Phill Elston, Operations Director for Brompton Bicycles, sat down with Rosie Burbidge, an IP partner specialising in retail at Howard Kennedy (and fellow Brompton owner), to talk about what he’s learned throughout his career to date in manufacturing, moving from the aerospace sector to manufacturing consumer goods. As the heritage British brand celebrates its 50th birthday in 2025, Phill opens up about empowering his teams to lead as the business rapidly grows, the brand partnership he’s most proud of and why community and sustainability are at the heart of everything they do, plus, his advice for anyone looking to replicate their success.
Could you share some highlights from your career and what initially drew you to the world of urban cycling?
I spent almost a decade working for Foundry that made high grade alloy parts for aerospace. I joined the business as a temp working nights on a sand blaster. By the time I left I was running two major departments after progressing via manufacturing engineer to team leader and so on until I was operations manager. What I learned during this time was pivotal to how I lead now. I can really understand what it’s like to be on the factory floor, because I was once. What drew me to work at Brompton Bicycles was the culture – it really aligns with my leadership style, I’m very much a people-person and very customer-centric. Having the opportunity to work for a brand like Brompton, something with real purpose, making a real difference to society, to the individuals who use the bike, as well as those around it who aren’t being polluted or run over, felt like a really good thing.
How do you set your teams up to be more empowered, more agile, more clear about their goals and how they deliver it?
My leadership style is based around servant leadership. The idea being that you set a vision and a goal, and your job is purely about helping people achieve it. When I first joined, we were very centralised, and we didn’t empower teams locally. I gave people more local ownership, more local accountability. As the business scaled over the years, it forgot to scale its operational ecosystem to match that, and we’d just outgrown the mechanisms that we had. I separated our factory out into four smaller sub factories, each with local support teams, so that none of them could be constrained by what the others were doing. This created really clear responsibilities and accountabilities for each, as well as a feeling of being part of one team. We agreed quarterly targets. Historically, it’s been quite common within manufacturing to blame missing targets on other people. “I didn’t do that because X, Y or Z hadn’t finished their part.” It removed a lot of the politics. That’s how we’ve operated for probably three years now, whilst we were growing really rapidly, and it has made a big difference to the speed of execution.
The other important element is personal development. During Covid, we hired a lot of people with no experience in cycling – they’d been at restaurants or in warehouses, for example, they just needed a job. I was really conscious that a lot of their skill sets weren’t being utilized, we had all of this untapped resource. We had people that were on the assembly line that had come from engineering jobs in the chemical industry, or were warehouse managers in a previous role, or they’d done a mechanical engineering degree but hadn’t yet got the work experience to be able to go and apply for another job. We started creating secondments and opportunities to work alongside other teams, many staff have moved into quality, engineering, digital, planning, team leadership from this. We invest heavily in leadership training. We’re really, really passionate about personal development, although we use external providers for some development work, we actually enjoy using our teams to develop and deliver some of the content, it’s us developing ourselves and teams as well.
Brompton is known for its innovative brand partnerships. Can you tell us about a collaboration that stands out to you and how it has influenced the brand’s evolution?
One that really stands out for me is midway through Covid, we did a collaboration with a charity in the US called Crew Nation. It’s a charity that was set up to support people in the music industry who weren’t the artists themselves, people like the techies and roadies, that couldn’t work during the pandemic. From a brand point of view, it worked for us as well because the US was an area where we didn’t have a great presence already. It was also talking to a demographic that we wouldn’t think of as a traditionally Brompton demographic. And it was for a cause that we cared about. We ended up getting some really high profile bands to design bikes for us – including Radiohead, the Foo Fighters, Phoebe Bridgers, Dinosaur Jr and LCD Sound system for example – and we were able to test out a novel new way of applying images onto our frames that looks really special. And it was very low risk too: we were only manufacturing one of each bike, not thousands of identical ones.
How is Brompton integrating sustainable practices into its operations and product development?
As an organisation, I think we’ve operated within what is classed as a B Corp framework for a long time. Even from a shareholder level down, they’re aware that we’re totally committed to this as an organisation. It influences our material choices, influences our partnerships, who we contract with and who we don’t, where we source our products, how we train, how we talk about what we do, our employment conditions. For example, we pay the London living wage rather than just the minimum wage. It’s just knitted into how we operate.
