Ambitious New E-Bike Shop Opens in Bayers Lake
HALIFAX – Aaron Stonehouse and Lee Doucette grew up together in Saint Margarets Bay and have been best friends for years, forging a bond racing sailboats together. Now, they’re taking their partnership off the ocean and into the choppy waters of entrepreneurship.
The pair are the co-owners of Bayers Lake’s newest electric bike retailer and repair shop, The EShop.
The shop is set to open in May and will enter the market at a time when e-bikes are surging in popularity. Stonehouse says he hopes to make the EShop stand out with comprehensive e-bike repair services and a selection of cutting-edge and hard-to-find accessories.
In an interview with Huddle, Stonehouse says getting into the e-bike business “was just a complete fluke.”
About a year ago, he took a job as a marketing coordinator for a boat shop. But the shop also happened to sell e-bikes and he eventually found himself as the de facto e-bike salesperson.
Stonehouse found Doucette a job at the shop and the buddies eventually struck up a relationship with the CEO of Dartmouth-based e-bike manufacturer Zen Electric Bikes.
It was that relationship that inspired the pair to start their own entrepreneurship journey. With the help of some money from the sale of Stonehouse’s family business a few years earlier, they got to work building The EShop.
“We’ve always had this idea in our head that we’d like to open up a shop,” Stonehouse says. “It’s just kind of always been in the blood and the people I hang out with.”
The EShop will feature a large selection of Zen e-bikes, along with bikes from three other manufacturers. Stonehouse calls Doucette “one of the best tinkerers I’ve ever met,” and since he will run the repair side of the business the shop will repair e-bikes from any manufacturer, not just the ones it carries.
Customers will also be able to rent e-bikes from the shop. Stonehouse hopes their location, just 400 metres from the Chain of Lakes Trail, will be an ideal starting point for people looking for a good ride.
Stonehouse says one of his and Doucette’s biggest goals is to bring e-biking to as many people as possible. That’s why they’ve gone out of their way to lower the barrier to entry.
Working with Zen, they have designed an original, folding e-bike they believe is easy to use, good quality, and a heck of a deal on price. While the average bike in their shop will sell for more than $3,000, the “OK to Go” will retail for less than $2,000.
Stonehouse says there’s even a great origin story behind the bike’s name.
“I was watching Game of Thrones for the first time right when we were designing [this bike]. Brienne of Tarth had a sword called the Oathkeeper. And I was like, alright, I have to pick a name so we’ll call it the OK to Go. If you’re trying to keep an oath to yourself, which is get out and go somewhere outside, this thing is the oath keeper to go.”
Stonehouse says making e-bikes accessible is so important to him and Doucette because cycling can be incredibly rewarding but also very difficult to get into, especially for people with physical limitations.
His wife is a very strong cyclist who “can eat 40 kilometres for breakfast,” he explains. Riding an e-bike lets him keep up with her (even, he jokes, if he has to rely on the occasional white lie and tell her he’s on a lower power setting than he actually is).
“Taking an e-bike by the water in Nova Scotia just kind of checks all the boxes for what I’m looking for out of recreation. I hope other people come down and try it. That’s our whole point: we’re trying to get as many people into this type of recreation as we can,” he says.
The EShop will officially open on May 13, at 102 Chain Lake Drive in Bayers Lake.
Trevor Nichols is Huddle’s editor, based in Halifax. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].