State of Indian cycling gear: the GearLama Index, June 2026

A monthly snapshot of what's on the shelf, at what price, and where.

GearLama tracks 18 specialist cycling stores in India. Combined, they carry 43,317 distinct products. Right now, 26,519 of those are in stock — the rest are listed but sold out, waiting on restock, or catalog placeholders.

Here's what that market actually looks like.

The stores

The catalog is dominated by three large players. Bums on the Saddle carries 10,355 products, Cycling Boutique lists 9,545, and The Bike Affair holds 6,700. Together those three account for 61% of the tracked catalog. The next eight stores make up most of the remainder; the last six are specialty boutiques with under 400 SKUs each.

Catalog size is not the same as stock. Here's the in-stock rate for each store, ranked best to worst:

Cycling Boutique is worth calling out: it has the second-largest catalog in the country but the second-lowest in-stock rate. If you're browsing there, expect two-thirds of what you see to be unavailable. The small, focused stores at the top of the list (Heini, NAC, Keep A Pace, D Byk) are the opposite — smaller selection, but if it's listed, it's on the shelf.

The brands

There are 1,041 distinct brands across the catalog. The vast majority are long tail — one product at one store — but a small group of brands are ubiquitous.

Only two brands are stocked at 11 of 18 stores: Shimano (3,362 SKUs) and SRAM (1,292 SKUs). That's the drivetrain duopoly in Indian cycling. Everyone else caps at 9 stores or fewer.

Note what's missing from this top tier: no apparel or eyewear brand cracks the "9 stores" threshold, even though apparel is one of the largest catalog categories (see below). Apparel distribution in India is fragmented — most stores carry their own preferred lines rather than the same handful across the board.

The money

Bikes are 6.5% of the tracked catalog (2,838 SKUs) but they carry an average price of ₹1.99 lakh — an order of magnitude above every other category. Everything else averages under ₹20,000.

Apparel is the largest category by volume — over 4,000 in-stock items — but distributed across 162 different brands, none of them dominant. Drivetrain and accessories both punch above bikes on volume. Bikes have the smallest brand count of the top-6 categories (128), which is what you'd expect when the price barrier to being a bike brand is high.

Bikes are also unusually spread across price bands. Of the 2,838 tracked, here's how they distribute:

The ₹2–5 lakh band being the largest is a real signal about who's buying in India. It's not just entry-level: there's a meaningful market above ₹2 lakh, and stores are stocking to match. There are almost twice as many bikes tracked in that band as under ₹50k.

What actually moved

In the last 30 days, 7,588 price events were recorded across 6,313 unique products — roughly a quarter of the in-stock catalog had a price change of some kind. This is the churn number that matters if you're timing a purchase: about one in four products actively moved.

A note on the numbers

All figures reflect the state of the 18 tracked catalogs at the end of June 2026. Price and stock movements are recorded whenever a catalog changes, so month-over-month comparisons in future issues will be like-for-like. Products flagged as non-cycling (a handful of accessories that leak in from mixed-catalog stores) are excluded.

The next Index post lands at the end of July. In the meantime, /dropzone is the always-current view of biggest discounts across all 18 stores, and /blog has the weekly Drop Report.

Have a question the data could answer? Reply to me at bsbhadwal@gmail.com.