Drexel Hill bike shop owner finds success in happiness

His is a quintessential neighborhood bike shop, and like many small-scale retailers, it has huffed and puffed its way through the last few years with an uncomfortable weekly reality laid bare in cash-register receipts: Consumers simply aren't spending the way they did in better times.

But Frank Havnoonian is not a quintessential bike shopkeeper. Passion and optimism - not a focus on money or the lack of it - have kept Drexel Hill Cyclery, his one-man-does-it-all operation, chugging along against the economic tide and powerful competitors such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., whose massive scale has swiped huge chunks of the new-bicycle market away from shops like his.

The shoebox-size store on Burmont Avenue has been in the Havnoonian family since 1969, when Frank's father bought it during the height of the East Coast's bicycle-buying boom. Drive past and it is easy to miss, so camouflaged is it in a pocket of now-faded shops in a densely populated, yet eminently walkable, Delaware County suburb just west of Philadelphia.

Last week, amid the aisles of sleek yet moderately priced bikes, customer after customer showed how Havnoonian, 55, has kept the venture going, despite an anti-Wharton-case-study business model.

"Happiness first. Profit second," he said, describing his philosophy. "If you do a great job, people will beat a path to your door."

That was evidenced at 9:40 a.m. Tuesday, when the phone rang at his shop 20 minutes before he opened - Havnoonian, who lives nearby, was at work early.

On the line was Robert Hopper, 36, a loyal customer whose pedal broke near the tail end of his daily 38-mile round-trip commute from his home in Drexel Hill to one of Philadelphia's prisons, where he works as a carpenter-locksmith. (He had mostly walked back home from Front Street and Kensington Avenue.)

By 10:30 or so, his bike already repaired, Hopper and his 6-month-old golden retriever, Holly, were comfortable inside the shop, as if it were their own living room. Customer and shop owner chatted about the minutiae of bike parts and repairs, suggesting that despite his stout build and potbelly, Havnoonian himself boasts a history of hard-core cycling.

"Anybody can put a million-dollar inventory into a building," Havnoonian said, explaining why he refuses to go where some more newfangled bike shops have.

"Doesn't mean the people there know what they're doing," Hopper chimed in, his Diamondback mountain bike mended.

Hopper said he bought his bike from Havnoonian because, as a carpenter, he recognizes the value of buying a mechanical product made of quality parts, and this shop seems to take care in choosing what it sells.

He bought a second bike for his 14-year-old son, and it hasn't broken down once in five years, Hopper said. "I come here, I spend a little bit more, but I know I'm getting a quality product that'll last a lot of years."

Most bikes at Drexel Hill Cyclery sell for $270 to $800, prices suited to the middle- and working-class families who live nearby. But some enthusiasts come from farther away, too, lured by Havnoonian's expert reputation.

Last year, he said, he special-ordered an elite racer for a customer willing to spend $5,800 on a Raleigh Team - "a Tour-de-France-type bike."

Hopper was not the only one singing Havnoonian's praises last week. Other customers did, too, as did the UPS deliveryman, who said he had bought a bike at the shop and his brother bought five.

"Information," Havnoonian said, is what differentiates him from his big-box competitors. "It's what you can't get at the toy stores."

On paper, Havnoonian does not fit the born-merchant profile. A math whiz in high school, he graduated from Drexel University with a chemistry degree in 1978.

But even before opening the shop, his father had worked for a bicycle wholesaler in Philadelphia, so bikes were frequent dinnertime conversation. Havnoonian became hooked on cycling in ways he finds difficult to explain with words. So he went to work there right after leaving Drexel.

"I love the sciences - chemistry, physics, astronomy," he said, "but I live for the bike business."

These days, he hardly resembles the string-bean-thin racers who sign lucrative endorsement deals for their cycling dominance. Yet it was only a few decades ago that a younger Havnoonian clocked nearly professional racing-tour times in competitions.

But the real challenge, it seems, has been making money as new-bicycle sales have shifted to bigger retailers that order cheaper, custom-made bikes directly from the manufacturers.

"My father has a saying: 'If Wal-Mart sold parachutes, who would jump?' " Havnoonian said, critical of bicycles sold at low cost and, he believes, lower quality. Plus, parents increasingly give their children cell phones instead of bikes, which also hurts sales.

These days, Havnoonian relies more on profit from service than sales. Because he pays only a modest rent to his 88-year-old father, now retired, overhead is low and he keeps prices low on service.

He is sure of what he does - and why.

"Albert Einstein said the first bicycle was here before the first car and it'll be here after the last one," Havnoonian said. "Because it represents simplicity - and people yearn for simplicity."