of confusing their children with left and right; the list is long. “We always listened to our customers’ feedback, and that’s how these features accumulated,” says Fattinger. It is precisely this approach to collecting feedback that will be taken into account in the new Vienna headquarters in the 19th district: “We are bringing customers and employees even closer together,” says Rorsted, who naturally has more to say about the future of the company than about the past . This is where you can drive, try out and test. The feedback from children and parents should be brought directly to the employees and integrated into the product. It still remains to be seen whether this should only be possible on certain days of the week or during events.The purchasing process itself is also designed to be as simple as possible. Instead of measuring bikes in inches, as is common practice in the industry, Woom bikes come in sizes. The Woom Original 1 model is for children aged one and a half and over, the number 6 (the largest Woom bike) is for children aged ten and over. “The parents don’t care whether the bike is a 16-inch or a 20-inch bike. The main thing is that it fits,» says Fattinger, before continuing: «With us you start at number 1, and if that’s too small, you try number 2.» Some models, such as the mountain or the E- Bike, only available in larger sizes. The system is also well suited for online retail, through which Woom handles around a third of sales in Europe (in the US, Woom only offers D2C sales).
Initially, the founders Bezdeka and Ihlenfeld assembled each bike themselves in a garage. However, it soon became clear that this could not continue; The demand was already too great back then. They brought reinforcements on board, initially from family and friends. This is how the brand grew, as Fattinger explains: “There was never a lot of money for expensive marketing — so it was clear from the start: the product had to speak for itself. To date, our best advertising medium is the bicycle at the children’s playground, where other parents see it and are enthusiastic about it.”The start-up’s organic growth is also reflected in Woom’s financing: until 2020, the company developed organically without any major investors and through smaller private loans from friends of the founders. It was only in 2020 that the first institutionalized backers came on board, including the Brenninkmeijer family, which is also the owner of C&A, and Runtastic co-founder Florian Gschwandtner. “At that time, the two founders took the first steps to withdraw from the operational business. The idea was and still is to bring experience into the company alongside capital,” says Fattinger. In 2022, the Hong Kong-based Jebsen Group also invested a double-digit million amount (the investor therefore holds 15% of the company shares), which means Woom also has a foothold in the Asian market. Expansion there is still a few years away, although there are already initial sales in Japan and the Arab Emirates.Although there is still enormous growth potential in Asia, the primary challenge was initially to meet domestic demand. At the beginning of 2022, there were around 70,000 potential customers on the waiting list. Parents talk about how other parents wanted to buy the small aluminum bikes from them on the street. The price of used Woom bikes reportedly exceeded the original price at times, so sought after – and difficult to obtain – was the product. According to Fattinger, this was not an artificial shortage; Today, customers hardly have to be put on the waiting list. Fattinger: “We have reached a size that allows us to assure our manufacturers that we can and will continue to work with them for the next few years.” This also enables the Austrian company to produce larger volumes. Two-thirds of this takes place in Asia, mainly in Cambodia and Bangladesh. The assembling takes place in Poland. And although Bezdeka and Marcus Ihlenfeld said in an interview last year that they want to move more production to Europe, Rorsted highlights the difficulties of this: “We are still struggling with a labor shortage in Europe. In the long term, moving production to Europe is still a goal, but we will have to do this more through new technologies such as advanced 3D printing.”Most start-ups are founded with the intention of one day completing a successful exit. When asked whether Woom will also have an exit in the future, Rorsted replies: “I think that’s the wrong way of thinking for us. The goal must be for us to be the best-known and most sought-after bicycle brand in the countries in which we operate. What the ownership structure looks like is secondary.”
Paul Fattinger became a member of the Woom advisory board in 2020, and a year later he also joined the operational business as CFO before becoming co-CEO in 2022. Fattinger has been CEO of Woom since June 2023.
Kasper Rorsted has been CEO of Adidas since 2016 and has been advising the management as chairman of Woom’s advisory board since May 2023.
