Mike Loves Bike

At age six, Mike Cotfas’s dad handed him an old bike and told Mike to take it apart before he returned. “I was just super happy I got to destroy something — but also learn from it,” he says. Little did either of them know that Mike would one day wind up owning a bike shop.

Though he explored some other paths, studying literature at university, building and maintaining bikes became an obsession he couldn’t shake. “I had my bike shop job during the day and then I’d come home and keep tinkering for another three or four hours,” he recalls. He would pimp friends’ bicycles and salvage old bikes off the internet to fix up and resell.

Eventually, all the moonlighting led to a home-based bicycle building and repair business in 2010. In spring 2013, he opened his location on Whyte and 89 Street. “My dad gave me my career path,” says Mike.