Cycling IncubatorsLoek Luijbregts · Netherlands

Two gravel riders, tiny in the frame, on a ridge track through the rhyolite mountains of Landmannalaugar, Iceland

Marketing & Communications for riders, brands and destinations

Seen. Understood. Published. Booked.

Founders, brands and destination marketing organisations usually have something genuinely good. What is often missing is the bridge between “we have this” and “people see it, value it and book it.” Building that bridge is what I get hired for.

Landmannalaugar, Iceland · See us there? 5 years on this story still inspires new visitors.

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110M+

Earned impressions

90+

Cycling organisations

30+

Businesses outside cycling

€0

Spent on paid media

What you actually book

Being seen is the easy half.

A region, a culture, a product, a landscape, a route: the value is usually already there. What is missing is the connection between having it and people seeing, understanding and booking it - seen, understood, published, passed on, bought. Every brief on this page is a version of that same run.

And it is built to outlast the invoice. Zuiderwaterlinie, Visit Luxembourg, Tilburg, Goirle, Oisterwijk, Hilvarenbeek, Go Türkiye - every one of them is still promoting the same routes two to five years on. A campaign stops when the budget does. Something a person can actually go and ride keeps bringing people in.

Selected work · 2021–2026

Ten examples, and their transformations.

01Destination rebrand - from mass tourism to active tourismGo Türkiye · Marmaris 02Better visitors - from a one-day stop to a four-day stayGo Türkiye · Cappadocia 03Brand positioning - ten months to save the millions already investedGRAVAA · Interim CMO 04Social marketing - sixty days, nine million views, 280 leadsPilot Cycles · Interim social 05Earned, not bought - attention millions watchedIceland, Spain, Morocco 06Great value, made visible - an investment round investors could readWinWheelz · Press & paid 07Borrowed trust - relationships that multiplied the returnLuxembourg, Flanders, Tilburg 08Trust money cannot buy - the best photographers, volunteeringMark Gunter Photo Awards 09Sold-out rooms - an online audience that turned up in person, and paidHighland Heritage · Crazy500 · Cyclism 10The method - proven in cycling, applied outside itExplore the North · Lapland

Want the thinking behind all of this? Twenty-three pieces on cycling tourism, earned media and creators sit in the writing, and every photograph, film and press placement is searchable in the media library.

Destination rebrand · Go Türkiye, Marmaris & Datça

From a coast people fly over to a coast people ride.

The brief was a change of category: away from package beach tourism, towards visitors who come for the riding, spend more per day and come back. That is a positioning job before it is a content job.

So we rode it. Real roads, real gravel, in February, answering the questions a rider actually asks - what is the surface, where do I sleep, is there water, can I do this. It went out as routes, film and photography, and as me standing at Dutch expos telling people in person. Booked four times since.

Cyclists on a gravel road along the turquoise coastline of the Marmaris peninsula, Türkiye — Marmaris peninsula, Türkiye · photography Loek Luijbregts for Go Türkiye

Regions repositioned

4×

Rebooked

Expo representation

€0

Ad spend

Better visitors · Go Türkiye, Cappadocia & the Kaçkar

From a one-day stop to a four-day stay.

Cappadocia already had the visitors. It had them for one morning, in a balloon, and then it lost them. The job was length of stay: give people enough reason on the ground to book four days instead of one.

At ground level it is a better story than from the air - soft tuff, empty valleys, a potter's workshop you ride past at six in the morning, a coffee van parked above the clouds. The Kaçkar needed the opposite treatment: high, cold, and honest about what it asks. Two regions, two reasons to stay.

Hot air balloons over the Cappadocian valleys at sunrise — Cappadocia at first light

Riders passing a potter's workshop with blue window frames in a Cappadocian village

A bikepacker climbing a gravel road towards standing stone ruins

Trail runners on a snow-covered ridge in the Kaçkar Mountains above the clouds

Cappadocia and the Kaçkar · trail photography Ardisen Karadeniz tour

A yellow coffee van parked on a white ridge above the clouds with a group of cyclists arriving — The coffee van above the clouds. You cannot invent a stop like this from an office.

Brand positioning · GRAVAA, interim CMO, 2024

Ten months to save the millions already invested.

Years of engineering and several million euros were already in the ground. What was missing was a market that understood what had been built. The job was to make a complex piece of hardware mean something to fanatical riders, journalists, racers and investors at the same time, before the next funding round.

At the Gravel World Championships, Marianne Vos punctured three kilometres from the line. The kinetic hub pump kept her tyre up, she sprinted on hard rubber and beat the reigning world champion. Thirty-plus outlets ran the story about the wheels.

