ABOUT US

🇬🇧 EN / FR 🇫🇷

Musette bicycles and coffee first opened its doors in 2017 becoming the first bicycle café in Bordeaux. It was founded by Robert Lawrence (American) and Christopher Cooley (British) : two expatriated bicycle aficionados who had visited such establishments back home and decided to bring the concept to Bordeaux.

Musette was designed to be a place to drink a good coffee, get your bike repaired or buy a new bike and also a place for the cycling community to meet and mingle. Since then Musette has expanded and grown welcoming new team members ; what hasn’t changed is the community spirit and the fact that shop remains proudly independent.

Why the name Musette?

Here we see Eddy Merckx with a musette mid race.

It took us a long while to come up with a name that we could agree upon. We had some strange ideas such as Big Leg’s Coffee Shop, which we found funny but not quite right. Eventually we decided upon Musette because it sounds nice to say, it adds a touch of femininity to the brand, and what it describes links the two things we specialise in: cycling and eating / drinking.

Musette is a technical cycling term that is used in both French and English when talking about the shoulder bag that is handed to cyclists during races. It is filled with everything a cyclist might need to rehydrate and keep energy levels high.

Our philosophy

We are proud to be an independent business that is run by its owners, it means we can do things the way we want according to what we believe in.

One of our biggest reasons for wanting to run a cycle café was our belief in cycling as a whole and the community that surrounds it. Whether you are a competitive cyclist, a weekend warrior, or just use a bike for getting around town what is important is that you are keeping active (something that is increasingly important as sedentary lifestyles and the problems that come with them are a symptom of our time). Health is something often taken for granted but something that is so precious. We hope more and more people take up cycling in the future and believe that it is already something we are starting to see.

We also believe that as an inner city mode of transport the importance of cycling and the necessary infrastructure that goes along with it cannot be understated. We are proud that Bordeaux ranks highly in the Copenhagenize Index, which measures bicycle-friendliness in cities around the world. But more can still be done and the more people there are on bikes the more chance there is of this happening. This is why we believe strongly in community and want to create a hub (excuse the pun) where cyclists can meet at any time and all things cycling related in Bordeaux can be discussed. Our opinion is that the more bike and pedestrian friendly a city is the nicer a place to live in it is, which no one can say is a bad thing!

Cycling also has a low environmental impact which is an ethos that we’ve tried to build other aspects of our business around. We source a lot of our produce from local producersand buy our coffee from small-batch artisanal roasters in Bordeaux. While setting up we also aimed to leave as low an impact as possible recovering furniture from garage sales and shop closings. It might mean are décor isn’t 100% homogeneous but actually that’s the way we like it.

Aside from that the values we deem most important in everything we do from bikes to coffee are quality, durability, versatility and timelessness.