This article is more than 1 year old

Dutch bicycle company pretends to be television company

What were they smoking? Good e-commerce strategy: couriers are nicer to tellies than pushies

Dutch bicycle company VanMoof has found that disguising its products as televisions leads to lower rates of damage in transit.

The company's creative director Bex Rad took to Medium to share the company's story, recounting that the company has “struggled to find shipping partners that give our bikes the same obsessive love and care that we do.”

Rad says the company tried lots of couriers. “The big ones. The niche ones. The expensive ones. The start-up-ey ones.”

“Yet 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.”

“Earlier this year our co-founder Ties had a flash of genius,” he continued. “Our boxes are about the same size as a (really really reaaaally massive) flatscreen television. Flatscreen televisions always arrive in perfect condition. What if we just printed a flatscreen television on the side of our boxes?”

“And just like that, shipping damage to our bikes dropped by 70–80%.”

Which is huge for VanMoof, because it's given itself a huge online sales target.

So there you have it, readers. Whatever you're shipping, find a way to camouflage it as a television. Just don't try it with drugs, okay? ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like