When Kevin Gorman, owner of Webcyclery, jumped onto the Internet bandwagon in 1997 and launched his own mail-order bike parts company, his office was in his garage.

The company began with a bare-bones inventory of a single product line. Once the manufacture of that line decided to sell through retail outlets rather than wholesale, Webcyclery became a company without a product.

So Gorman, an avid bike rider since 1991, reinvented his business, specializing in single-speeds, cyclocross and high-end mountain bikes in the $2,000-$6,000 range. With the help of his brother, Todd Gorman, and his father, he built his Internet bike shop into a half-million dollar business that survived the dot-com bust.

Q.What is your experience in the business?

A.I started riding bikes in 1990, and got a job at a bike shop and put myself through college that way. And as soon as I got out of college, I moved here to Bend and a year later started up a Web site.

Q.When did you start your business?

A.1997.

Q.How much has your business grown since then?

A.It started pretty much in my garage, a few shelves with a few bikes on them, and not much business at all. It’s grown into a nice little business, I think.

Q.Why choose to do business over the Internet, rather than just setting up shop locally?

A.Back in 1995, I took a class called ”Marketing on the Internet.” It was a really interesting class. It was very basic. In fact, there was not a whole lot going on, but it was a really cool class and I enjoyed it very much. My professor was actually a biker, so we got to know each other very well. I just thought it was a great idea, working in bike shops. I thought, hey, you know, you reach a very large audience on the Web.

Q.Over the years many dot-com retailers, such as furniture.com and petstore.com, have gone bust. What are some of the greatest challenges of running a business via the Internet and how have you managed to survive?

A.The greatest challenge is definitely marketing – getting people to the site and letting them know who you are. That’s definitely the hardest part. In the last few years I’ve become much better at the marketing part than in the first few years. We’re definitely getting more and more traffic everyday. More and more people are coming in on vacation. They say, ”Oh, I saw you on the Internet and I wanted to stop by.” So, it’s definitely working.

Q. Would you ever consider retail stores?

A.Multiple (stores), no. Definitely in the future, once I have more employees, we’ll put a little more effort into the local scene. But we don’t do that much local business right now and we don’t really have the time to do the labor.

Q.I noticed you sell hard-to-find niche products. What is the market for these specialty bike items? How many orders are you shipping out weekly?

A.The market for each of the different little niches isn’t that big. But you take into consideration the size of the country and there are riders all over. They’re spread out, but there is only one or two places for these people to get the parts that they need and we’re one of them. So we’re a big fish in a pretty small pond.

Q. Are there any businesses after which Webcyclery was modeled?

A. Not really. I’d surf the Internet and find cool Web sites that I liked and see what worked and what didn’t work. I didn’t get to study the businesses themselves and see how they were doing on the back end.

Q. Based on your past revenue and business trends, what is your projected growth for the company?

A. A couple of years now we’ve been growing 100 percent per year. I don’t think that will last forever. But I guess in the next few years I would like to be in the $2-3 million range with just a few employees hopefully.

Q. What range are you in now?

A. Under a million.

Q. Is that where you expected it to be at this point?

A. Well, I wish it would be higher of course. But since I pretty much started over two years ago, I’m pretty happy with where it’s at. Sales dropped off almost completely and so I started over. So yeah, I’m very happy.