Close-up of a GRAVAA inflation valve mounted in a Reserve carbon wheel — The inflation system inside a Reserve wheel - the product behind the headlines.

Collage of international press headlines about Marianne Vos winning the Gravel World Championships on a self-inflating tyre system — Cycling Weekly, Cyclingnews, Wielerflits, Het Nieuwsblad, Mybike, ESMTB - one race, six languages.

Loek Luijbregts on stage holding a GRAVAA wheel in front of a screen full of press coverage — Days later, on stage at the RVO national congress with the wheel in hand - ten minutes in front of 800 of the country's senior sustainable-mobility decision makers. An invitation that came through the network, not a media plan.

60M+

Earned impressions

50+

International placements

9,000

Email subscribers

<50%

Of the €250k budget used

Loek's network, his creativity under real pressure, and his press work brought us worldwide recognition at exactly the moments it mattered.

Gertjan van Ginderen · CEO, GRAVAA

Social marketing · Pilot Cycles, interim social

Sixty days, nine million views, a queue for €8,000 bikes.

Pilot Cycles builds bikes for a lifetime. I know, because I dreamed of one for years. But their channels were seen by a fraction of the people around the world who, like me, dream of and save for a titanium bike like that.

So I reached out and explained how I would execute and activate it. They dared to say yes, and it served everyone well.

Views in 60 days

280

Leads for €8k+ bikes

3.1M

Top five reels

13K

New followers

1000+

Posts reshared

100%

Remotely managed

Remotely managed means all of it: the idea, the travel, the filming, the editing, the posting, the replies, the lead capture, and the follow-up with everyone who enquired.

Grid of Instagram reels from the Morocco campaign with view counts from 9,563 up to 475,000 — Nine posts from the Morocco campaign, with their reach. Shot on an iPhone while riding.

Earned, not bought · Iceland, Spain, Morocco

Attention nobody paid for, watched by millions.

Iceland, Spain, Morocco: rides nobody commissioned, made because the category rewards people who have actually been there. Earned attention behaves differently from bought attention - it is slower to build, it does not stop when the budget does, and an editor picking it up is worth more than any placement you can pay for.

Five days through the Icelandic highlands, two riders, one camera. It ran as the cover and the lead feature of Gravel Bike. People have ridden the route because of it since.

Two gravel riders on a rocky descent in the Icelandic highlands — Landmannalaugar, Iceland · self-funded, February

The Iceland story opened across two printed pages under the headline Groot Geluk — Eight pages in the most-read cycling magazine in the Netherlands. Again.

Cover of Gravel Bike magazine issue 2/2022 featuring the Iceland photograph — Gravel Bike 2/2022 · cover

3×

Magazine cover

7×

Lead feature

100%

Made while riding

Great value, made visible · WinWheelz BV, investment round

Millions in revenue, given a face and a story to like.

WinWheelz had grown for years - a Dutch family manufacturer turning over seven and a half million while the big bicycle brands around it were falling over. Performance was not the problem. The problem was that the whole story sat in an investment memorandum, written in a language only the people who wrote it could read.

The adviser running the round came to me on a recommendation from a senior at Canyon: “for cycling marketing, go to Loek”. I interviewed the owner several times, pulled the figures and specifications out of the memorandum, and turned them into stories people understood and wanted to pass on. FD, De Ondernemer, Eindhovens Dagblad and BikeBiz all wrote about it, unpaid - national, regional and international in the same month.

Het Financieele Dagblad: Kleine WinWheelz claimt winst, terwijl grote fietsmerken onderuitgaan

De Ondernemer: Waar grote fietsmerken omvallen, trapt Winwheelz naar 7,5 miljoen omzet

Eindhovens Dagblad: Geldrops familiebedrijf gelooft heilig in Nederlandse tweewielers

BikeBiz: Dutch business Winwheelz achieves growth with different business approach

Het Financieele Dagblad · De Ondernemer · Eindhovens Dagblad · BikeBiz. One story, four rooms.

Meta ads manager showing two WinWheelz traffic campaigns at €0.06 and €0.12 per link click

Press builds belief; it does not deliver a visitor to an investment page. That part I bought - and kept buying cheaply. Seven iterations in, the traffic campaign was running at six cents a click, and carried 95% of everyone who landed on the investment page. Total spend on the runs above: under eighty euros.

The same WinWheelz ad rendered across every Meta placement, from feed to stories to reels — One line - “from family business to growth business” - built to hold across every placement.

