Protect your new bike, call it a TV
Dutch company gets creative with box labeling to prevent damage by delivery companies
The bicycle you ride has probably traveled thousands of kilometers in a box to arrive to your local bike shop or your front door. During this transit, that delicate machine that has been meticulously packed isn’t always handled with sufficient care one Dutch bicycle manufacture decided. Their solution was to simply print a picture of a flat-screen television onto their boxes. The result was a drastic reduction in the number of bikes being damaged in transit.
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VanMoof creative director Bex Rad wrote of the company’s frustration with delivery services on their blog, “We’ve struggled to find shipping partners that give our bikes the same obsessive love and care that we do.”
With more bike manufactures shipping direct to the consumer, VanMoof wanted to find a solution to ensure it’s customers would not receive a damaged bicycle that was crushed or dropped by the delivery company. “No matter who was doing the shipping, too many of our bikes arrived looking like they’d been through a metal-munching combine harvester. It was getting expensive for us, and bloody annoying for our customers,” Rad wrote.
Damaged bicycles were an expensive cost to adsorb for the eight-year-old company but the solution was quite straight forward.
genius idea alert: @vanmoof bikes had problem with shipping damage. So it put flat TVs on its boxes. Problem solved. pic.twitter.com/dsomNATUoY
— Jason Gay (@jasongay) September 4, 2016
By printing a picture of a flat-screen television onto their boxes instead of a bicycle, the company found a 70 to 80 per cent reduction in shipping damage. Just like that, with a good idea by the company’s co-founder the they discovered that televisions are handled much more delicately in transit. After-all, who wants to be responsible for damaging someone’s bran-new expensive flat-screen TV.
“Earlier this year our co-founder Ties had a flash of genius. Our boxes are about the same size as a (really really reaaaally massive) flat-screen television,” Rad explained. “Flat-screen televisions always arrive in perfect condition. What if we just printed a flat-screen television on the side of our boxes?”
The solution proved easy for VanMoof ensuring their bikes weren’t forced to ensure more the arduous treatment bikes seem to be exposed to. Maybe before your next trip you should head to your local print shop to get some new artwork on your bike box.
