Cycling is taking over Dublin – everywhere you look there’s commuters whizzing through the streets, young people on rented bike shares, and parents cycling with more children than you could ever have imagined fitting on one bike. Bike share companies have become increasingly popular in recent years, and in Ireland especially, small independent companies dominate the market. Even with the surge in popularity of cycle, it’s harder than ever for small companies to stay afloat. So that begs the question – how do you make yourself stand out?  

One bike share company is using vibrant marketing and really tapping into the joy of cycling to promote the sustainable lifestyle. And even Dublin City Council has noticed. 

 On Oct 16, the council launched the BikeBunkers scheme, a scheme to install secure bunkers so Dublin City residents can safely store their bikes – making cycling more accessible to people living in apartments or with limited space. The BikeBunkers are being run with the bike share company Bleeper Bikes.  

Bleeper’s bikes – the white bikes with the purple Payzone logo on the side – operate in Dublin City, Fingal County and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown. They were the first bike share company to hit the Irish market – the independent company was set up 2017 and the first bikes were available to rent in 2018.  

Kiernan Ryan, Bleeper’s head of marketing said “Hugh Cooney, our founder and current CEO, he had been living and working in China for a few years in the 2010s and he saw how popular stationless bikes were in China and saw that they were coming.” 

After returning to Dublin, Cooney was inspired to take introduce stationless bike sharing to the Irish market. He began setting up company. The business plan was simple – they place their bikes all around the city and using the app customers can unlock their electronic locks and pay to rent the bike for a short period of time.  

Since the bikes hit the streets in 2018, they’ve expanded their business model. “From a business perspective, we also do bike leasing now. It’s kind of a subscription e bike service. So, you sign up for your own e-bike, depending on what model it is, it’s between 20 and 40 euro per week. And then included in that subscription fee is any maintenance or repairs, replacements for that bike. So, if anything happens to your bike, you can just come back to showroom, swap out the bike, or our technicians will fix it,” said Ryan.  

In the past year, they’ve heavily leaned on their unique marketing to drive business. “Recently we’re really tapping into the fact that cycling is one of the most purely joyful things you can do in your day-to-day life. Everyone knows there are difficulties with cycling, whether it’s infrastructure theft or danger from cars. But fundamentally being able to hop on a bike and cycle around the city, there’s a basic joy to that, and that’s something that we’re emphasising through our brand,” said Ryan. 

Bleeper has been relying on colourful hand illustrations in their marketing, kicking against grey drab stock images and generative AI. “It is going against the grain, because outside stock imagery, there’s also this rise in generative AI imagery, and we don’t really see that as part of our identity, particularly given the environmental and emissions concerns around AI,” said Ryan.  

“Our whole business model is about reducing emissions through cycling, and you know how much energy a single AI image can create so it doesn’t make sense for us,” said Ryan. 

As a small company with only X employees, they are shaped by their employees’ talents. “We have skills within our workforce, and we’re really happy to use them. So we have a great employee who is very good at illustrations and hand drawings, and we’re supporting that,” said Ryan.