≈€350K

Raised in round one

Outlets, regional to international

95%

Of traffic to the investment page

€0.06

Per click, after seven iterations

The numbers are unique. The story is invisible and there is no online presence. Can you help?

The brief, in one line

Borrowed trust · Luxembourg, Flanders, Tilburg

Borrowed trust, and what it multiplies.

A destination's own channel is trusted by the people who already follow it. Everything beyond that has to be borrowed - from a publisher, a rider, a club, a neighbouring region. Get the borrowing right and the same budget reaches several times as far.

Luxembourg since 2021: routes documented well enough that ninety thousand people clicked through to go and ride them. Flanders four years running. Tilburg, Goirle, Oisterwijk, Hilvarenbeek, Zuiderwaterlinie: all still sending people down the same routes today.

A gravel cyclist riding through a pine forest past a rusted metal aircraft sculpture — WWII memorial, All Along The Watchtowers. Photo: Loek Luijbregts

800,000

Route clicks, Zuiderwaterlinie

4×

Rebooked, Flanders & Luxembourg

10+

Destinations still using it

2–5 yrs

After delivery

Trust money cannot buy · Mark Gunter Photo Awards

Four of the best said yes, for nothing.

A cycling photography prize I help organise. For the 2025 edition we asked four of the most respected photographers in the sport to judge it - Chris Burkard, Leon van Bon, Twila Federica and Michael Blann. All four volunteered.

Escape Collective, the reader-funded outlet run by cycling journalists and about as hard to buy as media gets, covered both the announcement and the winners. That is what a network is for, and it is the part of this work you cannot buy in.

The four judges of the 2025 Mark Gunter Photo Awards: Chris Burkard, Leon van Bon, Twila Federica and Michael Blann

World-class judges

€0

Judging fees

2×

Escape Collective features

How the work is made

Four rules I have not found a reason to break.

Ride it first.

Every route on this page was ridden before it was written about. It is the only way the content answers the question riders actually have, which is never “is it beautiful” but “can I do this, and what will it cost me”.

Earn it, don't buy it.

A hundred and ten million impressions, no media budget behind any of them. Adverts get skipped. Something a person recognises gets forwarded to three friends, and that reach is slower to build and much harder to lose.

Make it outlast the invoice.

A campaign stops when the budget stops. A route, a guide, a story someone can act on keeps working: seven destinations are still promoting routes I delivered two to five years ago. I would rather overdeliver something durable than bill for something that expires.

One person, all the way through.

Strategy, camera, edit, press list, follow-up calls. No account manager between you and the work, and no handover where the thinking gets lost. It is why I take on few clients at a time, and why the ones I take on tend to stay.

A rider filming the group ahead on a phone while riding — Most of it is shot from the saddle, at the speed the story actually happened.

What people say afterwards

Three clients, three different kinds of problem.

His broad perspective, energy and talent for making new connections regularly lead to fresh insight and concrete opportunity.
Henk SwarttouwPresident, European Cyclists' Federation

Investors and I were happy with the ten thousand leads and the colleagues he brought in - and that all of it happened comfortably inside budget.
Gertjan van GinderenCEO, GRAVAA

I came asking for quick hacks worth a hundred thousand in extra revenue. He showed me my real value instead. I now have several world-class clients.
Lars VeenstraVisual Storytelling

On stage & in the sector

The other half of the job is arguing for the category.

Client work is one thing. The rest of the time I am on a stage or in a room somewhere making the case that cycling tourism only works when the routes get used, the stories are lived, and the money stays local. I brief destination organisations on this method regularly - next up at the ECF Cycling Tourism Conference in Utrecht. Before that: the EuroVelo & Cycling Tourism Conference in Izmir, the International Bike & Hike Tourism Conference, the RVO national congress on sustainable mobility, and TEDx at Tilburg University.

Full auditorium at the EuroVelo and Cycling Tourism Conference in Izmir, 2023

Conference dinner at the Agora of Izmir at blue hour

Loek Luijbregts in conversation on stage in front of a seated audience

Izmir, Utrecht, Tilburg · conference photography Seraina Wams

Who you get

Cycling Incubators is one person.

Loek Luijbregts, from Tilburg in the Netherlands. For years I ran a gravel-cycling media company that made the kind of cycling stories I want to see myself: made from the bike, outside, real, recognisable, and handed over in a form you can actually go and ride or forward to a friend. That is still the standard everything here is held to.

Before that: digital marketing for small and mid-sized companies, and several thousand client conversations at a bank. That is where the rest of it comes from - ask a better question before you propose an answer.

