Our History
The Tiny Corner Bike Shop was founded in July of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I (AJ) saw the building while out on a long ride three months prior in April. The world was in an eerie lock down at the time. The nightly news reported how many were lost every day and we were spraying our groceries with Lysol, just in case. But riding a bike alone was considered safe. I came through Oakland on that warm spring evening and decided to swing past the town parking lot to see where the new group rides were meeting on Tuesday nights. As I did, I noticed a small, sad yellow building nearby with a "For Sale" sign on it and tulips blooming out front. The building wasn't very large, but it definitely had character. I loved the facade of wooden planks and the little flowers hiding among the weeds. It was quaint. Humble. Waiting. I took a picture with my smart phone and my mind began racing as I thought of the possibilities. When I got home that evening, I told my spouse, Leah, that I had a crazy idea about starting a bike shop. To my surprise, and without even a hint of hesitation, she said, "You should do it." That started the ball rolling.
By July, the business loan had been secured and the property was ours. It was three more months of renovations, getting inventory, building bikes, and completing the necessary paperwork before the shop had its soft opening during Autumn Glory weekend of 2020. Those first few weekends will forever be etched into my memory.
The years have moved quickly. COVID peaked and ended. The United States saw its biggest bike boom and subsequent bust since the 1970s. Our kids grew about two feet each. And I've built up or worked on thousands of bikes. The shop has remained opened full-time or nearly full-time during the months of April-October and part-time during the colder months of November-March. The business model has also changed over the years. I first started with a large inventory of new bikes every year like most bike shops, but in the time since, I've come to see that many can't afford a new bike -- and there are plenty of used bikes that need a good home. So, starting in 2025, the shop began prioritizing used bikes instead of new. As a certified retailer, we can still order new bikes from Jamis, Salsa, and Surly, but we no longer keep them stocked.
As for my personal experience with cycling, I've been actively riding bikes for twenty-five years, starting in 2001 when I entered my first mountain bike event at Valley Falls State Park as a junior sport racer. Over the course of the past two and a half decades, I've raced and ridden my bike tens of thousands of miles on the roads and trails in Garrett and Preston Counties and across the country. I'm a finisher of the 2022 Tour Divide, a 2700 mile mountain bike/gravel race from Canada to Mexico that's considered one of the hardest races in the world. I'm also a six-time finisher of the arduous RockStar bikepacking race, and a former XC racer from way back in the day when NORBA existed and we were all rocking v-brakes and 26 inch tires.
Leah and I live just across the state line in Aurora, West Virginia, where both of us grew up, along with our two wild sons, a black lab named Laika, and a plethora of barn cats. Reading is my second favorite activity after riding bikes, so there's a Little Free Library on the front of the shop.
The picture to the right is from when we closed on the building in July of 2020. Much has changed since then, but our passion for cycling and helping others hasn't.
