Bike Manufacturer Deceives Delivery Companies to Minimize Shipping Damage

Bex Rad, creative director at VanMoof, told Medium that VanMoof has been trying to find a reliable partner among delivery companies for eight years. They tried working with big and niche companies, expensive companies and start-up-ey companies. But with all of them, many biked came to the customers ‘like they’d been through a metal-munching combine harvester’.

VanMoof plans to be doing 90% of sales over the Internet by 2020, so they needed to change things and decrease their losses. Taco Carlier, co-founder of the company, noticed that boxes with VanMoof bikes are visually similar to boxes carrying flat TVs. The company decided to place an image of a TV on the box and look at the result. The number of delivery damage dropped down by 70–80%.

VanMoof were not going to make their trick public, but then The Wall Street Journal author Jason Gay published a picture of the box on Twitter.

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) 4 сентября 2016 г.