A great example is this: I was cycling home recently and ended up chatting to a guy whilst riding along, he worked for a charity based in Southall that had been given 12 of our old electric bikes, but wasn’t able to use them. I invited him and some of the technicians to bring them into the factory so we could take a look and get the bikes working. And we did. And that makes a difference to 12 people in Southall now, who can get around and do whatever they need to do, which they couldn’t before.
As an organisation, we work with Saheli Hub, and Cycle sisters which was founded to encourage women from Muslim backgrounds to get into cycling. The Brompton is really good for that, because it’s got a higher seat and a lower cross bar, so it’s more respectful, and it’s not going to be awkward to ride if you’re wearing more modest clothing. It feels safer for them. We’d not really thought about that until we were talking to a couple of the ladies when we were doing a ride out after a factory visit. But we do that sort of thing a lot. We care about it.
Customer engagement is crucial for any brand.
How does Brompton foster a strong community among its users, and what role does customer feedback play in your innovation process?
We do a lot of customer surveys and monitor our social channels, actively seeking out feedback and trying to understand different user groups and personalities. We know that there are some customers who want to own a bike, lease a bike, borrow a bike just for one day, for example. And how each of those use the product and what they expect from the experience is different.
We feed back any issues post-purchase into the design loop. So if a customer buys a product and then something doesn’t happen as they’d expected to, or as we’d expected to, then that goes back into our quality and design loop, and we just make sure we understand them and fix it. We’ve got a seven-year warranty on our products, because it’s so important that when someone invests the money in our product that it doesn’t let them down.
We have community ride out groups at pretty much all of our stores, who meet up and go for rides together. If someone’s just bought a Brompton, then the store often makes them aware that they can go for a ride out with some of the group. So if they’ve got questions about the best ways of changing a tire, or riding tips, they can ask each other.
We also do something super cool called the Brompton World Championships for our customers, fans and staff too. We host mini races across the globe and the winners of those then come together and race in London in a closed street race. It’s a brilliant event where everyone just gets drunk on Brompton love, and sometimes actually drunk too! Everyone dresses up in brilliant costumes. No one wears lycra. It’s just about a bit of eccentricity, a bit of fun. It is truly phenomenal, and it’s a really good reminder of why we do what we do, how much fun you can have and what it means to be part of something like this brand.
For other retail brands aspiring to achieve similar success, what advice would you offer regarding innovation, building brand loyalty, and navigating market challenges?
I think it’s important to have a clear and credible vision, as well as a strong set of values, which speak to how you operate. Our purpose around ‘creating urban freedom for happy lives’ gives us loads of scope to think about that from the perspective of not just the customer but also the staff member and the environment too.
When you’re a small business growing, it’s really important to talk about and capture your working processes, not to get too constrained by trying to capture policies and processes in excessive detail, as they will very quickly change and constrain you. Sometimes the worst thing you can do is write a policy and train people to it, because that stifles innovation and accountability rather than empowering people to understand intent. When people understand the intent rather than necessarily the letter of policy, then I think they are generally able to make better decisions.
Secondly, breathe life into your values via reward and recognition. So when someone does something that fits into one of your values, then absolutely reward it. One of our values is building community. If a team leader arranges a lunch to introduce them to the rest of the team because they’re feeling left out, that should absolutely be acknowledged.
Being vertically integrated has also been beneficial to us. Having far more control over your supply chain is actually really powerful. Building strong relationships with your dealer and distributor network, and having far more sensitivity to trying to right size your business to meet demand is probably the most valuable thing that we’ve had in our arsenal.
We don’t have 50 different bikes. We’ve got a lot of different ways you can configure them, but they’re all built basically around the same skeleton. Not having to manage an incredibly diverse portfolio through a very rocky time has helped us to have greater agility.
This tiny, beautiful, agile, folding bike, cutting through the city, is a beautiful metaphor for how we’re navigating the cycling industry right now. The bike’s characteristics mirror our way of operating.
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