AJ’s Family Cyclery in Livermore closing at the end of January

By Katie Nielsen

A popular Livermore bicycle shop is closing its doors for good on Saturday.

The owner of AJ’s Family Cyclery says between the economic downturn and tariffs on goods produced overseas, he just can’t keep the shop open.

“This is where I spent 75-80 percent of my time every day, just turning bikes over every day,” said AJ Wright, looking around the now-empty shop.

He started working on bicycles back in 2020 during the pandemic, when he was struggling to pay his rent after being laid off.

“I basically made an Instagram post and just said, ‘Hey, does anybody need help with their bikes? And literally I started getting a flood of messages from friends, friends of friends, and before I knew it, within a few weeks I had basically a 5 to 6 day schedule of doing seven to 10 bikes a day,” he said.

Wright was working out of his garage at the time, and a neighbor reported him to the city for operating a business out of a residential area. He started an online petition, and more than 12,000 people signed it, urging the city to change the codes so he could stay. The issue went all the way to the city council, and after getting the support of the mayor, he was allowed to keep working out of his garage.

“It was just so much fun every single day, meeting new people, working on different bikes. There were different problems to solve,” he said.

He got so busy, he moved out of the garage and into a brick-and-mortar storefront, still repairing bikes but expanding the business into selling new ones as well. 

“This is a really big task. This is a very big goal. I had no idea if I was even going to pull it off, but I want to try,” he told CBS News Bay Area.

He opened the shop off Concannon Boulevard in 2024. It was one of the worst years for bicycle sales in decades, but at the start of 2025, he had built a cycling community around the shop, and sales were picking up.

“Things were selling. Things were moving. The economy, I was like, ‘Whoa! We are seeing a humungous turnaround.’ Literally, it was a night and day difference. This is going to be my saving grace,” he said.

But right when things seemed to be getting better, the tariffs hit, and they hit the cycling world hard because almost all bicycle parts and components are made overseas.

“Service demand plummeted, sales demand plummeted, and then the cost of everything went substantially up,” Wright said.

He tried to hang on through the holidays to see if that would make a difference, but not one bike was sold the whole month of December. At the beginning of January, he made the difficult decision to close.

When asked if he would go back and do it again, he said, “Yes. 100 percent. I’ve got time and energy and passion, and you know, one door closes, another opens. Tomorrow is a new day, and there are endless possibilities for what tomorrow could bring.”

He said he isn’t sure what the next chapter holds, but he hopes it will still include bicycles and the cycling community.