The same skills go to owner-led companies outside cycling through loekluijbregts.com. Thirty-plus of them so far. Different sector, same run: seen, understood, published, passed on, bought.

Portrait of Loek Luijbregts speaking at a conference — Loek Luijbregts · photography Seraina Wams

Go TürkiyeGRAVAAVisit LuxembourgCycling in FlandersPilot CyclesWinWheelzApiduraRidley BikesRogelliEtxeondoVisit LaplandVisit SwedenVisit ÖrebroVisit UgandaVisit ColoradoHighlands ScotlandZuiderwaterlinieEuropean Cyclists’ FederationECF Cycling Tourism ConferenceInternational Bike & Hike ConferenceEscape CollectiveRouleurBicyclingGlobal Cycling NetworkGravel BikeFietsSportPinkBikeEurosportSporzaVRTLiveSlowRideFastIn de WaaierRAW Cycling

Ways to work together

Three shapes, depending on where the run breaks.

Diagnostic

Two weeks. I interview you, then I talk to your customers, then you get a written report on where the run breaks - seen, understood, published, passed on, or bought - and what to fix first. Often the answer is not marketing.

Campaign

One defined story, shot and placed. From a two-day production to a multi-region expedition with press, film, photography and the follow-up that turns coverage into conversations.

Ongoing

A quarterly commitment: content, channels, press and sparring. This is where the compounding happens, and it is how Luxembourg, Flanders and Türkiye all started. Rate card on request.

Loek Luijbregts directing a camera crew on location — Campaign production on location - strategy, direction and delivery kept in the same hands.

Sold-out rooms · Highland Heritage, Crazy500, Cyclism

An online audience, in a cinema, paying to be there.

Three multi-day film productions, each thought up as a concept first and co-produced with Fatpigeon.cc. Made with backers rather than for them: Ridley and Cycling in Flanders on Cyclism; Rogelli, Shimano and New Challenge on Crazy500.

All three sold out. Two hundred people at Ridley's head office, two hundred at Cinecitta in Tilburg, full rooms in Nijmegen and Limburg. Almost everyone in those seats we knew only as a name in an online community, and met for the first time at the door. That is the entire run in one evening: seen, understood, published, passed on - and then people got in a car and came.

A single rider on a cleared road between snow-laden pine forest — Crazy500 · two days, fifteen riders, five hundred kilometres, in December

Three bikepackers riding a Scottish glen watched by highland cattle

A cyclist riding out through the Menin Gate in Ypres at first light

A two-camera interview set-up with an elderly cyclist in a village café

Highland Heritage in Scotland · Cyclism in Flanders · and the interviews that hold both of them together

A packed cinema with the whole audience holding their hands in the air — Cinecitta, Tilburg · sold out

A full room at Ridley's head office watching the Cyclism premiere — Ridley head office · two hundred seats, every one of them taken

The #CRAZY500 hardcover book cover, a black and white photograph of the riders in motion — Forty stories and commissioned drawings from the first edition - sold to the community, given to the twenty riders who rode it

Handing over a cheque for 3,185 euros to EpilepsieNL on stage — €3,185 to EpilepsieNL, on the night

Documentaries, co-produced

200

Seats, Ridley head office

Sold out

Every screening

€3,185

Raised for EpilepsieNL

The method · Explore the North, Finnish Lapland

Proven on a bike. It works off one, too.

No bikes here. An activation campaign for Explore the North, shot in Finnish Lapland in midwinter: a lodge at blue hour under a full moon, a snowmobile track from directly overhead, a snowshoe line through rimed forest, lunch on reindeer hides around a fire. It ran in print and online, cut so the six frames run on from one another when you swipe.

The method is the same one every case above runs on, and it does not need a bike. Thirty-plus businesses outside cycling have used it - through loekluijbregts.com, where the same work is done for owner-led companies that have something good and are not getting it seen.

A glass lodge lit from within on a snowy ridge under a full moon at blue hour

The lodge village on the hillside, windows glowing through snow-laden pines

A snowmobile and sled photographed from directly overhead on a groomed track

A line of snowshoe walkers moving through a frozen forest

Rime-covered spruce forest with a fell rising into the mist behind

A group eating lunch on reindeer hides around a fire, seen from above

Six frames · Explore the North, Lapland · swipe or use the arrows

Get in touch

Tell me what you own that is not being seen.

Emailloek@cyclingincubators.com Phone+31 6 50 93 94 34 LinkedIn/in/loekluijbregts Based inTilburg, Netherlands

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